I’ve been applying to many jobs on and off for about a year and I would say out of all of them, I hear back about 10% of the time. Of the 10%, about 90% is standard rejection letters that are sent en masse usually through email. The rest results in some sort of interview. During these interviews, I’m told by the hiring managers that they like my work and think I’m a good fit for the role and want to either bring me on right away or interview me for a second round. Nearly every time I get to this point, the hiring manager disappears and ghosts me. I would then reach out inquiring about the status of the position and nothing. I’ve heard this same thing happening to other people as well. Is this just people being incompetent at their jobs or are there other reasons for this? I’m beginning to think that most job listings are just ghost jobs and this whole narrative that no one wants to work is by and large not true. Is anyone else experiencing the same thing or has some insight to what’s going on with the labor market?
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You are right that some of the jobs aren’t real, and the hiring managers are basically collecting resumes for the future. But the combination of being told you’re a good fit in person and then not getting a response is something simpler – people are nicer to those right in front of them. Once you are gone, you are a number or forgotten completely.
The “no one wants to work” thing is completely false, though. No one wants to work for the pay, benefits and conditions that those employees are offering. It has been repeatedly shown that offering a living wage brings in lots of good workers who wouldn’t show up for $7.25 per hour, and are productive enough to earn the difference.
Three issues here which I believe are the cause of much of this.
Firstly, the legal requirement for many jobs to be posted causes a colossal waste of time and effort, not just for the candidate but for company that are ‘hiring’ too. What I mean by that, is if somewhere has a vacancy, particularly if it’s at all connected to government or local authority work, they need to advertise the position even if they already know someone that they’ve already decided to give the job to.
Secondly, agencies are absolutely horrendous for this. They’ll get you in through the door on the promise of a job that’s got good pay on perhaps a temp to perm basis so that you’ll enrol with them and give them your details. There is no job. Or at least, there was very few places and the job was already given to someone weeks ago. Then they’ll use you as a dog’s body to do all the shittest jobs that come up, often with zero notice and expect you to be thankful for it.
Honestly I believe that legislation should be changed to allow people to work ad-hoc on zero hour contracts without agencies needing to be there as a middle man that only sucks down wages and eats away at company profits.
Thirdly, I believe there are industry conspiracies at play here and they do it on purpose to force government to accept immigration to drive down wages. In the UK for instance we recently had a “HGV driver shortage”, except there wasn’t. After covid, many drivers didn’t want to go back to working 60-70hour weeks for crap money so instead of simply increasing pay, the haulage industry started making all sorts of complaints about there being a lack of drivers. The impact of that was that more people did the HGV training, more immigrants with the skills were allowed in – but there weren’t actually that many jobs on offer.
IMO it’s simply effort based, in the tinder-type electronic world of job dating.
There’s no recourse that the co receives or negative review (or downvote) for moving on without informing candidates, or moving on any not providing why. It’s not a good PR move but only for one person so there’s really no issue metrics wise. It takes some effort to press a reject by writing an email or automatic reject notification button.
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