Jalen Gooch

Photo Credit: Andrew Neel

You did it. No more late night cramming, early morning lectures, or finals exams. You’ve worked hard to earn your degree and now a whole new world of possibilities exists before you. Excited to start your professional career, you sit down, open LinkedIn and search for Entry-Level Jobs. You find a job that aligns perfectly with your career, pays handsomely, and is in a location you would love to live in. As you scroll down your excitement quickly turns into dread. Listed under requirements it reads “requires 3-5+ years experience,” followed by a list of several skills you don’t have and frankly can’t picture having any relevance to the job. You scroll back to the top of the page to see that despite this, the posting sports the Entry-Level Linked-In tag in bold words. You tell yourself that this is an outlier and surely you won’t run into any more postings like this, right?

State of the Job Market

In a 2023 study conducted by TestGorilla, 42% of employees reported feeling “excluded from job opportunities due to a lack of formal qualifications or experience.” (CNBC News). While in the past, many companies were more willing to hire and train recent graduates, there has been a shift leading to recruiters seeking out the “perfect employee”, i.e., someone who not only has the desired skill set, but wouldn’t need to be trained.

Other reasons for a slow-down in hiring can be attributed to the increasing automation of traditionally blue-collared jobs, the prevalence of ghost jobs, and cultural changes happening at a deeper level within the United States (The Observer). There are growing conflicts between older generations, arguing that Gen is either lazy or unprofessional in the workplace, and younger generations not willing to work jobs that take advantage of their talent and novel position in the market.

Reasons for not hiring Gen Z workers have ranged from failing to hold eye contact during interviews, having unrealistic salary expectations or dressing inappropriate for the job interview (Forbes). However, recently, it is rare for candidates to even reach the point of the recruitment process where they are speaking face to face with a hiring manager, giving the increasing complexity and demand of applications. 

Competition between applicants also is playing a significant role, with a majority of the jobs applicants are aiming for happening in popular industries (such as the tech industry), which have recently experienced an increased number of layoffs (Forbes). It is not uncommon to see a job posting on LinkedIn, having been posted a mere 30 minutes prior already having over 100 applicants.

Whether you are unemployed or employed, we all can agree that even though we hear all the time that the job market is increasing and unemployment is down, it feels like nobody is getting hired. Let’s look into a few reasons why that might be the case.

Ghost Jobs

Mentioned briefly earlier, Ghost Jobs are positions posted by hiring managers or recruiters on websites such as Indeed, LinkedIn, or ZipRecuriter, in which the company has no intention of filling the posted role. These are not scams, in which someone is posting a fake job posting to steal your personal information, but are postings created by legitimate recruiters.

In a survey of 650 hiring managers conducted by the career site Resume Builder, it was found that “Forty-percent of companies said they have posted a fake job listing” and that “three in 10 companies currently” have a fake job listing up (CBS News). 

Reasons for Ghost Jobs can include intimidating current employees into thinking that they can be replaced, increasing revenue, or giving a company the appearance that it is growing. While a staggering seven out of 10 hiring managers believe that this practice is morally acceptable, it only makes an already difficult job market that much harder (CBS News).

However, there are a number of signs that can alert you to the potential of a listing being a ghost job and save you a bit of time and effort. First, you should always avoid jobs that indicate that there is no intention of hiring immediately. Your resume will simply be thrown in a database and you will never hear back from the company. Second, if the job posting has been active for months or longer or has a questionably large range in salary, there is most likely no intention to hire.

Hiring Discrimination

I want to briefly touch on this topic, as doing research for this blog I quickly realized that this would be better suited for its own post. Hiring Discrimination has always and continues to exist. While there are laws that prevent companies from making hiring decisions based on race, gender, or sexuality, when applying to the jobs, the applicant is often left in the dark as to the reason why they were not hired.

A study conducted in 2021 involved sending out thousands of fake resumes in which the experience of the applicants was the same, but more personal aspects of the individual, such as their name, were altered. The study found that on average, applicants with names commonly associated with white individuals were contacted 9.5 percent more often than those applicants assumed to be black. (New York Times).

(Interestingly, if you were presumed to be a member of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, which could be indicated on an application through the use of pronouns or involvement in a club, this benefitted you if you were assumed to be a black applicant, but resulted in a slight penalty if you were assumed to be white.)

I hope to dive further into the aspects of hiring discrimination in a later post because it is a serious topic and deserves significantly more time and research than I have been able to conduct thus far.

Artificial Intelligence

From both the recruiters and applicant’s perspective, Artificial Intelligence has increasingly inserted itself into the hiring process. Whether that is to instantly write cover letters or to automatically filter out applicants based on their resume, it is a part of both sides of the process.

I remember seeing a job posting and being hesitant about applying. The following morning I woke up to find I had received a message on Handshake from a recruiter inviting me to apply for that specific job. I immediately responded that I was interested and spent the next hour filling out the application. The rest of the day, I couldn’t stop picturing myself working at that job and what my life would look like if hired. Being that a recruiter had reached out to me personally, I believed my odds had to be pretty good.

Before the day had come to an end, I received another direct message for a job I wasn’t as excited about so I didn’t pay too much attention to it, but stopped when I noticed something about the message felt familiar. My heart sank as I realized that this was the exact same message I had received in the morning. In fact, scrolling through my inbox, I found several of the same template, with the only difference being the job listing attached.

I never heard back about the job.

Artificial Intelligence adds a whole new layer to the complexity of applying for jobs. To ensure your application even has a chance of reaching a hiring manager, you need to spend hours crafting a resume and cover letter for each job you apply to. The more time you spend working on these applications, the more your excitement grows and the more you can picture yourself working in these roles. Which makes it all the more crushing when you never hear back from them.

Moving Forward

It is undeniable that searching for jobs right now can be a soul-crushing experience. You’ve pushed yourself thus far to reach this point and it feels like the door has been slammed in your face. You can only watch as your friends one after another land jobs, while you continue to send out your resume to compete with an endless void of applicants. In a situation that feels this hopeless, how can you keep yourself from completely falling apart?

Numerous sources have stated that one of the best courses of action is to adapt to the changing market. Tactics that have been used in the past to land a job simply aren’t as effective in a rapidly changing workplace environment. Here are a few ways that you can gain the experience required by many “entry-level jobs” today.

Finding an internship or part-time role while you look for your first full-time career can be a great way to network, and gain experience. (However, I do want to acknowledge that in my own experience, many internships are either restricted to individuals still attending university or have the same strict requirements as an entry level job). Volunteering is also an option, but one that might not exist for those financially dependent on a steady income.

If you have a basic set of skills and aren’t able to land an entry-level position, why not hire yourself? I’ve recently been investing a lot more time into Freelancing and taking on Gig work as a designer and have had a higher success rate applying for jobs than through traditional means. It will take a lot of work to get set up and you will not make a lot of money the first few months of pursuing freelance work, but I can attest that pursuing freelancing has been a much needed break from the application process.

You could always sign-up for a bootcamp or online course that is offering the skills you are listing, but these are often expensive and another large time commitment. A free and easy alternative is to teach yourself the needed skills using the internet and other resources at your disposal. There are Videos teaching skills ranging from crochet to multi-level marketing exist all over YouTube, and you can find hundreds of books on the topic at your local library. Take the skills you picked up during your time in university and apply them to learn more about a topic you love or want to pursue professionally.

Teaching myself new skills and freelancing have restored a lot of the self-esteem and respect I lost for myself as I continued to apply for jobs only to hear nothing back. I hope this post didn’t stress anyone out about the state of the job market, but only inform why you might not be hearing back from recruiters and how it has nothing to do with your experience or worth of a candidate.

This is a challenging time and some days it will seem so easy to quit, but I hope that you will continue to keep working towards your dreams and goals. I’m rooting for you all and we’re in this together. Make sure to care and be patient with yourself. Your future self is depending on it.