Applicants in 2024 face uniquely frustrating barriers to accessing employment.
Many companies conduct hiring through online processes. The facelessness of this procedure leaves applicants vulnerable to disingenuous or expired listings.
Businesses admit to advertising positions they have no intention of hiring for, either because they hope to promote from within, to misconvey their expansion, or to give current employees false hope new
additions are coming to support their workload. In the case of positions that do exist, employers often fail to remove job listings once they’ve been filled.
The difficulty, not only of finding employment but of receiving assurance one’s application has even been received, is immensely demoralizing for those seeking employment. Increasingly, employers fail to notify the applicants they don’t intend to hire of their decision.
The use of AI to scan resumes for keywords and automatically further or eliminate hundreds of applicants is standard. Not taking the extra step to program hiring systems to send automated emails to rejected applicants evinces a total disregard for the time, effort, and emotions individuals invest into job applications.
Even for those who do manage to get their applications seen, interviews are often impersonal. Automated interviews which meet applicants with a blank screen and a timer disadvantage those who struggle with intense time constraints.
AI replicates historic hiring biases when screening resumes, discriminating against and eliminating applicants based on race and gender. Relying upon automation in hiring processes is literally and figuratively inhumane.
Admittedly, employers’ apparent disregard for applicants can be mutual. Failing to attend interviews, to notify employers of having received a better offer, and phenomena like “quiet quitting”—wherein employees boast doing the bare minimum and slowly fading out of work—imply workers’ lack of investment in the positions they apply to.
The perceived impossibility of getting a job incites applicants to send out innumerable applications, subsequently putting little effort into each one. The impersonality of these applications allows employers to guiltlessly dismiss prospective hires without communication.
Those who wish to set their applications apart or feel seen in the job hunt must rely upon traditional methods, like in-person visits to businesses and social networking.
The capacity to network doesn’t have to rely on existing connections or social capital. Researching and attending job fairs or similar events can allow applicants to make impressions on their employers.
In-person meetings can allow employers to gain a greater sense of an applicant’s competence for and suitability to their work environment. Inviting applicants to a workspace to demonstrate their relevant abilities on technical tasks—in addition to reducing the facelessness of job hunting—could better assess qualifications than abstract interview questions do.
Not all types of positions may warrant this level of concerted effort. For short-term employment or cases where employers receive massive amounts of applications, the convenience of virtual processes may reign preferable.
Their procedure therefore must be ameliorated.
Applications must be designed to be easy to fill out and submit without user error. LinkedIn could easily train a model to verify the legitimacy of job postings, flagging those posted over 30 days ago or reposted several times over as unreliable.
Whether our methods are computerized or analog we must restore humanity—literal and figurative—to the job market.
—Journal Editorial Board
Tags
Employment, Graduation, job market
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