If you’re looking for a job, you’ve felt it, and if not, you’ve certainly heard about it. Today’s job market feels more nightmarish than ever before.
It’s easy to feel alone in this situation or to believe it’s your fault. But one recruiter has a message for professionals: “It’s not you, it’s them.”
A recruiter explained that the current job market is not normal.
Even the experts agree that our job market is not good and only seems to be getting worse. As layoffs continue to hit the headlines and competition for applications seems increasingly insurmountable, the prospect of finding and keeping a job is daunting.
With all the tumult, it’s easy to feel like things are getting too hot, especially because pundits, economists, politicians and news outlets constantly tell us that the economy is booming and the job market has never been hotter. You are left with only one conclusion: you are the problem.
But recruiter and labor market expert Bryan Creely calls this notion nonsense. In a recent LinkedIn post, he shared how utterly bizarre the job market has become, and in a follow-up video, revealed what exactly is behind all this annoying weirdness.
The recruiter mentioned several “not normal” things about our current job market that are driving us all crazy.
“It’s not normal to compete for one with 2,000 other candidates [bad] Job,” Creely wrote in a LinkedIn post. “It’s not normal to go through seven rounds of interviews (only to get ghosted).”
“It’s not normal to be fired a month after being promoted. It’s not normal to feel ashamed for refusing to work for free to prove yourself,” he continued, adding other commonly reported experiences such as having a job offer rescinded at the last minute and return mandates that come with the threat of dismissal.
Creely’s post definitely resonated. Several people in the comments reported experiencing exactly what he described. A TikToker shared Creely’s post on the app and called his opinion “very important” for anyone “who is having a hard time getting a job or losing a job.”
Her comments were also full of people who didn’t know what to do with the current job market situation. So what exactly is going on? Several things and none of them are good.
He says the positive economic and labor market reports don’t tell the whole story and employers are taking advantage of the confusion.
“I have spent the better part of the last 20 years as a corporate recruiter and have never seen the job market so washed out,” Creely said in a YouTube video in which he discussed how bizarre our current job market is.
He said the positive reports we constantly hear about the labor market and the number of job vacancies are not at all consistent with other indicators, such as waves of layoffs, particularly those specifically targeting recruiting teams, as has happened at companies like Google .
Another factor driving up labor market numbers? The new trend of fake job offers that companies post for various reasons, including to give a false impression of company growth.
These two forces work together so that, as Creely put it, “a job that might only get 100 applications in the normal job market is now getting a thousand applications,” and many of those jobs aren’t even real. Even when they are real, they are often shady. Creely said companies also laid off staff at the time.[turning] right back around and [posting] the same jobs as contracts or short-term assignments.”
To make matters worse, employers who actually hire “can be unusually selective” due to the huge number of job seekers. This is one of the reasons why so many people go through multiple interviews only to go unnoticed or receive an offer that is then rescinded at the last minute. There are so many candidates available that it ultimately doesn’t matter.
Related stories from YourTango:
So what can you do to combat all of this?
Well, as much as we all wish there were magical solutions, Creely said it ultimately comes down to good, old-fashioned networking so you can skip “the recruiter” and all of its bizarre, unfair processes altogether.
“The people who get these jobs quickly are people who use their network very effectively,” he said. If that’s not your forte, Creely suggests hiring trainers or taking online courses on topics like resume optimization and using LinkedIn to your advantage. Whatever helps you stand out from the crowd.
But perhaps most importantly, he urged job seekers and those experiencing difficulties in their careers not to “internalize these problems” and blame themselves. As he so aptly put it in his LinkedIn post: “It’s not you, it’s them.”
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer covering topics such as pop culture, social justice and human interest.
Originally posted 2023-11-19 03:00:21.