Which is usually followed by, “with the unemployment is low as it’s been, it’s got a be easier for me.!” Well, let me explain a little bit about what the market is and what it isn’t.
Just because you read in the paper that unemployment is the lowest it’s been in a number of years doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be easier for you to find a job. There is still boatloads of people looking for new opportunities and your competition is really keen. It still takes an employer an average of 10 candidate interviews to fill one of their jobs. And, on average it takes them almost 60 days from the time they actually need to hire someone to get someone to start the job. These are much different statistics than the last two years. So, don’t call me up asking me, “where is my job?” There are lots of reasons why this market is still very challenging.
First of all, there is still hordes of companies that try to hire through their human resources/recruiting department. They are advertising the job all over the place, telling candidates to send their resumes to their offices. Most candidates are plain old stuck with having to send their resume to an applicant tracking system. They don’t ever expect, nor should they, to get an interview. They know that they are absolutely “perfect” for the job that can’t get anyone to pay attention to them . After a while they simply quit sending their resumes . On top of that, 60% of the people that are reading your resume don’t know what they’re looking for. They are viewing, on average, 180 resumes for each posting and the probability of “discovering” your talent compared to the others is not very great.
The paradox to all of this is quite interesting. Four times in the last three weeks, our organization has filled positions that were called into us by direct managers, because in two cases their corporate recruiting department had only found them three or four candidates in a 90 day period of time. We came up with 10 in one day and it took the hiring authority a whole two days to hire somebody. One of these clients had said that his internal recruiting department had gotten him one candidate in one month. He came to our office and interviewed six people in one day and hired one the next day. In the last instance, our client had interviewed four candidates, produced by his internal recruiting staff, none of whom, according to him, were qualified. It took us one day to come up with six candidates with four being qualified as “finalists” according to the manager.
For the most part, hiring managers are just as frustrated with the internal HR/recruiting team as you are. This is an extreme but one of my long term hiring managers is now working for a company where he is looking for a sales person. His firm will not let him pay a fee. He has been interviewing candidates, found by his own HR department, for six months. Just think of what kind of revenue it has cost him and his company by not having someone in the position for a whole six months. His HR department has only found him 10 candidates in the whole six months and just this week he said that he might have found one person you might be able to hire. I have worked with this guy for years and he’s a reasonable person… although picky. I’m absolutely sure that I have a number of excellent candidates he could have interviewed six months ago. His company “saved” of $20,000 fee. But look what it costs them.
The next greatest frustration that jobseekers are running into is the interview itself. 50% of the time, the initial interview isn’t even done by someone who the job reports to. Sometimes these people are in HR, sometimes they are people in another department who are “given” the responsibility to do initial interviews. (Remember, the average company in the United States only has 16 people in it… most do not have HR departments. They have people that assume that responsibility.)
couple this with the fact that the vast majority of job candidates really don’t know how to sell themselves very well at all. They approach an interview with the idea of “what’s in it for me.” They have a crazy idea that interviewing is a “two-way street.” In the first few interviews of any company’s search there are multiple candidates. Most jobseekers know they have a lot of competition but totally forget that it is their job to perform so well and shine the competition, then worry about what the company can do for them if they get hired.
Is the job market better? Maybe a little. Is it easier? No!
