Greenhouse, the main hiring platform, has revealed its 2024 State of Job Looking report.
The report exposes a difficult job market the place candidates are battling discrimination, sloppy hiring, fierce competitors, and a brand new AI arms race – as candidates deploy their very own tech instruments to outsmart corporations’ techniques.
Amongst 2,500 employees surveyed throughout the UK, US, and Germany, practically half of UK employees (45%) are actively job-hunting, but 72% admit heightened nervousness in an more and more selective and damaged hiring market.
Ghosting and “ghost jobs”— positions marketed with no intent to rent— proceed to plague the market. Ghosting is getting worse: 61% of job seekers have been ghosted after a job interview, a 19 share level improve since April 2024. Highlighting persistent disparities within the recruitment course of, 71% of traditionally underrepresented job seekers now expertise post-interview ghosting, in comparison with 58% for white candidates.
Job seekers are more and more cautious of ghost jobs: over half (56%) say they’ve suspected they’ve encountered a ghost job and one-quarter (27%) of them utilized anyway. The phenomenon isn’t in candidates’ heads— Greenhouse inner knowledge exhibits that in any given quarter, 18-22% of the roles posted on the platform are categorised as ghost jobs. Candidates are additionally battling rip-off and spam listings, with near three-quarters (69%) encountering them.
“The information highlights a troubling actuality— the job market has develop into extra soul-crushing than ever. Candidates are trapped in a cycle of despair and do not know what’s occurring. Hiring seems like a black field. It’s develop into a battlefield that job seekers need to cross – employers ghosting candidates, pretend, spam, and rip-off jobs— and AI is simply exacerbating all of it,” says Jon Stross, President and Co-founder of Greenhouse. “Firms are struggling to handle the overload of functions fuelled by AI, however they should understand that the market runs in cycles and so they gained’t all the time have the higher hand. Each unanswered e-mail and each vanishing hiring supervisor isn’t only a minor inconvenience to candidates; it’s pricey and may harm an organization’s fame, making it tougher to draw prime expertise in the long run.”
As variety, fairness, and inclusion (DE&I) efforts and applications face public backlash, job seekers nonetheless view it as a inexperienced flag. Practically one in each two (49%) candidates think about it crucial for corporations to overtly promote DE&I in job postings, whereas solely 7% deem it unimportant. Between April and November 2024, the variety of traditionally underrepresented job seekers who view an organization’s DE&I commitments as important when making use of to a job grew by 36 share factors.
But, discrimination and bias stay prevalent, with 63% of UK candidates reporting they’ve confronted discriminatory or biased interview questions, a 22-point improve since April 2024. Essentially the most continuously encountered discriminatory questions associated to age (58%), gender (41%), and race (37%). One other regarding development reveals that 60% of candidates have had hiring managers mispronounce their names—a primary oversight that impacts traditionally underrepresented job seekers at greater charges (74%) in comparison with white candidates (56%).
“The hiring panorama is riddled with systemic inefficiencies and an absence of consideration for the candidate expertise. Discriminatory practices, communication breakdowns, and short-sighted methods have develop into all too widespread,” mentioned, Danielle McConville, VP EMEA at Greenhouse.
“Market circumstances can change shortly, so corporations should perceive how the candidate expertise can considerably affect whether or not expertise select to work there. A enterprise’ capacity to draw and retain prime expertise generally is a figuring out issue of long-term organisational success.”
