Recruitment Shouldn’t Be This Hard
The game has changed and enough is enough.
I’ve been in recruitment for 25 years and I’ve honestly never worked so hard. The industry has gradually got worse that bad practices have set in (on both sides of the process) and we’re fighting more fires than ever before.
I don’t know if anyone else is finding this, but I’m now putting in 10 times the amount of effort into resourcing than I used to – and I’m bloody knackered! The game has changed and enough is enough.
Advertising Jobs on LinkedIn? Forget It!
Any recruiter worth their salt knows how job ads on LinkedIn are a double-edged sword. Yes, you get more attention and reach, but candidates flood in and make the whole process completely unmanageable.
Suddenly you find yourself sifting through hundreds of completely irrelevant candidates. People who aren’t qualified for the role or even working in the right industry. And what do you have to then end up doing? Sending your rejections and apologies to hundreds of additional candidates.
You’ve created too much work for you to do that you’re then chasing your tail. This is why I can’t post job ads on LinkedIn. I’m busy enough as it is – why make the process worse?
I Feel Sorry for Graduates
We all know that recruitment is tough. The markets are being squeezed and with the rise of AI, more junior roles are under threat. And how are graduates trying to get around this? By spamming their CVs to hundreds of recruiters.
I get it – it’s difficult to stand out, you don’t have any experience and you’ll take what you can get. But CV spamming is not the way to do it. All that happens is you’re left wondering why you don’t get any feedback. This is one of the main issues – irrelevant candidates are applying for anything and everything, which only makes recruiters’ lives harder.
Two years ago, this top grad I was speaking to would have been snapped up by any business. Now they’re currently getting nowhere. Because I’ve been in the industry for so long, my heart goes out to people like this. How do we help them?
Candidates believe that the only way to counter this lack of progression is to spam their CV, but that’s not the answer. It just creates frustration on both sides. Simply having a degree no longer cuts the mustard.
I’ve also seen graduates who don’t advertise themselves across the three years while they’re at uni. When they get to the other side, they then find themselves stuck, having to put in the groundwork they should have been doing all along, unable to get anywhere.
Sometimes this comes from a place of privilege too. Their parents may be too kind, set in their role as the Bank of Mum and Dad. But they don’t realise that this will come back to bite them later down the line. These grads aren’t becoming hungry enough to fight for what they want – they’re too secure in their safety net.
Will AI Generate Mass Unemployment?
The recruitment world is not immune from the shift to heavy AI use. We’re already seeing tech replace parts of what used to be human judgement. But the scramble for quick fixes and cheap results is nothing new. AI is just the latest symptom of it.
I recently watched Channel 4’s Will AI Take My Job? Dispatches. It made for some very interesting viewing, not least because of how capable it’s becoming.
In the programme, AI was pitched against a lawyer, a doctor, a composer, and a photographer to see how it would fare in their jobs. And do you know what? It barely scraped through for some of these professions.
While the more artistic expressions, like music, were far superior with a human element behind them, AI still came out on top. Why? Because it was so much cheaper.
The worrying trend this programme highlighted is a very real issue that’s only exacerbated with the rise and advancements of AI: we could be pricing ourselves out of professions. Everyone is now so focused on cutting costs that this is often coming at the expense of actual human talent.
Humans are better at what they do, but AI is quicker and, crucially, cheaper. One of the lessons Channel 4 was trying to show was that it wasn’t always obvious either – even the presenter was entirely fictional and constructed by AI. A stark warning that “the takeover” is already happening.
And suddenly a lot of what’s happening in the market right now makes sense. As we move into the future, more and more lower grade jobs will become threatened by AI, with people becoming effectively priced out of jobs. There will be a knock-on effect for entry level roles and grads too.
But where do we draw the line? If cost is such a critical factor driving business decisions, how long before there are no more roles left for people inexperienced in sectors they want to move in to?
Or are extra low salaries going to become the norm for anyone looking to build a creative portfolio?
Is the future going to look a lot less creative because no one is willing to pay for it?
The Solution for Recruitment
I’ve gone on a bit of a tangent here, but going back to my main argument: recruitment will always be hard, but it shouldn’t be this broken. From limited talent pools to ambiguous briefs, resourcing has become so much worse in recent years.
Ultimately, the recruitment landscape has changed and there’s no going back. However, this is the chance for fellow recruiters, clients and candidates to adapt to the current state of play. If we all stopped treating recruitment like a numbers game, maybe we’d actually start enjoying it again.
Maybe if we go back to valuing people over processes like we used to, we won’t need to worry about how much recruitment has changed. As individuals, we may not be able to control the market, but we can control how we operate within it.
This can be as simple as educating clients on realistic briefs and helping candidates present themselves properly. It feels strange to even have to say something so simple, but I feel as though we’re losing sight of what we once had.