A Broken Hiring Market (Of Our Own Making)

Talent teams are living in the craziest hiring market of all time. Not only are there millions of people looking for jobs, a new listing with a remote tag is now open to, well… anyone.

Roughly 19 million new jobs were advertised in the first half of 2024, according to a report by Workday — a 7% increase from 2023. It’s safe to say most of those listings received hundreds (or maybe thousands) of applications.

But this article isn’t just about how competitive the job hunt is right now. 

I want to talk about some of darker issues brewing in talent acquisition during this lopsided hiring market. 

Biased hiring processes. Recruiters ghosting candidates. AI disqualifying people because of the wrong CV format. Months-long application processes with no clear steps. Talent teams, shackled by impossible hiring metrics, are increasingly rude or dismissive.

Tl;dr: The market is an absolute mess right now. 

And none of us who work in the industry should act surprised. How can you, when most companies have a talent acquisition strategy focused on quantity instead of quality.

So, how did we get here? And more importantly, how do we fix it? 🤔

The job market is f*cked. Who is to blame?

Let’s start with the obvious: we are living in a very unbalanced job market. 

There are way too little jobs. And way too many people looking for a job. In fact, data from Indeed’s Hiring Lab shows job openings are now tracking below pre-pandemic levels in the United Kingdom, United States, Ireland, Germany, France, Canada, and Australia.

It’s not just job listings that have changed. The power game between companies and candidates has also shifted. More companies are now acting like they are doing candidates a favor by offering them a job, which is becoming more obvious in the hiring process: 

• Companies are focusing solely on evaluating candidates, but are forgetting hiring is a two-way street and the candidates need to evaluate them as well
• More businesses are focusing on what they need instead of what a role has to offer a candidate
• Candidates are accepting jobs throw up red flags (or aren’t a good match) because it’s slim pickings

Then, there’s the layoffs, which have impacted us heavily in tech. Even though they have (somewhat) slowed, around 165,000 tech workers were laid off in 2022. Another 262,000 tech employees lost their jobs in 2023 and, as I’m writing this, the current count for 2024 is 142,532.

As I said earlier, the whole thing is a mess. 

So, how did we get here? 🤔

It started when candidates became numbers in a spreadsheet

Before everyone starts blaming talent acquisition teams for this mess, let’s get one thing straight. Most People Ops and HR teams want to be doing better with this situation, but it’s impossible in the current climate. 

Recruitment departments are being cut as companies scale back hiring, leaving fewer people to handle the hiring process. This has led to the bread and butter aspects of hiring, like being human, being neglected. However, with the average corporate job listing is now getting 250 applications, it’s impossible to expect our talent teams to be doing much more.

One tactic companies have resorted to is only considering the very best candidates for the hiring process. Bonnie Dilber, lead recruiter at workplace platform Zapier, recently told The Financial Times companies were receiving so many applications that it was impossible to consider all of them. 

“We have no reason to look at anyone who’s not top notch — other applications aren’t even being considered.” 

But to even find that 1% of talent to focus on, talent acquisition teams must screen out 99% of the candidates. And that’s a huge job. 

However, TA and HR aren’t blameless in this.

Most of our industry has failed to innovate. Instead of fixing a broken system, we’re scrambling to find shortcuts to meet hiring goals, like using AI to automate the screening process. 

The people who suffer the most are candidates. They get ignored. Their CVs are rarely looked at by a human. And then they spray off 100 applications a day in their desperate search for a role.

And the cycle continues. 

So, what can HR and TA teams do to start clearing up this mess?

🫡 Take responsibility for this mess and acknowledge (if you use an archaic hiring process) that your system can’t cater to the demands of the modern job market.

💗 Always remember there are real people behind the numbers in your spreadsheets. Reevaluate your hiring steps to make sure you evaluate everyone fairly, ensure transparent communication and always close the feedback loop, and treat people with respect.

🗿 Create a Hiring Philosophy. This is your guiding principles which should always reflect your way of recruiting, acting as the North Star of the whole process to keep you on track. Toggl’s Hiring Philosophy lays out our motivations, values, equal opportunity goals, and long-term planning to keep our People Ops department on the same page.

Our team must also ask themselves if they left an interview feeling energized and if the candidate would add immediate value to Toggl. If the answer is “No” or even “Maybe”, our TA team will have a simple answer: the candidate isn’t a good match for us.

We use AI to apply for jobs. We use AI to help hire people. But AI isn’t the problem. 

People love to point to AI as the reason the hiring process has deteriorated in quality. 

But AI itself is not an issue, and we should not get rid of it. The problem lies in talent departments not being smart about how we use it. 

I recently came across a company called Propellum that claims to help recruiters. A bit of digging found it actually scrapes job posts using AI algorithms to gather information without requiring personal interactions. AI can also take over on LinkedIn. Once a listing has enough applicants, AI takes over the work hiring departments should be doing. Just look at this 👇

“Using AI-assisted messages is easy. Once you’ve selected a candidate in Recruiter, all you have to do is click the button that says ‘draft personalized message’ and a unique and personalized message will be crafted for you to review, edit, and send.” 

Just think about the sheer number of applications we have just talked about each job listing receiving. That number will only grow as more companies explore remote work and remove geographical restrictions from their recruitment process. 

Don’t get it twisted. We absolutely need AI, but it should only automate parts of our hiring process that make sense. 

But I don’t want to let candidates off the hook with AI. A survey by Canva found about 45% of global job hunters were using AI to build or improve their CVs. ZipRecruiter’s quarterly New Hires Survey also reported more than half of all respondents admitted to using AI to help with their applications this year.

From where I see it, solving all this isn’t as complicated as a lot of talent managers on LinkedIn make it out to be. 

The answer is to bring some humanity and personality back into the hiring process. 

An argument for bringing humans back into the hiring process

In a perfect world, hiring should always be about quality over quantity. 

But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in one where every job listing we post has hundreds (or thousands) of applicants. And talent managers just can’t read every single CV that lands in their inbox.

Let’s talk about what the core issue really is.  

The overwhelming majority of companies still base their hiring process around a CV — something that has been the only tool to hire people since the 1950s — and nobody wants to evolve. 

The harsh reality is CVs are not cutting it in today’s modern hiring process. Think about it. We ask for CVs, along with a cover letter and 3 references. We then deploy AI to skim for keywords on CVs because we receive too many to physically read. Then there’s the problem of the CV itself. It rarely tell us much, and all of us know people can lie about experience to get ahead.

But one thing applicants can’t fake is doing the actual work. 

That’s why it’s time for talent teams to rethink our approach to hiring and what our process needs to look like to not just scale, but survive, in this new age of hiring. The only way for talent managers to accurately assess candidates accurately and timely is to create an elimination funnel at the start of the hiring process.

At Toggl, we completely ditched CVs and replaced the very first step of the application process with a skills test. 

This small but powerful change not only helps us treat candidates fairly, but it also allows us to continue screening only candidates who are the best match for the job. 

But it also solves a huge problem for most modern companies: it frees up time to focus on finding the absolute best candidate for a role. This time spent forming relationships with candidates who pass the first hurdle can improve their experience and create a more personal hiring process.

Candidates want to be acknowledged. Talent managers want to acknowledge them. A small change like replacing CVs with a skills test can create a world where candidates get a better experience. And more importantly, you hire people who can actually do the job. 

Together, let’s fix this broken hiring market — one hire at a time!