If you’re looking for a job, you’ve felt it, and if you’re not, you’ve definitely heard of it. Today’s job market feels like a nightmare at a level never seen before.
It’s easy to feel alone in this, or like 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 labor market is not normal.
Even the experts agree that our job market is not good, and it only seems to be getting worse. With round after round of layoffs making the news and seemingly an increasingly insurmountable level of competition when applying for jobs, the prospect of finding and keeping a job is daunting.
It’s easy to feel paralyzed in the midst of all this tumult, especially since experts, economists, politicians and news stories are constantly telling us that the economy is booming and the job market has never been hotter. Only one conclusion remains: you are the problem.
But recruiter and labor market expert Bryan Creely uses this idea. In a recent LinkedIn post, he talked about how completely bizarre the job market has become, and in a follow-up video, he revealed what exactly is behind all this annoying craziness.
The recruiter said several ‘not normal’ things about our current labor market that are driving us all crazy.
“It’s not normal to compete with 2,000 other candidates for a (bad) job,” Creely wrote in a LinkedIn post. “It’s not normal to go through seven rounds of interviews (and then get ghosted).”
“It’s not normal to be fired a month after your promotion. 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 withdrawing a job offer. at the last minute and returning to office mandates that come with the threat of shooting.
Creely’s post certainly resonated. Several people in the comments reported experiencing exactly what he described. One TikToker shared Creely’s post on the app, calling his opinion “very important” for anyone who is “having a hard time finding a job or losing jobs.”
Her comments were also full of people at their wits’ end with the current job market. So what exactly is going on? Different things and none of them are good.
He says the glowing economic and jobs reports don’t tell the whole story and employers are using the confusion to their advantage.
“I’ve worked as a corporate recruiter for the better part of the last 20 years and I’ve never seen the job market this soft,” Creely said in a YouTube video describing how bizarre our current job market is.
He said that the glowing reports we continually hear about the job market and job openings are completely out of line with other indicators, such as waves of layoffs, especially those specifically targeting hiring teams, as has happened at companies like Google.
Another factor that unfairly increases labor market numbers? The new trend of fake job vacancies, which companies post for various reasons, including to give a false impression of company growth.
These two forces are coming together so that, as Creely put it, “a job that might only have a hundred applications in the normal job market now gets a thousand,” and many of those jobs aren’t even real. Even when they are real, they are often obscure. Creely said companies have also laid off workers, then “cut back on the same jobs and put the same jobs on short-term contracts or assignments.”
What makes matters worse is that the sheer number of people looking for a job means employers who actually do Are hiring “can be abnormally picky.” This is part of the reason why so many people go through multiple rounds of interviews only to be ghosted, or receive an offer that is then rescinded at the last minute. There are so many candidates available that it ultimately doesn’t matter.
So, what can you do to combat all this?
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 their bizarre, unfair processes altogether.”
“The people who get these jobs quickly are people who use their networks very effectively,” he said. If that’s not your strong suit, Creely suggested hiring coaches or taking online courses on things like resume optimization and how to use LinkedIn to your advantage. Whatever will help you stand out.
But perhaps most importantly, he urged job seekers and those struggling in their careers not to internalize these issues 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 who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.