The job marketplace is ostensibly where employer and employee meet to their mutual benefit, but years of optimisation by marketers and accountants have all but killed this simple transaction, making it an abysmal experience for both.
From an employer perspective, every position advertised receives hundreds or thousands of responses, each needing to be validated, applying tools that look for keywords in a misguided attempt to prevent being overwhelmed by sheer volume, rather than taking advantage of a human who brings comprehension to the selection.
From an employee perspective, the scattergun, apply everywhere, approach has become the norm, since finding the actual perfect position is nigh-on impossible due to poor search tools and even worse job descriptions, often obfuscated by either an apparently incompetent Human Resources department who ingested the corporate marketing doublespeak handbook, or a placement agency looking to make a quick buck. If you're unemployed and fortunate enough to have access to unemployment benefits, government policies make this worse with nonsensical requirements to apply for a minimum number of positions per week in order to continue to qualify, as-if actually finding an appropriate position wasn't hard enough.
The tools we have, LinkedIn, Seek, Indeed and thousands of others like them are not in the business of matching employer with employee, they're in the business of making money. They have no incentive to remove duplicate positions, to ensure accuracy, to enforce pay scale inclusions, to ensure "remote" actually means that, and not two days at home and three in the office or to provide advanced search filters that actually return the results a potential candidate is interested in, matching the needs of the employer.
Filtering is a topic all it's own. Attempting to find employment in a specific city in one country regularly returns positions in a city with the same name on the other side of the planet, great, but the commute is going to be a problem. Then there's filtering based on pay, looking for $250k per annum positions that return $250 per week jobs. Filtering on work requirements like VISA or work permits is all but non-existent and trying to use multiple listing sites only makes the problem worse, attempting to filter out duplicates represents an exercise in futility.
The so-called "smart" matching algorithms are no better. Often selecting on random words between an employees' skillset and a position, ignoring the underlying prerequisite for a specific competence as outlined by the employer.
Some listing sites offer premium memberships to augment their income stream. There is no evidence that these additional perks actually result in better outcomes, let alone a better user experience.
The placement agencies are "helping" by making the issue worse in several ways, evidenced by the increasing addition of the phrase "no agency applications" to position advertisements. Agencies, desperate for revenue, are finding random candidates and introducing them to employers because they represent an income stream to the agency, never mind the waste of time it represents to both the employer and employee. If that wasn't bad enough, often an agency will copy the essence of an employer position and re-post it to the same platform, purposefully, sometimes maliciously so, obfuscating the employer details in the hope of catching yet another unsuspecting candidate and their associated income stream.
Job listings on corporate and government websites are no better, barely rising above the level of cork noticeboard at the local shopping centre covered a dozen layers deep in paper imploring its audience to take action. Making no attempt at standardisation, with little or no means to exclude based on simple filters, anything to get a position shown to as many people as possible in the hope that someone, preferably not too many, find the position and apply.
Most listing sites are under the mistaken belief that more is better. If you're gainfully employed and looking, you don't want a hundred options twice a day, you want one exquisitely tailored and matched suggestion once a week. If you're unemployed, you want better, not more results.
If finding a position wasn't bad enough, during the application process, there's an insatiable demand to supply a resume in half a dozen different ways. First answering a multitude of random meaningless "skill" questions, followed by a requirement to upload your resume, whilst demanding a link to your LinkedIn, GitHub and social media profiles. Agencies demand your resume in an editable format, so they can "adapt" it to their client requirements, as-if the candidate wasn't a client in their own right with final say in how they wanted to be represented in the first place.
Don't get me started on automatic resume generators which use unhelpful and undocumented criteria to export from a full work history and skillset into an unusable document suitable only as scrap paper for the local kindergarten.
None of this is a new phenomenon either, it's just gotten immeasurably worse with time. Before the Internet, looking for work involved pestering the local job placement agency every day, until someone took pity and gave you a poor excuse for a job for a day, followed by more pestering and eventually, actually being matched with something more or less relevant.
At this point you might ask what if anything can be done about this?
For starters, it needs to be recognised that this is an issue that hurts both employer and employee alike. The current process only benefits the job listing sites and agencies, and that fundamental problem needs to be addressed.
In the over 40 years I've been earning income from my efforts I have never found a job through this process and nothing in it makes me want to spend any time trying. That's not to say that I'm not looking for work, I am, aren't you?
Based in Perth, Western Australia, Onno Benschop is a self-employed Technology Consultant and Communicator with a bent for speaking and writing. With a passion for solving puzzles and helping clients discover technology, providing an independent view and advice on your specific requirements. Background in trouble shooting, software development, database and web technology, payment systems, rural communication, radio broadcasting, amateur radio, IT support and business continuity.