The Job Searching Process is Getting Ridiculous

I’m sure you’ve seen posts and memes going around joking about how employers want someone with at least 10 years of experience for what it meant to be an entry-level job. Maybe you’ve seen one or two of these kinds of job descriptions like below:

Many employers these days want potential employees to jump through hoops to prove their “dedication” and “need” for the role applied but they don’t really provide the same courtesy. I encountered all sorts of situations when I started applying for jobs after graduating, I knew it was gonna be hard but I never thought it was going to be this hard and this ridiculous.

The largest gripe I have with the recruitment system is how employers hardly ever want to be clear about the salary range. What is the point of hiding it when salary is likely the number one factor that determines whether people even apply for the job? Now, don’t you go telling me that it’s because people should be prioritizing their passion for the job rather than the money. Passion doesn’t pay the bills or feed me. Employers shouldn’t be worried that putting out a salary range will put people off from applying for the job. It’ll only deter people if the salary is laughably low. Why waste your own and other people’s time if they go through initial stages of recruitment such as checking resumes, arranging for an interview only to have everything fall through once the applicants realize that the salary isn’t what they wanted.

Besides that, can companies stop making the recruitment process any more complicated than it needs to be? I get it, as more and more people have the minimum of a university degree or maybe even two degrees, it’s getting harder to determine which applicant is good for the job. People can’t just waltz into the companies and just ask for a job anymore. I understand the need for Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and assessments but it gets a bit ridiculous sometimes when the assessments don’t seem to serve a purpose.

To me, there are some assessments that make sense like giving coding tests to a potential software engineer to get a sense of their skills but sometimes, they are just too much. I’ve seen people be made to plan entire marketing campaigns that are supposed to go on for months, using up at least more than a day of their time to do these assessments, only to not even get the courtesy of a rejection. It gets to the point where it feels like companies are just trying to make people do their work for them for free. Employers can give assessments but they should make sense for the job itself and shouldn’t take up too much of an applicant’s time. The recruitment process shouldn’t consist of so many processes!

Now, don’t get me started on the interview stages. Interviews are meant to suss out a person’s personality and suitability for the job. But sometimes, the questions get so personal, inappropriate, or even weird. I remember applying for a fresh graduate marketing position in an engineering firm once. Rather than asking me questions related to the job or maybe my background or interest in the job, I was asked extremely random questions that the interviewers obviously came up with on the spot. I was asked: “If I could be a superhero, which one would I be?” and “If I was the government, what would I do to curb COVID-19?”. It was so random and out of place, I was kinda stunned but I did my best to give proper answers but the whole time, I felt so bad because the interviewers were laughing at my answers.

The worse one was when I was asked why I applied for the job and I gave a really standard answer. I just had an interest in the job because it was related to what I studied in university and I got blasted with an extremely long lecture on how I should be passionate about the job and that interest alone isn’t enough. As mentioned before, passion doesn’t pay the bills and how exactly can I be passionate about something that I don’t really know fully about?

Finally, the worse thing about the job search was the ghosting. It’s just such a terrible feeling because you’re just left in limbo. You can’t move on because you still have hope that maybe they’re still reviewing your application but at the same time, this false hope is just going to let you down sooner or later. It’s one thing to just get ghosted on the first step of the application process but it’s way worse when you’re further into it. If I submitted an assessment that took me days to do but just never got an answer, I would just be so frustrated. The very least employers can do is to just send an automated rejection email but they don’t even bother. I don’t know if it’s because they find it awkward or feel bad having to reject people but I can say that a majority of people would prefer a rejection over ghosting.

A good tip is to just give them 2 weeks to respond, if they don’t, you could always send a follow-up email but even then, those emails get ignored too. If the follow-up email gets ignored, just move on. You don’t owe these people any more of your time, to say the least.

But yeah, this kind of devolved into a bit of a rant but I just wish that employers could just take into account that applicants are human beings with emotions and lives and that the job searching process can be really draining and dehumanizing. I just hope that more steps could be taken to make this process better and that most of the bullshit mentioned above gets cut out. \

Peace.