With job growth fluctuations over the past few months, many young job seekers are feeling frustrated by an extensive application process that has seen more and more applicants stop before they finish the format.
A survey by online company Indeed said in its latest State of the Job Seeker report that of 1,500 U.S. job seekers they questioned, more than half of Generation Z and millennial job applicants said they stopped mid-application due to length and redundancy. One seeker said she’d applied to over 90 jobs before finally getting an offer.
“Job seekers are fatigued, in part, because the mechanics of applying for a job can be very difficult,” Tyler Heidebrecht, senior product marketing manager at Indeed, said in a statement. “The idea of finishing an application, not hearing back and then continuing with multiple others becomes disheartening.”
The Indeed study said about half of job seekers spend more time trying to make an employer think they are right for the job rather than if the employer is right for them. They stated that employers need to streamline the way they gather information from candidates, according to feedback given as part of the survey.
There’s increased frustration from job seekers, particularly Gen Z and millennials, about whether artificial intelligence is entering the picture — whether employers are actually seeing applications or depending on AI to farm them out immediately due to “algorithms” that don’t match. Online company Monster said that in its survey of job seekers in September, Frustration is high enough that 54 percent of job seekers surveyed said they supported “heavy regulation or banning applicant tracking systems entirely.”
The majority of U.S. workers surveyed by Employ Inc. last year said they expected the application process to be 30 minutes or less. And while many companies have turned to AI tools to ease the hiring process, fragmented systems, isolated tools and siloed data have prevented companies from seeing shifts in decision quality and speed during recruitment, per a ManpowerGroup Talent Solutions report released in June.
