Why recruiters being bombarded with resumes isn’t a good sign

Hung Lee, Editor at Recruiting Brainfood, explains why the thousands of applications received by potential employers isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Transcript

00:00Recruiters are being overloaded. We're hearing about jobs sort of being published in 24 hours

00:06and getting hundreds, even a thousand plus applicants in that time frame.

00:11And if you still have a kind of a human being on the end of that application flow,

00:16there's just no way it's possible to review those candidates and get back to those candidates.

00:22So what we're seeing in the inside of the industry is that companies are rushing really to put in

00:28automation software in order to handle this applicant flow or even deciding that advertising

00:35jobs may not be the primary way in which they sort of try and find candidates because the

00:40overwhelming, the number of applicants basically is overwhelming a system that wasn't designed for

00:46this type of volume. So given that imbalance or where these recruiters are being rushed in terms

00:56of the number of job applicants, what does that actually tell you about the state of the job

01:02market? Well, I mean, it doesn't tell us great things I'm afraid to say. It basically means

01:10there's a lot of people that are out of work and therefore looking for work. An unemployed

01:17job applicant, by the way, is typically a very active job applicant. If you're out of work,

01:22basically you're spending most of your time applying for jobs. That is in addition to people

01:28who are in work and applying for jobs. So it also tells us there's job insecurity as well.

01:35So yeah, there's a lot of economic stress out there. I think that's adding to the sense

01:40of people feeling as if they're not being justly treated. And I think the phenomenon or the

01:49concept of the ghost job kind of has emerged to try and explain, you know,

01:54why it's explained some of these pressures that people are feeling.