Is a Magic Number

There have been a number of layoffs in various sectors of the tech industry over the past couple of years or so. Some people managed to land on their feet within a fairly short period of time, some dropped out of the labor force entirely and some entered the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Which is never a good place to be. Especially in a society that doesn't come across as a fan of the social safety net.

A lot of job seekers feel hard done by, whether it's the impression that generative automation attached to applicant tracking systems are rejecting their applications out of hand, companies appearing to use the hiring process to mine for free work or simply having to go through multiple rounds of interviews only to have the process dropped without any word. And it makes sense that applicants would find the process obnoxious, because for most roles, there isn't anyone who's accountable for the experience of applicants.

And because no-one's being graded on it, no-one's paying attention to it. I've sat through my share of business reviews, and our HR partner was constantly being asked about the size of the hiring funnel and time to fill roles. There wasn't a word about the experience of applying to the company, even for the people who were hired. The people who didn't pass the various gates of the process weren't even a consideration.

In an environment where applicants for open roles are plentiful, there's no need to conserve or recycle them. So employers don't feel a need to ensure that the process works well for applicants; if someone had a bad experience with applying and never seeks to work for that company again, well, there are plenty of other fish in the sea. And applicants tend not to want to burn bridges with potential future employers so while they might complain about being ghosted or having to do an excessive amount of homework as part of the process, they're unlikely to name names... and so even if other people were prepared to take their business elsewhere due to how a company treats applicants, they wouldn't know who to punish.

To me, all of this is obvious. Which, as my father would always remind me, means that I'm the only person who sees it. I suspect that it would be worthwhile to change that. The employment market tends to be very much opaque, and so a certain amount of conjecture and deduction is a necessary component to talking about it. Maybe it should be less opaque. Given businesses' incentives to treat everything as a trade secret, more information is unlikely to be forthcoming, but there would be value in people who used to be on the inside sharing some of their knowledge. The most difficult part of job hunting is always knowing which haystack the needle might be in; better information could have benefits all around.

(This, by the way, is post three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three. Hence the title.)