Amid a slowing job market, applicants are increasingly burned out and exhausted — due in part to the application process, according to survey data released Thursday by Indeed in its State of the Job Seeker report.
Indeed surveyed over 1,500 U.S. job seekers, including those who are already employed — also called passive job seekers — and those who are currently unemployed, who are active job seekers.
More than half of Generation Z and millennial job applicants surveyed said they stopped mid-application, often due to length and redundancy. Additionally, due to the state of the market, many seekers have had to apply to a hefty number of jobs before hearing back, the report said. One Gen Z job seeker interviewed by Indeed said she applied to over 90 jobs before she got 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.”
About half of job seekers surveyed also said that they spend more time trying to make an employer think they are right for the job, rather than considering if the employer is right for them. Gen Z was especially likely to report as much, with 60% saying they strongly or somewhat agree with that statement.
In answer, hiring managers may need to “streamline the way they gather information about candidates,” Indeed said.
Frustration with the hiring process — especially in a market that relies on artificial intelligence tools — is well-documented. Six in ten U.S. job seekers surveyed by Monster earlier this year said that not knowing whether a human looked at their resume is the most exasperating part of the application process. Frustration is high enough that 54% 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.
