If you’re looking for a job, you’ve felt it, and if not, you’ve certainly heard about it. Today’s job market feels nightmarish on a level never seen before.
It’s easy to feel alone in this, or that it’s your fault. But one recruiter has a message for professionals: “It’s not you, it’s them.”
One recruiter explained how the current job market is not normal.
Even experts agree that our job market is not good, and appears to be getting worse. With the news coming out with round after round of layoffs and what seems like an insurmountable level of competition when applying for jobs, the prospect of finding and keeping a job is daunting.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed amid all the turmoil, especially since experts, economists, politicians, and news stories constantly tell us that the economy is booming and the job market has never been hotter. There’s only one outcome left for you – you’re the problem.
But employment and labor market expert Brian Creeley calls out the idea to be deceptive. In a recent LinkedIn post, he shared how weird the job market is, and in a subsequent video he revealed why it’s all so infuriatingly weird.
The recruiter mentioned several “unnatural” things in our current job market that are driving us all crazy.
“It is not normal to compete with 2,000 other candidates for a position [bad] “A job,” Creeley wrote in a LinkedIn post. “It’s not normal to go through seven rounds of interviews (just to stay hidden).”
“It’s not normal to be laid off one month after getting a promotion. It’s not normal to feel ashamed for refusing to work for free to prove yourself,” he continued, adding other common experiences, such as canceling a job offer at the last minute and returning to office mandates that It comes with threats of dismissal.
Creeley’s post certainly resonated. Many people in the comments reported that they witnessed exactly what he described. A TikToker shared Creely’s post on the app, calling what he did “very important” for anyone “having a hard time finding jobs or losing their jobs.”
Her comments were also full of people who are at their wits’ end with the current job market. So what exactly is happening? Several things and none of them are good.
He says the glowing economy and jobs reports don’t tell the whole story and that employers are exploiting the confusion to their advantage.
“I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years as a corporate recruiter and I’ve never seen a job market this messed up,” Creeley said in a YouTube video in which he addressed how bizarre our current job market is.
He said that the glowing reports we constantly hear about the labor market and the number of job opportunities are not at all consistent with other indicators, such as waves of layoffs, especially those that specifically target recruitment teams, as happened in companies like Google.
Another dishonest worker up the labor market numbers? The new trend is fake job opportunities, which companies post for a variety of reasons, including as a way to give a false impression of a company’s growth.
These two forces combine so that, as Creeley puts it, “a job that might get only 100 applications in the regular job market now gets a thousand,” and many of those jobs aren’t real. Even when they are real, they are often suspicious. Companies also laid off employees, Creeley said, and then “[turning] Right back around and [posting] Same jobs as contracts or short-term assignments.”
To make matters worse, the sheer number of people looking for jobs means employers are actually looking for jobs We are Hiring “can be extraordinarily picky.” This is part of the reason why so many people go through multiple rounds of interviews only to be ignored, or get an offer that is then withdrawn at the last minute. There are so many candidates available that it doesn’t matter in the end.
So, what can you do to combat all this?
Well, as much as we all wish there were magic solutions, Creeley said it ultimately comes down to good old-fashioned networking so you can “skip the recruiter” and all of his weird and completely unfair processes.
“The people who get these jobs quickly are the people who leverage their network very effectively,” he said. If that’s not your forte, Creeley suggested hiring coaches or taking online courses on things like resume optimization and how to use LinkedIn to your advantage. Everything that will help you stand out.
But perhaps more importantly, he urged job seekers and those struggling in their careers not to “ internalize these issues ” and get bogged down in blaming themselves. As he aptly put it in his LinkedIn post, “It’s not you, it’s them.”
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer covering popular culture, social justice, and human interest topics.
