The Heroin of the Recruitment World - “Easy Apply”
At GrowthHUB and HIRED.ae, we love using data and analytics to improve hiring outcomes for our clients, and we recently worked with the guys at Hireflix on a client project where the findings about candidate motives and integrity on Linkedin paints a picture of the scale of dysfunction in the recruitment market in the Middle-East.
In this article, we explore the general issue around the phenomenon of ‘everyone applying for everything’ and how this approach is being perpetuated by the biggest player in the market causing massive structural issues in the recruitment sector for candidates, agencies and employers alike.
Like many critics of social media, we believe the gamification of platform tools and exploitation of neural patterns that reward instant gratification, exploit the same neural pathways as the most addictive drugs in the world. Candidates often know deep down an action is not good for them, yet still do it anyway which we believe is causing a terminal erosion of the capability of candidates in the region to think for themselves, make careful considered and tailored job applications.
What worries us the most, is that an entire generation is now emerging who have never experienced anything else in the job market, and therefore there is no 'rational' side of their brain telling them the dangers and futility of their behaviour.
Background
Recruiters in the GCC will be familiar with the challenges of having too many candidates. It’s a situation that is believed to come from two factors. Economic desperation is certainly one of them with the world's second biggest labour market only a short flight away and little or no regulation of visit visa numbers for people paying UAE a speculative long term visit to try to find work.
We were going to say that candidates' EQ was the problem, but on reflection we can see the manipulation inherent in recruitment platform tools are having a devastating impact on candidate behaviour too.
Too many candidates is especially evident in a time of economic contraction, but this problem has plagued the middle-east market for years now.
Across social media in UAE, you’ll see criticism of recruiters for not giving feedback to candidates, recruiters pleading with their followers about it being completely impossible to feedback to all candidates due to sheer volumes, and finally candidates being perplexed as ‘surely this is a recruiters job?”
We believe there are two sides to that story, and will address the challenges and solutions through this series of articles.
Linkedin are Very Much Part of the Problem
With job applications via Linkedin’s ‘Easy Apply’ button often attracting 4000 applications in UAE even in pre-covid times, (one job for a HR Manager with TikTok hit 9000 applicants recently) companies have to find smarter solutions than AI algorithms or search strings for key words to find the best candidates because the sad fact is that they don’t work for either the recruiter or the candidate.
Good candidates are routinely missed because they don’t know how to tune their profile to algorithms and key word searches, and recruitment (whether internal or agency) becomes incredibly inefficient and a pretty unsatisfactory experience on all sides.
However as social media has increasingly moved toward gamification in recent years, it’s clear that the ‘Easy Apply’ button on linkedin is becoming a central part of the problem, offering the instant gratification of taking action……….. “I applied for 30 jobs today, I’m doing everything I can to find a job”, with each application getting that hit of dopamine individuals become programmed to apply for even more - regardless of the likelihood of getting the job. We spoke to some candidates and asked why they did it, and most were unable to explain, others just shrugged and said 'you never know'.
Yet in reality, employers and most recruiters have already figured out the futility of posting vacancies with ‘Easy Apply’, but it seems nobody has told most candidates just yet!
The ‘Easy Apply’ button on Linkedin, promotes a culture of candidates not using their emotional intelligence to self-limit when it comes to applying for jobs where they clearly can’t meet the requirements of the role. Linkedin are in the business of providing candidates, and they do though this feature – but it’s a clear case of quantity over quality, and we believe Linkedin are very much part of the problem with this feature as it encourages candidates to apply for anything and everything without any investment of time or attempts at tailoring a CV – contrary to every piece of career advice you will ever hear.
A Selection of Recent Vacancies
The images below were taken from Linkedin this morning, as some of the most obvious examples of why Easy Apply is such a dumb tool.
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Firstly 4600 candidates for a CEO role....really? Secondly, a 30% click through rate is absurd for a vacancy at this seniority unless Linkedin's algorithm was putting this in the jobs box for every COO, CFO and CEO in the world. They aren't because it somehow was promoted to me despite having a 2/10 skills match.
The second example is even more baffling - a highly technical and niche role, with a 50% clickthrough rate from views to application. Again, why was this promoted to me with 0/10 skills?
Candidates Need to Get Realistic
We constantly see posts on Linkedin saying ‘I applied for 100 jobs in the last month and didn’t get a response from any’.
Einstein is widely credited with the saying "The definition of?insanity is doing the same thing?over and over again, but expecting different results"
And herein lies the problem, there is absolutely no conceivable way in a country of 10 million people, that there are 100 jobs posted within the last month that fitted your profile. Similarly there is no possibility there are 4500 CEO candidates or 1700 Technology Directors. Zero chance, none. And candidates know this deep down.
It seems the easy apply curse has led the good people of the middle-east to completely ignore all advice relating to job seeking, preferring instant gratification for applying, over following methods that require effort, but nevertheless are endlessly more fruitful.
Whilst not as serious, you can see exactly the same behaviour pattern in addicts taking cocaine or heroin, short term gratification over longer term destruction, desolation and misery and it's a cycle that has to somehow be stopped due to the harm it's causing to employers and candidates alike.
Candidates are Harming their Own Job Prospects
In fact from our research across multiple roles with various clients, we found that companies struggle to even find 1% of candidates using Easy Apply who meet the role requirements, and Hiring Managers were unequivocal that the problem with wading through so many candidates is that sometimes Linkedin's algorithm that is supposed to serve up the best matching candidates simply doesn't work..........every user reported that when they had checked in Linkedin's 'reject pile', they did subsequently find candidates who should have been shortlisted. But with several thousand candidates, employers can't check each and every one, so good people get missed - VERY often.
So the problem is clearly with job-seekers being unable to self-filter due to desperation, but this is enabled by this manipulative feature from a company who let’s call it out right here, are doing untold damage to candidates and employers alike by persisting with this feature.
About Us
John is Founder and Director of GrowthHUB and Hired.ae, and has a passion for analysing structural inefficiencies in organisations and even whole markets. Over his career, John has been privileged to lead and direct major strategic talent initiatives across private, semi-government and public sector organisations.
GrowthHUB are a specialist consultancy in the People & Organisation space, boasting consultants with a rich and diverse background across many countries, cultures and a wide array of projects from multi-billion $ global culture transformations, to supporting ambitious SMEs and startups.
Contact us today for a chat if you need support making talent work better for you: [email protected]
Talent Management Strategist / HR Lead/ Organisational Development Coach
3 年Apart from Easy Apply enabling all job seekers to randomly apply for any job they want, there is also an issue of job seekers falsifying their experience. We have been seeing well crafted resumes detailing all the required experience that we have advertised for, and upon interviewing the candidates, only to realise the Resume has been written by "professional writers" and the candidate doesn't actually have the required experience! For me that is most frustrating and I don't understand what purpose that serves!
Head of People & Culture | Strategic HR Business Partnering | HR Management | Talent Acquisition | D&I | Wellbeing
4 年When I recruited, I preferred the easy apply button over the ATS. LI immediately gives a good overview of the applicants profile, which is usually lacking in many ATS. And with Bolean search, you immediately are able to find the right folks even in between 100’s of applicants. Besides, for hard to fill roles, good candidates don’t apply, they need to be headhunted. No rockstar spends 20 mins filling out lengthy ATS applications and writing cover letters.
Transforming Organizations Through Strategic Rewards and Talent Engagement
4 年I understand the point but I do not agree. Candidates are always right! We are in a world that you might get hired to a top rated job in a top rated organization with NO relevant experience. People are just trying their chances. And to increase their chances, they apply to hundreds of jobs. Although I personally don’t like this, no one can blame them. Contrary, the need to fill in several pages of application forms is just meaningless now. There are obligations at both sides - candidates as well as the companies. Candidates should try their best and take the additional step forward to get recognized by the hiring manager, show them how their experience is relevant for the role. Companies should do even more to find the right candidate. Relying only on the AI’s (or simple filters) will make all companies filled by the same type of people with similar experience and background.
Group Managing Director at Mackenzie Jones Group
4 年John, great article and i think you know my thoughts. On a very basic level the middle east attracts a diverse job seeker and in previous years it was "easy' to get a role. Times have changed but candidates methods of applying have not. The easy apply is one issue but the most obvious thing is that candidates apply for everything. We struggle with the response to our adverts on LI ( 800 plus to each ad) which means we miss the good ones. My piece of advice to all candidates is DO NOT apply to ads where you don't have the required experience. Sounds obvious! You are clogging up an interviewers inbox and making their job impossible to do. More importantly you are potentially stopping a relevant candidate from getting the job they deserve. A final point is one that keeps getting leveled at recruitment agencies. We are paid by clients to find the very difficult and spot on candidates. If you apply and we reject you, it is because we have a very tight brief and are paid by client to just do that... find the perfect candidate. If they wanted someone with broad skills it is highly likely they will just place an advert on LI and get the avalanche of candidates who have some of the skills required. I was asked why recruiters are not posting many jobs these days?. It is for that reason. We are trying to find the A matches in amongst all of the candidates who don't have the right skills. This has to change as clients and recruiters are spending to mush time 'sifting' rather than doing the assessment and selection.
Health Insurance expert | Cii Qualified Broker | Partnering with Allianz, Bupa, Cigna, and many others
4 年At the end of the day its a shortcut and by definition that means something is missing. I would assume that is great for a company with a low skilled position who just wants LinkedIn to crunch data. I cannot see how this benefits the candidate other than fooling them into thinking they have "applied" for 100's of jobs. Realistically 9/10 haven't made it past the algorithm so they haven't been seen by the company they are applying to.