The Job Market is Broken

But your job search for a PM position doesn't have to be

I’m sure that it does not come as a surprise to anyone that the job market today has a whole host of problems. Whether you are an HR professional seeking new talent, a hiring manager looking for that perfect candidate, or a job seeker trying to find your next assignment, everyone is complaining about the challenges associated with matching talented professionals to critical job vacancies.

The symptoms are aplenty and include the ghosting, the endless interviews, the thousands of applications to a single job, the vacancies posted with a specific person in mind, the job descriptions written in corporate haiku, and everyone’s favorite AI filters to weed out the good with the bad. It’s frustrating, it’s exhausting, and it’s seemingly never ending. Yes, the job market is broken, but can we do something about it?

What’s Broken for the Employers?

Let’s get into that time machine and go back 30 years, to the golden age of 1995. The world was clearly very different then. In that era a company that had a vacancy would typically advertise in the classified section of the local newspaper and would receive a handful of applications from the metropolitan area. If the company was in a large city, it could expect a larger number of applications simply due to newspaper circulation. While this meant the talent pool was significantly smaller, the process of identifying candidates was simpler. Either the right person was in the stack, or the company had to compromise, even if it meant interviewing someone who didn’t look perfect on paper.

If we jump back into that time machine to today, the scarcity of local talent has been replaced by both complexity and complication. A single vacancy on a job board in a remote village in a country that nobody had even heard of could yield thousands of applicants. The deluge of information means that HR teams are literally attempting to find a needle in a haystack and more often than not, they are losing out on good candidates. Even when the cream of the candidate crop rises to the top based on resume, hiring managers are confused because they are not sure how to differentiate between them. The thing that adds to the frustration is individuals who are clearly unqualified for the job hitting that apply button and remote candidates who are 15,000 miles away submitting their application for a local job position in a country they don’t have a visa to work in.

By the time the poor hiring team agrees on a list of qualified candidates everyone enters a never ending interview cycle that results in choosing the least objectionable person hired by a committee.

Are things better off for candidates and job seekers?

Of course not. Candidates spend endless hours perfecting that resume to make sure it can perform artificial intelligence and psychometric gymnastics like Tom Cruise jumping from a motorcycle onto a moving train in Mission Impossible. In the end, the frustration becomes very evident when the outcome turns out to be one of the following scenarios:

• The company posted the vacancy as a fishing expedition aimed at performing a sanity check on compensation packages

• The hiring manager already knows exactly who they want to hire for the position, the candidate is already onboarded, but HR has to list the vacancy online because it’s company policy.

• The candidate meets 999 interviewers ranging from the hiring manager, potential colleagues, direct reports, prospective customers, and the pizza restaurant owner next door, only to be told that there is a cultural fit issue so they are going with someone else.

• The HR team or hiring manager call/email the candidate to let them know they got the job and an offer is on its way, only to disappear to oblivion as if they entered the witness protection program, never answering an email and blocking calls.

Honestly, in any other kind of business interaction, this kind of behavior wouldn’t fly. But in hiring it seems more common than not.

Has Technology Failed Us?
Yes, but it’s our fault. Let me explain why. There was a time when technology was seen as a savior that was to enable smarter, fairer, and more efficient hiring. The premise that technology can enable better matches and faster identification of talent met the reality of poor behavior:

• One-click apply turned into resume roulette, especially since there are AI systems that can operate on cruise control much like Homer Simpson and his drinking bird at the nuclear plant.

• ATS systems that scan for buzzwords, and are quick to eliminate someone who does not have the title “Project Manger” because the data entry person mistyped Project Manager into the system.

• Résumés getting filtered by bots instead of read by people resulting in a rejection email sent to the candidate 4.5 seconds after the apply button is pressed.

We are quickly discovering that we did not optimize our processes for talent, we optimized for elimination.

Powerful applications such as LinkedIn, Glass Door, Monster, and many others offered a certain degree of optimism. They enabled us to gain visibility to connections in employer organizations, read employee reviews of companies, see position comparisons, and become aware of vacancies. However, despite all these capabilities we seem to have arrived at the same level of stalemate that relies on that single truth: who do you know?

The Hard Truths that Candidates Need to Hear
The job search journey needs to be tempered with some hard truths that are often difficult to swallow.

• If you live across the world and can’t relocate, your cold application won’t make it through. Perhaps don’t hit that apply button.

• If the job needs 5 years of a niche skill and you don’t have it, don’t bank on a miracle.

• Transferable skills are valuable but they don’t compensate for the lack of a specific skill listed in a job posting. Let’s be clear, if you get the interview and want to talk about how your skills are relevant, that’s great. However, expecting someone who received 700 applications to take the time to understand why you can do the job is a pretty big ask.

• Loving the company isn’t enough. They’re solving for risk not trying to make a match on a dating app.

• Applying for a job is not like buying a lottery ticket and hoping for the best. It’s not even like a card game and all you need is to figure out the odds. Applying for a 100 jobs doesn’t mean you’re being seen 100 times.

Before you jump off a bridge like Tom Cruise or declare all is lost, there is hope yet.

So What Works and What Can You Do?
Here are a few thoughts on practices that I have seen work and have been told by others that they resonate:

1. Network. Then network some more. Referrals beat resumes.

2. Nurture your network. Stay in touch even when you’re not actively looking. Don’t just show up when you need something, show up when it matters.

3. Use tech to research, not just apply. Know who’s hiring and try to take advantage of timing.

4. Send thoughtful outreach. Cold is fine, but lazy isn’t. Don’t send a message that says “hi” and wait for a response to engage the person on a conversation

5. Stay open. Keep your materials fresh and take the exploratory calls.

6. Build real skills. Certificates alone are not good enough. The last thing you need is someone to confuse your certification with a certificate of completion. Proving that you are able to deliver goes hand in hand.

7. Stay visible. Comment, post, share. Be familiar, not forgotten.

8. Run your search like a project. Set an objective, make a plan, attempt to follow it, track, adjust, and repeat. The important thing is to keep up the momentum.

Closing Thought
Even though the system is broken, we’re not.

Whether you’re a job seeker, a hiring manager, or an HR leader, the core truth holds: matching great people with the right opportunities still comes down to the same principles.

• Relationships matter more than resumes and cover letters.

• Real people exist behind every application and every and job posting.

• Who you know matters as much as what you know.

Our job, collectively, while we still live in a broken job market with less than adequate technology is to navigate through the noise. Ultimately the system won’t save us, the human network will.