People applying for jobs are often being “ghosted” by companies hiring, and it may be partly due to the increased use of AI.
Employment Hero has released new research that shows 44 percent of the workforce reported having been ghosted while searching for a job.
Forty percent said they received little or no feedback when they were not successful. A quarter applied for a role that had already been filled and 12 percent applied for a job that seemed not to have ever existed.
A quarter of hiring managers said they had been ghosted by a chosen candidate.
Employment Hero general manager for New Zealand Neil Webster said part of the problem was the large number of applicants that many job ads were receiving.
Employers were sometimes overwhelmed by floods of candidates and unsuitable applications that had been generated by AI.
“Applicants are frustrated by long wait times while businesses find it hard to cope with the sheer number of applications. Add to this New Zealand’s highest unemployment level since 2015 and it creates intense pressure across the board.
“It could just carry on getting worse because candidates are using AI to apply for more roles. You can write more cover letters, you can tweak your CV more times, more quickly. It’s just easier instead of applying for four or five jobs at a time it’s possible to apply for 10, 156, 20, 30 jobs in a bit of a production line.
“There’s volume on both sides that people are having to deal with.”
Sometimes the process took so long that people lost interest in a job, he said.
About half of businesses had lost good candidates because their process moved too slowly and many said they spent too much time reviewing applications and coordinating interviews.
Webster said better recruitment was about making the process work for both sides.
“Technology helps take some of that pressure off, freeing up time for the conversations and connections that matter because behind every application and vacancy is a person looking for the right fit.
“You do need the right intentions. We’re all people here and these are people’s lives, hopes and dreams. We need the right intentions, we want to be able to give some feedback to everyone that applies and do it in a timely manner. Then if you’ve got the intention and you’d like to be able to achieve that, what you really need is the right tools to deal with the volume a way that you want to be able to deal with them.
“If the new normal is high volumes of candidates for every role, which I think it might be for quite some time, you need to be set up to be able to deal with it.”
He said ghosting candidates would be bad for employers’ brands.
“Everyone’s trying to find the right fit for them… Some accurate feedback about why might help them find the next best option for them. I think we should be aiming to help each other out. We live in a very small country in New Zealand. Everyone’s connected by two degrees. And so you’re almost certainly going to bump into some of these people in your career later on.
“If you’re the hiring manager or the candidate on the other side, it’s a nice note back to say, ‘you’re not the right fit this time. We’re looking for someone with a little bit more experience in these sorts of things. But, you know, you might be you might be better to look at this sort of thing’.
That’s really useful and impactful for people who are out there in a in a tough world.”
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