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There are some things I will die on a hill saying. And “stop sending more applications” is one of them. SEEK’s July Employment Report came out last week, and applications per job ad are now at their highest level on record. Why do I care about SEEK? Because it’s Australia’s biggest job board. We mostly advertise jobs in this country rather than hiring exclusively through referrals, so SEEK holds an enormous amount of useful data about what is actually happening. Nationally, job ads fell again in July. But Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria all recorded an increase. Which means someone in Perth can hear that WA’s employment market is strong while simultaneously experiencing a bloody difficult professional job search. Both can be true. The issue isn’t simply whether employers are advertising jobs. It’s how many relevant candidates are competing for each relevant vacancy. And here’s where I get on my soapbox. When the market becomes more competitive, many professionals respond by applying for more jobs throwing their hat into every vague hat-shaped ring. Earlier this month, I worked with a client who had submitted 23 applications in one month. She’d received one interview and progressed to a grammar quiz for another role. Together, we went back through every job ad. Only six of the 23 were positions she was genuinely eligible to apply for. She hadn’t knocked on 23 doors and been rejected. She’d walked up to 17 completely different buildings and tried her key in the lock. Of the six doors she had a genuine chance of opening, one application was wasted because she hadn’t addressed the criteria in the way the employer requested. Not because she ignored the instructions. Because she didn’t realise what the instructions actually meant. As I’ve written before, candidate pools are sliced quickly. In recruitment processes I’ve looked at, roughly half the applications are cut immediately because people don’t meet the criteria or haven’t followed the instructions. Although, to be fair, some employer instructions read like clues from a particularly shit escape room. Reading a job ad sounds like it should be straightforward. It isn’t. So, six weeks without an interview is increasingly weak evidence that you’re fundamentally uncompetitive. It may simply mean you haven’t knocked on nearly as many suitable doors as you thought. And in a crowded market, a generic application is increasingly unlikely to get you through the ones that are. My take? Stop counting applications and start checking whether you’re knocking on the right doors. And if you need help working out which doors are actually worth your time, you know where I am. ~Lisa Your Q&AClaude says so! Hi Lisa, I found a senior role that Claude says I’m a good match for. The problem is that the job ad has already been open for more than 30 days. Do you think it’s genuinely still open, or have they probably filled it and forgotten to take the ad down? Is it still worth applying? Thanks, Megan.
Hi Megan, Thirty days? That job ad has one foot in the recruitment graveyard. My rule is simple: if a position has been advertised for more than a month, don’t apply unless you contact the employer and confirm they’re still accepting applications. By then, there’s a fair chance they’ve already reviewed applications, shortlisted candidates and started interviewing. Applying now could be like turning up at the airport after boarding has closed and asking whether there’s still a window seat. There’s another problem here: Claude is time-blind. It can compare your experience with the job description, but it can’t stop and think, “Hang on, this advertisement is ancient.” You need to give it that context for now. So contact the recruiter or hiring manager and ask whether recruitment is still active. If they say yes, go for it. Your time is better spent on a fresh opportunity where the starting gun hasn’t already fired. Thanks for writing in, ~Lisa |
