Why finding a job is so hard and how to get hired faster in 2023

You have been applying diligently for months, you have used platforms such as indeed and monster to find thousands of job listings; read through hundreds of them and applied to a handful of them which you found relevant.

Inspite of all that, you are not getting enough interviews or phone screenings as you mightve expected and may be wondering about whats happening behind the scenes.

If thats describes you then read on and we will list all major possibilities about why your interview to job application ratio is so low and what you can do to increase it substantially.

We keep hearing that hiring is broken, not just for job seekers, but for companies too; HBR even has a detailed look at it to trace what went wrong.

1.0 Resume failing the ATS screen

The current way of searching for jobs is completely broken. You use few keywords and a location to get hundreds of results. there has been no change in the way you get job listings decades even though AI, text analytics and NLP has completely dominated the applicant tracking system marketplace.

After you have applied, your resume goes into a ATS which is a software system used to rank candidates based on how much they match the job posting. Among other things, one of the top determining factors is text matching score your resume has with the JD, higher the score higher the number of skills that match with the job posting.

Now, after the ATS has ranked all resumes for a particular JD, the human person reviewing the applications will most likely only go through top 5 or 10 ones to shortlist candidates for interview. If your resume + cover letter are falling through the cracks of ATS by not being optimized properly, then there is no way you will be shortlisted.

Hence, there are two things you can do 1) optimize your resume properly for the jobs you wish to apply for and 2) only apply to those jobs where you have a high enough match score.

A better way to search is semantic searching where search results have a relevant score based on how much it matches with our resume description.

This idea is not new, infact most employers use an ATS that ranks resumes to job descriptions, so why not use this to get ahead?

Our Job Scanner Tool is a solution for this exact problem. You enter a search query, location, resume text and your email so that you can search for the latest jobs. Our job scanner tool is inspired by Kayak.com where we try to find best jobs for your query on platforms such as Linkedin, Google Jobs, Monster and Indeed.com.

Our tool will on the fly search for jobs using our aggregated job feed, fetch the JDs and match your resume using the SAME algorithms that power the ATS and sort the search results according to match score so that you get most relevant results up front. We generate wordclouds by going through the text from job descriptions and job titles of top 25 job listings. You can use these to add identify top keywords and put them in the resume to increase ATS matching score.

Our app returns search results which are sorted according to similarity scores to candidates instead of showing the results in the order it was originally shown on Monster or Indeed so that you see the job listings that have the best chance of making it past the automated ATS screenings first. We also expose top keywords that match with your resume and a similarity score so that you can reverse engineer the ATS and see for yourself how well the resume text is affecting your matches with the actual job listings out there in the real world.

2.0 Phantom Job listings

2.1 Jobs which no longer exist

Well this one is simple, right? you see a job posting which is been around for many months; clearly the job itself might have been filled already and HR forgot to remove the listing or the job position itself has been eliminated. In either of these cases, it generally makes little sense to apply to jobs over a month old.

Most job portals such as Indeed and Monster provide search filters to only display newly posted jobs, applicants should use it to save time on only applying to relevant jobs.

2.2 Jobs which are filled unofficially but they still have to interview candidates

These are frequently called Phantom job listings, and they have been frustrating job candidates even when jobs were searched by going through the newspaper classifieds but this problem has grown exponentially since WSJ ran a story on phantom job listings in 2013.

This is more common than you think. Most government jobs and major corporations have strict requirements to advertise a new job opening in open market before making an hire even though a suitable candidate for the position is already selected.

This also happens when a company has to sponsor skill based visas and immigrant applications (H1B, Green Card etc.) where it has to prove to the US labor department about a skill shortage and inability to find a US citizen before their sponsorship application is successfully granted.

In cases like these, wouldn’t it be awesome to figure out such job postings beforehand and avoid applying to it to save time since you know that chances of a success is negligible.

There are two defining features of such job postings. the first one is that these postings may be incredibly brief with low word count compared to legitimate job listings. Our job scanner tool provides a wordcount of the job descriptions so that you can steer clear of low wordcount jobs (<200 words).

The other one is that the job description seems so specifically tailored to an individual candidate that only a handful of people can meet that requirement, which is probably the goal of the HR person writing the JD if they published it in support of a successful visa application. In this case you similarity score with the JD will be much lower than other legitimate listings or it will have badly defined titles such as one shown below.

We generally advice candidates to always go through the job descriptions in cases when their is a low similarity score to evaluate if their resume has any shortcomings or not. However, if you do find a JD which just seems to demand specific skills combination which seems too specific than you might have ran into a phantom job listing and its best to steer clear of it.

3.0 Fake job listings

A fake job listing is simply creating a listing for which the real job does not exist and the only aim is to scam applicants in giving up their personal information. The best way to combat this is by thoroughly researching the company on Google and making sure it is legitimate before giving up personal information.

4.0 Geographical variations

Sometimes you just live in an area with a fewer jobs in a particular skill. This by itself is not that uncommon, for example, a Monster search for data scientist in Miami, FL only has 26 total results on Monster versus over 500 for Atlanta, GA. You can use our job market tracker to view more industry wide comparisons. We show you the total number of jobs found per query right above the wordclouds so that you can fine tune your location to get even more relevent results.

5.0 Industry based factors

Bureau of labor statistics tracks job growth in all industries and unsurprisingly, some industry sectors are poised to grow at a faster rate compared to others You can the occupations with most job growth on the official BLS website and it also contains interesting data on employment by major industry sectors.

Another great source is jobscanner’s job watcher page which tracks number of total open jobs across industries. The raw data powering this comes from web scraped pages of job listings on Monster and Indeed.com so they provide a more preliminary and admittedly noisy data endpoint of when a job is posted which could be many months before a candidate is eventually interviewed, hired and onboarded and counted in the official BLS datasets. BLS stats are often great in capturing decade long trends, but that is generally more interesting to policymakers and academics rather than individual job seekers who are more interested in seeing hiring trends for past few months.