I’ve been unemployed for almost seven months now. It’s been a very tough market to find work in. What’s especially tough is the job application process.

You can spend hours updating and tweaking your CV, and then spend a good amount of time writing a killer cover letter to specifically nail the job advert on the head. Then when you submit your CV, you begin to play the waiting game.

If you’re using IrishJobs, you’ll tend to get an auto-responder thanking you for your application, with an assurance that someone will be right back to you ….. it’s the one promise that more often than not of late is broken.

So you play the waiting game, hoping that a recruiter (be it HR or an agency) will see your CV and coversheet and see that you’d make a good fit and get back to you – but more often than not you’ll hear nothing back. Now I understand that agencies (and recruiters) are being swamped with applications, a friend who recently started a job was told there had been over 250 applicants for her job.

I’ve worked in the digital arena for over seven years now, and my first proper job was with Monster.ie when I would work with recruitment agencies and HR departments of some of the biggest national and multinational companies based here in Ireland. This was at a time of almost full-employment, and companies were finding it increasingly tough to find candidates. So I’d work with them on writing good job-ad copy and using the CV database to find people in employment and lure them somewhere (usually) better. It was a jobseeker’s market then and they needed to work hard to get the people they wanted, but not anymore.

There have been a few recent incidents that have seriously undermined my impression of how recruiters (be it direct, or agency) are behaving in this market:

  • I’ve applied for jobs and simply heard nothing, no response at all. Most recently a great company advertised a great job (and I knew the person making the hire), emails have been ignored, DMs too, a phone call (via reception) has even been fobbed off. One of my referees for the job is even a good friend of his. But nothing.
  • I’ve applied for jobs where a response a few days later has said due to the number of applicants they’ve not proceeding with my application. That’s fine, if others are more qualified that’s just common sense, but then day after day after day they’re refreshing the job ad on IrishJobs. In one case I got a rejection from a firm saying they’d found other candidates, only to get a call from a recruitment agency a month later because the client said they couldn’t find anyone good. Being told there are others better than you is fine (it seriously is) but being lied to, well that’s quite something else.
  • And then, finally and most commonly, you apply for a job and simply hear nothing back, you speak to the recruiter and they’ve no idea who you are, and make it pretty obvious if they’ve not gotten back to you that you must be no good.

My most recent employer was a controversial one, and in many cases I’m sure it’s prevented me from getting past screening level. It got to the case late last year that I wrote a killer cover letter almost apologising for the controversial employer, the reply was exceptionally honest saying I’d not be hired as they genuinely had other more qualified candidates, but they did make one thing clear in their reply, that I should never apologise for being successful at work I’d done, regardless of who it was.

I’m seriously reluctant to name and shame those jobs I’ve applied for and gotten no response – that’d be unprofessional (and probably do my job-hunting prospects more damage!), but whilst it’s become a recruiter’s market, agencies and firms hiring are starting to forget that it’s not just pieces of paper with previous experience listed on it, some people are spending time, energy and enthusiasm to ensure they’re selling themselves well.

At a time like this, with so many people looking for work, it’s clear there’s a huge amount of competition for the few vacant jobs that actually exist (and in particular there are a few firms that are being very specific in what they’re looking for – it’s their market at the moment, and it’s their right to be picky). But the very least they can do in this market is have the decency of replying to applicants. More often than not however, most recruiters are simply hitting the “delete” key and doing little else.