Hi constant reader,
I’m planning to get back into the substack writing game soon, although I’m still a bit burnt out from writing, editing and publishing A Career Breakdown Kit.
One update from this week that may interest you.
Speaking to job seekers they say their LinkedIn jobs feed has been updated with an AI interface.
They no longer search on job titles and key words, and instead prompt on what they want.
Their experiences are that it’s much harder to find jobs, and that generally this AI update is terrible.
But I’ve seen something funny happen from my side.
While there are now AI options when advertising directly on LinkedIn, with automated applicant filtering and terrible prompted content, I'm ignoring these for the purpose of this article.
Instead, I ran an advert for a common skill role and left it running for a week:
-Job title: Financial Accountant
-Date listed: 1st August
-Number of applications: 89
-Applications that failed knockout questions: 12 (they receive an automated rejection defaulted by LinkedIn to 3 days later)
-Applications with accounting experience: 70
-Applications with broadly suitable experience: 20 (unsuitable applications get a template rejection)
-Candidates contacted: 20
-Longlisted after qualification: 4
Compared to this time last year when I had double the amount of applications in 48 hours, at a similar time of year, yet broadly the same number of suitable candidates, I find this quite interesting.
Yes, there are lot of variables, such as economic conditions, yet this one example flies in the face of what I’ve read recently about very high volumes of unsuitable applications.
I’ve another common skill vacancy to advertise on Thursday, so will be good to compare.
Could it be that a terrible interface has meant that ‘wing and a prayer’ applications are less likely to happen?
Hard to tell off a single advert, though it makes sense logically. Don’t take this is science fact, but perhaps worth your own experiment.
If the interface improves, that may likely change again in future.
For now, if you’ve given up on LinkedIn because of the huge volume of unqualified applications, might be worth another try.
Give Mitchs.ai a gander first though.
Regards,
Greg