After leaving a role in February 2025, I didn’t dream that it would take four months to land my next gig. As time ground on, I realised I wasn’t alone - there’s a sea of unused, untapped and unemployed skills out there with folks battling an increasingly difficult recruitment market. Is this the new job searching ‘normal’?
by Neil Hopkins
“This is the worst hiring market since the pandemic”. Whether I was registering with a small boutique or large generalist recruitment agency, it never took long for these words to pass the recruiters’ lips.
Whether the cause is the changes to National Insurance, minimum wage or business tax; uncertainty over Trump’s tariffs; multiple global conflicts or a stuttering national economy, we’re seeing a perfect storm sweeping through the jobs market.
Over the past four months, I’ve got to know the market inside and out, created relationships with recruiters and been part of an amazing community of jobseekers. This post is a distillation of everything I’ve learned and experienced in that time.
Whether you’re a jobseeker, hiring manager or recruiter, I feel there’s something in this for you.
Setting the scene
From my experience, there are four ‘Triple Whammies’ facing job seekers, ranging from overall market conditions to hiring manager behaviour.
Triple Whammy One - the job search context
Jobseekers are facing a triple whammy, just to get started in their search:
Permanent and temp hiring is volatile at best - and declined in June 2025 at the quickest pace in nearly two years [Staffing Industry Analysis]
Availability of candidates has risen at the fastest pace for nearly four-and-a-half years [Recruitment & Employment Confederation]. There are now +42% more applications for each role than a year ago [JobAdder], and 43% fewer vacancies overall [McKinsey]
Recruitment firms are closing at the fastest pace since the financial crisis [Staffing Industry Analysis]
TL;DR - more people are applying for fewer roles, with fewer highly skilled intermediaries (recruiters) providing crucial insight and applicant/role matching. No wonder they’re being overwhelmed and stretched thin [People Management] - which can negatively impact candidate experience.
At the same time…
Triple Whammy Two - AI. Artificial Intelligence or Agonisingly Irritating?
Like it or not, AI is here to stay. In my opinion, it’s making everything more difficult in the recruitment landscape while we all work out what to do with it.
AI may, or may not, be coming for our jobs. It certainly seems to be decimating entry level vacancies [Guardian] as well as graduate jobs [Observer] with a prediction for a restructuring of “white collar” work by 2035 [Forbes]. The level of uncertainty being introduced to the market is unprecedented in my experience
While some recruitment folk deny AI hiring is a thing, 81% of UK agencies were planning to increase their use of the tool when asked in December 2024 [The HR Director]. For a candidate, there’s a growing feeling of needing to beat the machine which means…
AI tools are being used to tailor CVs, covering letters and more by candidates, especially when being forced into a spray-and-pray approach as a way to beat the bots [Financial Times]. However, recruiters are then fighting back by making it harder to apply for roles in the first place [Start Ups]. My opinion - a hellscape spiral from all angles
TL;DR - to use AI, or not? To be screened out by AI, or not? AI is here to stay, but if the personal touch is what gets you over the line (if you can beat the AI search algorithms), how can you make this balance work? And this isn’t even scratching the surface of coded bias which works against folk from Global Majority backgrounds and women specifically [University of Washington].
Being clear, I did use AI in my job search. I prompted ChatGPT and Claude to create a list of key words that would beat ATS systems across a number of core competencies.
That list is here. I then took the list, looking for repetition across different competencies and then wove those repeated terms into each custom CV/application. Did it work? I can’t say definitively that it did and I’m not an expert in AI prompting. But I do know that I beat at least one Boolean search with the keyword enriched CV…
Triple Whammy Three - Ghosts, vampires and conservatism
Let me be clear. There are great recruiters out there (I’ll happily recommend some). However, all is not rosy in recruiter land…
Ghost jobs account for over a third of listings [StandOutCV]
Ghosting and vampire jobs are real [GiGroup]. I was ghosted by recruiters so many times during my recent search I thought it must be me. By connecting with other folk in similar positions, I discovered that it’s incredibly common. Some of these folk were then dragged through vampire processes - multiple (up to 6!) interview rounds, presentations etc only for the roles to be pulled and the whole thing to be a waste of time
Companies seem increasingly unwilling to hire outside of their industry. I applied for several roles which my experience was 100% transferable into, but the employer wasn’t interested. It became particularly soul crushing when the recruiter said ‘I know you could absolutely deliver on this role - but the client won’t move on sector experience’. Perhaps hiring managers aren’t hiring for talent but to avoid blame [FinalRound] and missing out on the clear benefits of diverse opinions, experiences and views [INPD]?
TL;DR - as a candidate, it’s hard to know if the role you’ve seen is real; whether you’ll ever hear anything back and if you can persuade a company to look more broadly than their niche.
In my opinion - and with my communications specialist hat on - companies who won’t consider totally transferable skills from a different industry are missing out on fresh perspectives. If you do what you’ve always done and all that…
Final Triple Whammy: Money, dead work and free work
Even if a candidate can get around the three previous triple whammies, there’s one more (at least) to navigate…
Money. We all need it - and we deserve it for a job well done. But a large majority of UK job ads omit salary info [HR Review] despite clear benefits to including it [Reed and We Show The Salary]. Not only is this bad for pay transparency and gender equality, but it’s also time wasting for applicants and recruiters. Applicants want to know if it’s £20k or £70k (with job title inflation, anything is possible these days) - and if they try to get hold of the recruiter, there’s probably 300 other people trying to get the same info. Back to the point about recruiter overwhelm…
Dead work. I’ve lost count of the applications which force you to upload a CV, then rekey it into their system. Every system is, of course, different so you can't go on autopilot to input job title, employer name, address etc because the boxes are in different orders. While I appreciate that some recruiters are trying to encourage only the most committed to apply, this rework is time consuming, laborious, boring and sends a very clear signal (rightly or wrongly) about the company
Free work. ‘Prior to your interview, please can you prepare a detailed annual marketing plan and campaign?’. Uh, hard no. Miranda Davis pummeled this point perfectly earlier in the year. Given that we don’t generally sign NDAs before interviews, how do we know that the company aren’t simply going to waltz off with the candidate’s great ideas and get someone else to deliver them? Trust works all ways…
TL;DR - lack of transparency, enforced double (or triple) work and free work demands abound. The only way around this is not to apply for the roles. Which if you’re out of work and the money’s running low isn’t an option…
The Jobseeker experience
Before I share what the last four months have been like for me, I want to share three bullet points from my extended community. The first two are anonymised and I have permission to share the third person’s name:
A is a highly qualified and experienced tech marketer. She’s been out of work for 18 months and can’t beat the feedback that there’s always someone ‘more closely matched’. She’s seeing jobs go to men far more frequently than to women; to younger people more often than those with several decades in the field; and despite having her CV professionally rewritten AND tailored using AI where necessary, can’t get a foot into the door on any application process (even if the job is perfectly suited to her)
B was out of work for 15 months before she landed a new gig. Her journey included six rounds of complex presentations, multiple ghostings, battling against unadvertised salaries and finding that companies wouldn’t shift out of their sector. Her marketing background would have been completely transferable to the roles she was going for, but companies wouldn’t even look at the skills on offer
Tyrese has had much more success landing interview invitations by using his middle name - Anthony - than he has using his given first name. At one point, he applied for the same role with a tailored CV as Tyrese, and then again (same CV) as Anthony. Anthony got invited for an interview, Tyrese received the standard rejection. Tyrese’s experience suggests that recruiters are not sticking to good, anonymised, candidate selection practices.
These are just three examples - I could have collated so many more. The equality and equity implications are staggering, frankly.
My Experience
The last four months have been a hard, emotional, exhausting battle. Constant rejections, frequent ghosting, the sense of not being good enough has been diminishing, to say the least. Being honest, I’m a white, educated, British male - an identity often afforded outsized, unearned and unfair privilege in our society. I can’t imagine the toll on folk who have been out of work longer, and those who don’t have that socially conferred privilege.
Registered with every job board under the sun (and most agencies too), I’ve had up to 80 emails a day with job alerts, seven days a week for four months. Is that a lot? I don’t know - but because I’m a generalist no single search alert covers the things I do, so I have to be everywhere. What I do know is that there’s a constant state of fight-or-flight as each new email could be the one I needed to jump on. Job alerts are hit or miss - one major agency keeps sending me job adverts for qualified legal positions, because the word ‘Communications’ is buried in the description somewhere. Another thinks I’d be a perfect carpenter on minimum wage at the other end of the country, despite my search parameters being tightly set. Exhausting and overwhelming.
I’ve connected with some fantastic recruiters who really have gone out of their way to keep me updated, to keep the job hunting community buoyed up and ensure that the human side of the work is never lost. I’ve also connected with ghosters and reported more fake LinkedIn recruiter profiles than I can count (what breaks my heart is that lots of people can’t spot these fake accounts and start interacting with them).
In the past four months, I’ve cried more times than I can recall. Cried with frustration. With anger. With fear. And, when I got the call to say my new role had come through, I cried then with sheer relief.
No-one could have prepared me for this.
In conclusion
“‘If you’re not in the job market, you can’t comprehend how bad it is”, as one of my connections said recently. I agree, wholeheartedly. It’s a hellscape for everyone concerned.
Virtually every jobseeker I’ve spoken to in the last four months has talked about the toll being exacted on them. Mental health, physical health, financial health - I fear that there’s a tsunami of hidden need out there as jobseekers are scattered, solitary and frequently battling through alone from their front rooms. Recruiters and hiring managers are also talking about the strain they’re experiencing as the market continues to cool.
So, where next? The answer - the only answer - is to keep going and try to drive change where we can. We mustn’t sweep the issues with the market or the hiring process under the carpet, but we can refuse to let them diminish and break us.
For jobseekers - I encourage you to share your stories, build connections and find communities that can nourish you. Protect your time and your energies fiercely. Remember that there’s dignity in good work - so even if you take lower paid, lower skilled work to get some money coming in, that’s your brave response to the market conditions and doesn’t reflect on everything that you will bring to your next role.
For recruiters and hiring managers - the best (in my experience) turn up with honesty, integrity and great communications. Keeping in touch matters (bust that ghosting trend), as does designing an equitable recruitment process fit for human beings and not tailored to unicorns.
Together, we all need to push for better in this frequently inhumane market. Because, to quote Daft Punk, ‘we’re human after all’.
Neil Hopkins is a strategic communications specialist. You can find him on LinkedIn, or through his website - www.interacter.co.uk.
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