FIVE MONTHS AGO, Project Manager Cheryl Needsagig (Substitute name to protect the job hunter who wants anonymity just in case a potential employer reads this) adopted a peculiar hobby. While her friends met for drinks or played video games to unwind after work, she would come home, boot up her laptop, and spend hours filling out job applications, for sport.
Job hunting these days is the worst. Friends described returning home from an exhausting day of work they hated, applying for new positions, and quickly growing discouraged by clunky application software (ATS) and a low response rate. Research suggests the frustration is widespread: 92 percent of candidates abandon online job applications before completing them, according to the recruitment platform Appcast.
“You might hate your boss. But if you think that searching for jobs is worse, you are never going to change,” Cheryl says. “I wanted to try to put some data behind the claim that job hunting sucks.”
Cheryl set herself the challenge of applying to 100 project management jobs to observe exactly what made the endeavour more or less frustrating. Halfway through, however, she hit a snag. “I wanted to chop my head off,” Cheryl says. She scaled back her target to a still brain-melting 50 jobs across a range of industries and company sizes, chosen largely at random—companies she’d seen on billboards, for instance, or friends’ employers.
Cheryl timed each application from start to finish and for consistency always applied directly through a company’s career page—she ended up spending about 11 hours total filling applications.
Cheryl found it took an average of 2 minutes and 42 seconds to fill out a job application—but that does not include time spent identifying suitable roles, and the time could vary widely from job to job. The longest took more than 10 minutes, the shortest less than 20 seconds. Much of her variation sprang from the particularities of applicant tracking software (ATS).
Applying to work at a company that used Workday, for instance, took 128 percent longer than average for similarly sized companies in the same industry. Workday spokesperson Nina Oestlien called customer service a “core value” at the company and says that application timing is determined by how customers configure their applications.
The Software Quagmire (ATS)
Job hunters have long complained about the process, but it developed fresh annoyances after moving online starting in the mid-’90s, says Chris Russell, managing director of the recruitment consultancy RecTech Media. Online job boards like Monster, SEEK, Indeed and CareerBuilder flooded companies with candidates, giving rise to applicant tracking systems (ATS) built to help recruiters manage the deluge.
These systems promised to save recruiters time by automatically ranking and filtering applicants based on keywords. From the perspective of applicants required to laboriously enter their information into the software, they felt like a new barrier. “These systems were built with the companies in mind,” says Russell. “They never really considered the user experience from the job seeker’s point of view.” A cottage industry sprang up of tools and résumé whisperers promising to help job seekers get past the automated scanners.
In recent years, new features like psychological assessments and “digital interviews,” in which applicants answer prepared questions into their webcams, only placed more barriers between candidates and human decisionmakers. Meanwhile, the fundamentals of hiring remain stuck in the past, says Scott Dobroski, a career trends expert at jobs platform Indeed. It takes three and a half months for most Indeed users to find a job, she says. “All the other parts of our lives have sped up. The hiring process has not caught up.”
Time Wasters
While job hunters have much to gripe about, from “ghost jobs” to the dreaded “résumé black hole,” Cheryl decided to focus her efforts on the initial application process. She identified three main factors that affected the time it took to apply: the size of a company, the industry it was part of, and the applicant tracking software it used.
Applicant tracking software (ATS) was a major source of Cheryl’s frustration. The most common systems she encountered were Workday, Taleo, Greenhouse, Lever, and Phenom, which adds AI-powered features on top of systems like Workday. More established systems such as Workday and Taleo redirected her away from the careers page and made her create a separate account for each application, adding significant time and vexation. By the end of her 50 applications, she had 43 separate accounts.
Newer offerings such as Greenhouse and Lever spared her some of these frustrations. Applications through Lever, for instance, took 42 percent less time to complete than the average for similarly sized companies in the same industry.
Cheryl also spent many excruciating minutes retyping information she had already uploaded on her résumé because software would misread it. Workday, for instance, would routinely populate the education field with “Munich Business School” even though Cheryl’s résumé clearly says she graduated from non-soundalike UC Berkeley. “Sometimes it’s not even the time,” she says. “It’s the mental fatigue of having to do it every single time.”
The longest application to fill out was for a Government Service, clocking in at 10 minutes and 12 seconds, while the shortest was that of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, which requested only her name and résumé and consumed a mere 17 seconds. In general, Cheryl found that government applications took the longest—a trend that Indeed’s data backs up—followed by aerospace and consulting jobs. Younger industries such as online banks, AI firms, and crypto companies were amongst the least time-consuming. Legacy banks, for instance, took about four times longer to apply to than their newer online counterparts.
Cheryl also found applications to large companies more time-consuming than for smaller firms. In general, a doubling of company size added 5 percent to the average application time.
While hiring software (ATS) has historically been stacked in employers’ favour, more job seekers are using their own forms of automation. Bots and tools like LazyApply use text-generation technology like that behind ChatGPT to automatically mass apply to jobs, to the likely chagrin of overwhelmed recruiters. When Cheryl posted her results on discussion site Hacker News, one commenter claimed to use bots to fill out job applications and ChatGPT to write cover letters and correspond with recruiters, fully taking over only at the interview stage. “Can you blame her?” Cheryl says. “Because the companies are doing it too. Their résumé parsers, their application tracking software (ATS), and their tools are also using AI. So, it is almost as if the applicant now has their weapon they can use against the companies.”
An AI arms race that floods the job market with unserious applicants and insurmountable filtering tools is in nobody’s interest.
Cheryl has her own ideas for what would make job applications more productive for both seekers and recruiters. First off, she advises applicants to save time and mental anguish by prioritizing employers that use simpler software like Lever and Greenhouse. For jobs she is really serious about, she will try to make a human connection with the hiring manager on LinkedIn.
There’s a saying Cheryl likes, from computer science professor Randy Pausch: The brick walls are there for a reason. Facing and surmounting hurdles can help a person discover how much they want something. But if an employer erects too many barriers, “is an applicant really going to think, ‘That brick wall is there for a reason?’ Or is the applicant going to exit out of your website and go apply somewhere else?” Cheryl says. “I think it’s the latter.”
