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Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. | |
CAREERS
What are the odds?
Someone has finally calculated the chances of an online application actually resulting in a job. It’s about as bad as you think
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IF YOU’VE BEEN looking for a new job, maybe the following will seem familiar. “What are the odds…” you say to yourself, downcast and dejected, as you hit send and ship another résumé into the digital abyss.
We all know that AI and various candidate screening technologies have broken the job application process (for both sides). But really — what are the odds? If you send a résumé in somewhere, what is the statistical likelihood that it leads to a job?
The number is not encouraging. New data from Greenhouse shows that each résumé has just a 0.4 per cent chance of leading to a job. The average job on their platform now receives 242 résumés — nearly triple what the average job would receive in 2017 when each job would get around 80 applications.
“And that’s just for the average job,” wrote Business Insider’s Aki Ito. “At the big-name employers, the odds are even worse.”
We’ve written many times about how screwed up this process is — this just puts data to the sentiment that job hunting feels nearly impossible now. But Ito’s argument is that it’s more than just slanted against candidates. We’re not merely in a market that favours employers, we’re in one that is driving everyone crazy.
“You’d think employers would be loving this, getting to pick from such a big pool of candidates,” she wrote. “But they’re just as frustrated.”
Greenhouse, which is fundamentally a tech platform trying to solve the pain points for both sides, see this as just as much of a problem for hiring managers as for candidates. They’ve invested in a lot of AI tools, not to automate the process so much as give flustered hiring managers some ability to decipher signal from noise.
“Talent acquisition teams have also been disproportionately impacted by layoffs, which means they’re facing this influx of applicants with leaner teams,” they wrote in a company blog post.
But as Ito points out, this is also a problem that can be understood as a structural one. Economists call it “congestion,” a situation where “big markets hold the promise of creating better matches, but they also tend to devolve into total chaos.”
But for now, congestion is the state of play. A less than half per cent chance of landing a gig is better than no chance, even if it’s deeply problematic from a job market perspective. The bad news is, economists figure it’s going to get worse.
“The forces that make it cheap to send more applications are working faster than the forces that allow you to quickly process many applications,” said Stanford economist Alvin Roth. “We're deep into congestion.”
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WORKPLACE
The holiday hideout
Devoid of porch pirates, snoopy spouses and missed deliveries, the office has become the go-to depot for everyone’s holiday shopping
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CHANCES ARE, SOME readers out there spent at least a little time at work online shopping last week, what with all the Cyber Monday deals out there (we’re not judging!). And while the end of those sales may have cooled your spending, the weeks after Black Friday and Cyber Monday start to get hectic for one particular part of the office: the mailroom.
Data from Envoy found that it’s not Black Friday that slams corporate mailrooms. Instead, about a week after Black Friday, the action starts in the mailroom, where deliveries jump 60 per cent above average, and the office overall sees a 30 per cent week-over-week spike in packages. And in the weeks to come, it only gets busier. By early December, the average corporate mailroom sees 75 per cent more deliveries than the yearly average, and 40 per cent more than the average week in Q4.
Envoy’s explanation isn’t that businesses get in on deal hunting, but that their employees use the office mailroom as a place to get their stuff delivered.
“It turns out people aren’t just working form the office in December. They’re also using it as a holiday hideout — stashing gifts away from curious family members, dodging porch pirates and making sure those Black Friday deals arrive safely,” Envoy wrote. “Every year we studied — across 2018-2019 and 2021-2024 — the busiest week for office deliveries lands in early to mid-December, not the week of Christmas itself.”
This is a growing dynamic for offices, which have become the destination for more and more ecommerce in recent years, but which aren’t necessarily set up for the sheer volume of stuff being ordered.
“Office managers and front desk associates are being overwhelmed by the sheer number of deliveries per day given that there’s no place to put them,” reads a blog by Parcel Pending, a commercial locker company, which point out that modern offices, which no longer have as many dedicated mail clerks as they used to, don’t have easy solutions. Front desk staff don’t like it, hiring additional staff is expensive and banning employees from using the office as a delivery destination seems a little heavy-handed.
The silver lining? It’s short-lived. Just as quickly as office mailrooms get slammed, the volume falls off a cliff. “People tend to handle post-holiday returns from home, not from their desks,” Envoy concluded. “After Christmas, the corporate mailroom goes from bustling to nearly silent.”
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Terry Talk: Play. Purpose. Potential. The culture advantage
| Culture isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s a critical driver of performance. How work makes people feel shapes everything: engagement, innovation and results. In this Terry Talk, Ahria Consulting president & CEO Terry Gillis discusses an article from the Harvard Business Review which identified six reasons people work. Of those six, the best cultures maximize positive potential, outperforming those that rely on fear or pressure. | | | |
WORKFORCE
The 2026 view from Gen Z
They’re stalled, stressed and scanning the horizon for more bad news in the coming year
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If you’re starting to think about your New Year’s resolutions, or even just your predictions for the year ahead, you’re not alone — although we hope you’re feeling a bit more optimistic than most of Gen Z, who appear to look ahead to 2026 with a rather gloomy attitude.
In a new poll from Employment Hero, only 53 per cent of Gen Z workers expect to get a raise next year, although 82 per cent said they think they deserve one. Same goes for promotions: 62 per cent think they deserve one, but only 32 percent expect one. They are forecasting a bad year that follows an already bad year, too. One in three respondents said they were in a job that falls short of their education level, while 46 per cent of them aren’t in their desired field. (For comparison, 25 percent of Gen X say the same.)
“The job market has been tough on everyone this year, but especially on Gen Z, who are just getting started in their careers,” says Employment Hero’s president of Canadian business Kevin Kliman.
Little surprise then that so many Gen Z employees are restless and looking at the exit. A majority — 55 per cent — said they are planning to look for a new job next year. “It’s not a subtle message,” wrote HR Tech Edge.
For businesses, Kliman’s message is that, while we’re all dealing with uncertainty, the value of investing in people remains.
“While it can be challenging for employers to offer career progression amidst economic uncertainty, there are other meaningful ways to invest in Gen Z's success,” Kliman advised. “It starts with hearing them out — why do they feel a mismatch between their goals and their current role From there, you can work together to identify opportunities for mentorship and exposure to different aspects of the business to support their growth.”
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TECHNOLOGY
So long Metaverse, we hardly knew ye
Just three years old, the fate of the once-buzzy technology has been sealed
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WITH THE BENEFIT of hindsight, we can admit that early 2022 was a very unusual time. Remember NFTs? And remember all the hullabaloo over an odd Facebook spinoff called the Metaverse?
Here at Worklife HQ, we do remember those weird times. In one of our early editions of this newsletter (January 2022), we covered the launch of the Metaverse and the frothy, sort-of-real real estate market that existed in there. “Does it sound insane? Maybe. But it’s certainly happening,” we wrote at the time.
The Metaverse never really caught on, though, proving to be one of big tech’s big flops. And last week, Mark Zuckerberg appeared to officially put the last meta-nail in the meta-coffin, after a Bloomberg News report that Zuck was “expected to meaningfully cut resources for building the so-called metaverse,” with suggestions the budget may be trimmed by as much as 30 per cent.
There are few tears being shed in the Metaverse wake, it seems. “The thing never made much sense, even when Zuck dramatically declared the metaverse would be the successor of the mobile internet,” wrote CNN Business’ Allison Morrow. “The entire project is, to say the least, a far cry from the vast digital idyll of Zuck’s pandemic-era fever dream, and it’s getting shoved to the back of the closet like so many well-intentioned Covid projects.”
“Smart move, just late,” added Huber Research Partners analyst Craig Huber, speaking to Reuters. “This seems a major shift to align costs with a revenue outlook that surely is not as prosperous as management thought years ago.”
So, we’re not shedding any tears here, either, even the Metaverse’s loftiest promises — Zoom calls around a virtual boardroom table, the Metaverse cocktail hour — were fun to think about.
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