Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

WE MAY SOUND like a broken record on this topic, but the modern job application system is almost universally panned as awful, inefficient and overly time-consuming. It’s a wonder anyone gets a job at all anymore.

Or to put it another way, it’s a wonder anyone can hire a new employee at all.

Backing this up is a new survey indicating is has become much more than a minor annoyance ― an overly complicated or time-consuming job application is actively pushing people away. LiveCareer’s 2025 Job Search Frustration Survey found that a healthy majority ―57 per cent of today’s jobseekers ― are regularly abandoning job applications mid-process because they’ve just grown too onerous.

“When motivated workers are quitting applications midway, or doubting whether anyone sees their efforts, it’s a sign that something’s broken in the system,” said career expert Jasmine Escalera.

Yes, the job market itself is not great right now, but that’s only part of what is making the job search (and on the flipside, recruiting talent) such a nightmare. The complete trust deficit in the hiring process is another. Survey data from Gallup has shown that a positive, human and respectful interview process is a net benefit for both employer and employee ― that all things being equal, the company with the better interview process is more likely to land the better talent ― and yet LiveCareer’s findings reiterate that most employee-employer relationships are getting off on the wrong foot.

“Banish lengthy application portals that require candidates to manually retype their entire résumé,” said ZipRecruiter’s in-house career expert Sam DeMase. “Considering the volume required of today’s candidates, each application should take less than 10 minutes to fill out.”

Experts reiterate this isn’t just hurting jobseekers, but employers, too. If we’re at least assuming companies are hiring because they want to gain a good employee out of the process, by deploying candidate screening tools that claim to be powerful, but which are in reality a pain in the neck, they’re likely contributing to the problem of low morale ― that star new employee is burned out and exhausted before they even step foot in the door.

“Ultimately, you want to attract people to your organization, so applying for a job shouldn’t feel like work,” said Jason Jeverant, president of staffing agency AtWork. “It should feel like the beginning of a partnership.”

CAREERS

The myth of the job-hopping generation

Gen Z are chided for being flaky at work. Turns out they don’t change roles any more or less than previous generations

IN THE PAST five or so years, Gen Z has developed a reputation as supposed job-hoppers. We’ve certainly written lots on the perceived trend ― a shift in thinking that workplace loyalty has changed the way people approach career and income development. Earlier this year, Revelio Labs called it a “feature, not a bug” for Gen Zers, and claimed “their behaviour is diverging sharply from that of previous generations.”

But is it? A study came out last week from the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS) challenging this notion. They checked the tape, and found that Boomers and Gen Xers (some of whom are awful quick to throw stones were job-hoppers once, too, and behaved in similar ways to Gen Z now.

“Shorter job tenure among younger workers is not a new trend, and it’s largely consistent across generations,” the study found. In 1983, the median job tenure of young employees was 3.0 years; in 2024, that study found the median tenure of the same age group to be 2.7 years, a difference of about three and a half months.

“Younger workers will always have shorter average and median tenures because they haven’t had the time to be employed for as long, and younger workers will change more frequently than older workers as they look for the job or career that is right for them. But these are not new phenomena.”

The NIRS’ interest in this data stems from trying to test the often-cited idea that younger workers would be better served by more flexible benefits, or that they aren’t interested in defined benefit pensions. Both ideas are often pushed by employers, but the NIRS was interested in whether it held water.

“Employers, policymakers and others involved in employee benefit design and administration should beware of ascribing overly broad and largely inaccurate beliefs to specific groups of younger workers,” they concluded. It might suggest that employers who are out there pushing the idea of less secure benefits while also criticizing low retention rates are, in effect, talking in circles. 

AI

The big divide

A new report from MIT paints a sobering picture for organizations investing in generative AI projects. Employees, on the other hand, love their off-the-shelf platforms

A MAJOR NEW report looking at the ROI on the nearly US$40 billion in enterprise investment into generative AI was published by MIT recently ― or, we should say, the lack of ROI.

“This report uncovers a surprising result,” the researchers wrote, “in that 95 per cent of organizations are getting zero return.”

It was an impactful finding, and one that led to some wobble in the AI stock market, which saw a small sell-off right after the report dropped. Large enterprise firms, many of which are pouring money into AI pilots and selling the idea of huge returns, aren’t seeing them. “This intensity has not translated into success,” the MIT authors wrote, based on the finding that “these organizations report the lowest rates of pilot-to-scale conversion.”

While a lot of coverage focused on the top-line profitability question, there was something arguably more interesting the MIT researchers found. Businesses were underperforming in their goal of AI adoption, but when it came to workers, the picture is different: they find AI to be incredibly useful consumer tools.

“Our research uncovered a thriving shadow AI economy, where employees use personal ChatGPT accounts, Claude subscriptions and other consumer tools to automate significant portions of their jobs, often without IT knowledge or approval,” they wrote. “Workers from over 90 per cent of the companies we surveyed reported regular use of personal AI tools for work tasks. In fact, almost every single person used an LLM in some form for their work.” (To you, the reader, we might ask: don’t you have an LLM tab open on your browser right now?)

One of the big questions hanging over all things AI right now is which of two possibly inevitable things will occur first: AI tech will begin to demonstrate real capacity to drive profitability, or the money funding it all will lose interest and begin hyping something new. The MIT study suggests that in the current environment, investment priorities are misaligned. Users of LLMs, for instance, expressed less trust with enterprise AI tools than they did with consumer-grade tools, like their ChatGPT account. Maybe this makes sense: if you used ChatGPT to successfully make a batch of muffins, you probably trust it a little more to help with your emails.

“This pattern suggests that a $20-per-month general-purpose tool often outperforms bespoke enterprise systems costing orders of magnitude more, at least in terms of immediate usability and user satisfaction,” researchers found. “Back-office automation may offer more dramatic and sustainable returns for organizations willing to look beyond the obvious use cases and truly cross the GenAI divide.” 

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