What are the odds?

Someone has finally calculated the odds of an online application actually resulting in a job. It’s about as bad as you think

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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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.” Kieran Delamont