One figure sums up the current tension in the job market: applications are increasing four times faster than available positions. This is no longer just a war for talent among recruiters; it is a war of applications for job seekers.
The Workday Global Workforce report, as reported by HR Today, quantifies this imbalance precisely: applications increased by 31%, while job growth reached only 7% compared with the first half of 2023. Top talent remains difficult for employers to find and even harder to retain, but for a candidate, this concretely means a multiplied number of competitors for every advertised position.
This bottleneck is compounded by a second filter: 77% of companies plan to increase their use of artificial intelligence in recruitment over the coming year. In other words, there are more applications to process, and increasingly relied-upon automated tools to screen them before a human interview.
For a candidate, applying through generic channels (job boards, standard forms) means entering the most saturated funnel, one filtered most heavily by algorithms. Profiles that receive responses are often those that bypass this process by contacting a recruiter or an identified manager directly.
This week: identify 3 companies that genuinely interest you, find the name of someone recruiting for or leading the target team on LinkedIn, and send them a personalized 3-sentence message instead of applying through a form. This takes you out of the application stream and direct competition.
Concrete action
LinkedIn post idea to adapt: "Applications are rising 4x faster than open positions this year. The result: your CV gets lost in a form before it is even read. This week, I tried something different: contacting the person responsible for recruitment directly, with a short and specific message. [Share your result or learning]. How are you adapting your search to this saturation?"
Training approach: ask each participant to turn an application already submitted through a generic form into a 3-sentence direct message addressed to a specific person, then collectively compare the response rate achieved over two weeks.