I've been in a unique position this year to have been recruiting, and then looking for a new role myself, within the span of a few months, so had experienced the market from both ends. I'm observing a number of trends, some more concerning than others.
1. An explosion in international applicants due to the shift to remote since Covid. This means job posting that used to get an overwhelming number of applicants (100+) are now getting so many applicants (5000+) it's literally impossible to properly evaluate.
2. It has become trivial to apply for a job. Aggregator sites like Otta and Cord send you alerts as soon as they've scraped a new job posting. As such, applicants are spraying their CV to every single job they get notified about.
3. ATS usage has skyrocketed (the ATS startup space has exploded as a result), because of 1. and 2., forcing even early-stage startups to use an ATS just to be able to screen the candidates. As an applicant, if you don't hit the keywords, your CV wont even be seen by human eyes.
4. Because of 3., applicants are polluting their CVs with keywords and resorting to ChatGPT to build their CVs. As a hiring manager, you use the ATS to narrow down a list of candidates, then look at the CVs, and they're useless for actually evaluating the candidate. (Keyword chasing has always been the case, but it's gotten to ridiculous levels at the moment)
5. Fake jobs. There is not a company on this planet that would not want to speak with an ex-Googler if one was interested. As such, in the hopes someone exceptional applies, they keep job posts up even if they're not recruiting, and fewer companies are labeling them appropriately (open role/wildcard/other).
6. Hyper-specialization of companies. We're seeing fewer and fewer companies willing to embrace a multi-product mindset, who are pigeonholing themselves into a very tight niche.
7. So, so much of the work you would need a dev for in the past, has now been delegated to SaaS driven by a non-dev in the company. Think Rudderstack, Mixpanel, Customer.io, Squarespace, etc.
8. The ROI of hiring software engineers specifically has gone through the roof. A single dev is able to provide immense value given the SaaS tools they have access to now. You would think this means companies would want more devs, but 6. and 7. means companies have less and less dev work required to reach PMF and profitability.
9. There is a massive segment of the software engineering talent pool that can only build integrations and simple CRUD applications. Because of 7., demand for them is diminishing. A lot of these devs have been doing integration work for a decade, and are now finding themselves competing for the same jobs with actual computer scientists, leading to very confusing outcomes (someone with 20 years of experience unable to land a job, someone with 2 years of experience doing better at a technical interview than someone with 10).
1. An explosion in international applicants due to the shift to remote since Covid. This means job posting that used to get an overwhelming number of applicants (100+) are now getting so many applicants (5000+) it's literally impossible to properly evaluate.
2. It has become trivial to apply for a job. Aggregator sites like Otta and Cord send you alerts as soon as they've scraped a new job posting. As such, applicants are spraying their CV to every single job they get notified about.
3. ATS usage has skyrocketed (the ATS startup space has exploded as a result), because of 1. and 2., forcing even early-stage startups to use an ATS just to be able to screen the candidates. As an applicant, if you don't hit the keywords, your CV wont even be seen by human eyes.
4. Because of 3., applicants are polluting their CVs with keywords and resorting to ChatGPT to build their CVs. As a hiring manager, you use the ATS to narrow down a list of candidates, then look at the CVs, and they're useless for actually evaluating the candidate. (Keyword chasing has always been the case, but it's gotten to ridiculous levels at the moment)
5. Fake jobs. There is not a company on this planet that would not want to speak with an ex-Googler if one was interested. As such, in the hopes someone exceptional applies, they keep job posts up even if they're not recruiting, and fewer companies are labeling them appropriately (open role/wildcard/other).
6. Hyper-specialization of companies. We're seeing fewer and fewer companies willing to embrace a multi-product mindset, who are pigeonholing themselves into a very tight niche.
7. So, so much of the work you would need a dev for in the past, has now been delegated to SaaS driven by a non-dev in the company. Think Rudderstack, Mixpanel, Customer.io, Squarespace, etc.
8. The ROI of hiring software engineers specifically has gone through the roof. A single dev is able to provide immense value given the SaaS tools they have access to now. You would think this means companies would want more devs, but 6. and 7. means companies have less and less dev work required to reach PMF and profitability.
9. There is a massive segment of the software engineering talent pool that can only build integrations and simple CRUD applications. Because of 7., demand for them is diminishing. A lot of these devs have been doing integration work for a decade, and are now finding themselves competing for the same jobs with actual computer scientists, leading to very confusing outcomes (someone with 20 years of experience unable to land a job, someone with 2 years of experience doing better at a technical interview than someone with 10).