Modern day job hunting is like navigating a giant maze with your eyes shut. You’re knee-deep in resume templates, cover letters, and applying to jobs non-stop without any indication if what you’re doing is right or if someone even saw your application. It’s a frustrating, time-consuming, and demoralizing process.

But why is it so hard nowadays? Why can’t we just emulate what our parents did and land our dream job with a firm handshake?

What happened? And how can we make it easier? Let’s explore.

No, it’s not because of that stimulus cheque.

The job market landscape has drastically changed over the years. And I’m not talking about the days when flipping the newspaper to the classifieds or networking at a local fair could easily land you a job—that’s ancient history. I’m talking about just the last few years, post-COVID.

When the pandemic hit, governments everywhere were wary of cascading economic effects, so they proactively pumped money into the economy to stimulate spending. This led to a massive increase in demand for goods and services, which, in turn, led to an increase in demand for workers.

Contrary to some opinions, the less-than-a-full-month’s-expenses stimulus checks that most people received didn’t cause the labor shortage. And just as much, that money running out is not the reason why the power is shifting back to the employers.

For the first time in a long time, the job market was a seller’s market. Phrases like ‘nobody wants to work anymore’ were popularized when employers could no longer underpay and overwork employees. Terms like ‘quiet-quitting’ were invented. It finally seemed like the power was shifting back to the people.

But, as with all things, this too was temporary. As the world opened up, it was time to pick up the tab.

Where did all the jobs go, and why? So, so many factors.

When governments overspend, essentially ‘printing’ free money, the price of everything also goes up; that’s what we call inflation. What happens when government spending stops? Instead of prices adjusting back down, corporate greed takes over and they keep them high.

The result: cost of living rises, but your wages don’t keep up.

In other words, you need to work more just to stay in place. When this happens at a large, country-wide scale, the effects are felt by everyone.

Small businesses have to pay more on things like their supplies and rent, so they reduce workers’ hours and sometimes even lay them off (seeing a single person run an entire fast-food restaurant on their own is becoming scarily common).

When people can’t spend as freely, either due to losing their jobs or simply not being able to keep up with rising prices, the effects are compounded. The economy slows down even more, so companies make less money, and trigger more cost-cutting/layoffs—in every industry.

And inflation is just one factor. Remember when the economy was stimulated and companies hired like crazy to keep up with demand? Now that all that spending has dried up, all those ‘excess’ employees are being let go in wave after wave of layoffs.

There are many more reasons, like the fact that the pandemic accelerated companies’ reliance on technology. Coupled with earth-shattering advancements in artificial intelligence, we’re seeing a lot of jobs being automated partially or even entirely by AI today.

Additionally, the normalization of remote work, also accelerated by the pandemic, led to a lot of jobs being outsourced.

I could go on, but you get the point.

The Role of Technology: A Friend or Foe?

Technology, while making our life easier in many ways, played a peculiar role here too. With the advent of the internet, applying for jobs became as easy as clicking a button. Great, right? Well, not entirely. While you can apply with a few clicks, so can thousands of others.

Consequently, employers are bombarded with candidates. Enter ‘applicant tracking systems (ATS)’, used by virtually every company in the world to filter out resumes that don’t fit an arbitrary set of criteria. We ended up with tech that should’ve been a democratizing force, instead becoming another barrier.

So, job-seekers were forced to start tailoring their resumes, mimicking ‘keywords’ and reworking histories just to pass the ‘ATS screening’. This tech-introduced rigamarole piled on the time it took to apply to a single posting.

Endlessly retuning your resume based on each job description, then filling out that same information over and over again for every company you want to apply to—like a bot—has even the most resilient people screaming into the void.

The crazy part is, this process hasn’t changed much since the 90s. The only difference is that now, there’s significantly more competition, meaning the odds of a human even seeing your resume are lower than ever.

The system that powered the job market for decades is now—and has been for a while—broken, for both sides.

The Landscape Today: It’s a Numbers Game

Stories of people applying to 1000+ jobs before landing a single interview are becoming more and more common. This new reality is daunting on the job-seeker, and there's no sign of it getting better. As you can tell by now, I'm leading up to the reason I wrote this article: why we built OAKI.

If employers can have the luxury of using AI and automated systems to filter out candidates, why can’t the job-seekers? There needed to be a technological leveller, and thus OAKI was born: an AI tool that finally serves job-seekers.

OAKI scrapes the web for opportunities and tailors your resume for each one, showcasing your skills and experiences to best fit individual jobs. It makes the system work for you, not against you; automating the parts of the job hunt that are repetitive and time-consuming waste your time, so you can focus on the human side of things: networking, learning new skills, and just taking a break.

Born out of the frustration of many voices clamoring for change, OAKI is the first step in a long journey to make job hunting more human.

We’re striving every day to change job finding forever; from something that feels like a despairing chore, into a journey filled with hope, growth, and excitement.

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Written by Nour
CEO @OAKI