Tech Job Market 2024: Why You Can’t Find a Job Right Now
Why does it feel like you can’t find a job right now? It’s not just you. Job openings recently fell to a 3-year low in 2024. This comes after waves of tech layoffs and share price drops at top tech companies.
The tech job market is highly competitive, but probably not for the reasons you expect. Did you know it takes 130-200+ jobs to land a job now, on average? Or that recruiters filter out candidates using automated tracking systems (ATS)? Understanding how hiring is changing can help you understand exactly what you need to do to land a job in the competitive 2024 tech job market.
1. The Labor Market Cooled Off
The tech job market cooled off in early 2024, in part due to inflation and rising interest rates. Job postings fell 15% at the end of 2023. In 2022, there were about 1 job for every 1 job seeker. In 2023, there were 1 job for every 2 job seekers.
The 1:2 ratio still technically makes it a job seekers market. But job seekers certainly don’t feel this way. Job seeker confidence in Q2 2024 fell to its lowest level in more than two years, according to a ZipRecruiter survey. Despite mixed statistics, it feels like you can’t land a job right now. Part of this tech job market pessimism likely has to do with the job seeker experience (more interviews, more ghost jobs, etc), while another part is probably because the rate of hiring by employers is at its lowest since 2017. Job seekers are feeling the squeeze of a cooler labor market.
2. Layoffs Make the Tech job Market 2024 Especially Competitive
After extensive layoffs in 2022 and 2023, the 2024 tech job market is flooded with recently laid off tech professionals competing for a limited number of jobs. With more job seekers and fewer positions, the 2024 tech job market is more competitive. LinkedIn job postings can get hundreds of applicants as soon as they’re posted.
Hiring is especially competitive at top companies. FAANG companies Google, Apple, and Amazon laid off thousands of employees in recent years. Among the top FAANG companies, only Meta seems to be hiring actively in 2024. While newer growing companies like Nvidia and Rippling are actively hiring, standards are still extremely high due to the high level of talent in the market. This means companies can afford to be picky. According to LinkedIn data, roughly 54% of recruiters cite the quality of hires as their main goal for the next five years until 2029.
3. Ghost Jobs
Job boards like LinkedIn are also flooded with “ghost jobs”: job postings that companies never intend to fill or that have already been filled. These job postings waste applicants’ time, and can leave them discouraged when they never hear back. It can feel like sending applicants into a blackhole, with no feedback.
Often, a recruiter just forgot to take down the job posting or left the company. With smaller and fewer recruiting teams due to automation, responding to a candidate can easily slip the minds of a busy recruiter. Sometimes recruiters don’t want to hire for the role right now, but they want to collect resumes to find talented candidates to hire for this role or another later. Companies may also post ghost jobs to try to raise the morale of their teams, showing that they have an interest in hiring someone to help ease the workload if the right candidate comes along. But often, they’re not serious about hiring a candidate.
More commonly, companies (especially startups) post ghost jobs to show that they’re growing. Posting hundreds of open jobs tells investors that the company is healthy and growing rapidly. For startups, this can increase their chance at raising capital and win them free press. For bigger companies, this can increase the company’s value. No matter the company size, posting new jobs can boost employee morale. After all, isn’t a growing company a great place to work?
While motivations behind ghost jobs aren’t malicious, they’re extremely harmful to job seekers. Not only do they hurt job seeker morale when they never hear back, they waste valuable time that could otherwise be spent applying to real jobs with an optimal strategy. A job seeker working a full-time job may only have a few hours per week to apply to jobs. In the past, most of the jobs they applied to would have actually been interested in hiring. Today, almost a third of jobs they apply to could be a complete waste of time with no interest in hiring. This means it could take significantly longer to find a job.
4. Fewer Recruiters and Increased Automation
New AI recruiting tools have changed hiring. While they can streamline the recruiting process, they also reduce the number of recruiters necessary to parse candidate resumes or even reach out directly. This can make the recruiting process feel less personal as automatic form rejections increase. Application tracking systems (ATS) can also be more strict about identifying skills, filtering candidates who may have otherwise been appealing. Without the correct resume format, you could be filtered out without the attention your application deserves.
While controversial, some data suggests automation and AI tools have already impacted the tech job market. While still in high demand, some aspects of data analyst and web developer roles can be automated. This doesn’t mean these roles aren’t still invaluable. It just means that fewer total may be necessary for a company as technology empowers them to achieve more with fewer teammates.
5. Skills over Education in Hiring
Companies are shifting towards valuing skills over academic degrees. In 2024, 79% of hiring managers reported prioritizing practical skills, experience, and past achievements above education.
On paper, this sounds like it would mean less gatekeeping and a fairer interview process if you have the most in-demand tech skills hiring managers are looking for. In practice, it seems to mean a much more competitive tech job market, especially for new grads looking for their first job.
Prioritizing skills over education means that college degrees may not always hold the same weight, putting recent graduates in a bind. After all, how do recent grads acquire skills and experiences if they need to develop skills and experiences on the job? Prioritizing skills over education also means that employers have a wider pool of candidates to choose from, further increasing competition.
High-level skills are also harder to find than education, since historically skills were often built on the job. This means despite many candidates applying, companies may not find any to have the specific skills up to a high enough level. A silver lining to this trend is that online courses, bootcamps, and certifications can help give you the edge over competition that may not have the specific job skills. However, even the best bootcamps alone have been shown to not always guarantee grads the level of skill required for roles. Meaning college alternatives like bootcamps or certifications are not a silver bullet to skills-based hiring. Candidates may have better luck learning to ace common technical interview questions and master Leetcode challenges themselves.
6. Fewer Entry-level Positions
Prioritizing skills means fewer entry-level roles, which are tailored to lower-skilled candidates with less experience. By the end of April 2024, entry-level positions constituted only 2.5% of the total jobs posted on platforms like ZipRecruiter. Only 1.9% of offers do not require previous experience.
When posted, today’s “entry-level roles” often require 5 years of experience. Job seekers may be intimidated and not apply, due to imposter syndrome or a genuine lack of qualifications. Worse, more than a third of employers reported a preference not to avoid hiring Gen Z candidates, probably because of a perceived lack of skills and on-the-job experience.
Another factor in competition for entry-level jobs is the increase in education overall. While more people are earning college degrees for white collar work, the supply of white collar jobs remains roughly the same. This means a glut of overqualified recent grads competing over a limited number of spaces. But it’s important to keep in mind that for in-demand jobs, like these top 5 highest paying tech roles, the demand is still greater than the supply. If you’re trying to find a tech job, especially in STEM, this likely doesn’t apply to your search. But it still applies to elite roles at top tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Netflix, or Google. While engineers are always in demand, enrollment in the 20 highest paying college majors like computer science have increased 34% since 2017, meaning the highest paying companies have more elite talent to choose from.
7. More Extensive Interview Processes
Now that the cooled labor market means companies can afford to be pickier, interviews have gotten longer. While interviews used to be 1-4 rounds, now they can be 5-8+, especially for competitive tech roles with technical components. As recruiters prioritize quality over quantity, they can ask candidates to jump through more hoops like extra behavioral interviews and even take-home assignments.
While more interviews reduce your chances of getting hired, they can also discourage candidates who may not want to invest so much valuable job searching time into take-home assignments, which can help offset the reduced odds.
8. Silver lining: High Interest in Hiring
While job seekers face more competition, companies are still hiring. In fact, more than half of companies plan to increase their hiring in the first half of 2024. While standards are high, companies still need to hire for critical roles. And plenty of companies like Rippling or Meta are aggressively hiring for high paying roles. You just have to present yourself well enough to meet companies’ high standards.
In a competitive tech job market, it’s more important than ever to make your job search materials. Your resume, portfolio, and interview skills should all be optimized to give you the best chance of landing a job. For help landing your dream job with data-back strategies and expert guidance, join Pathrise. It’s free until you land a job.
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