You’re not imagining it. Getting a job right now really is harder than it used to be. That’s because Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait has crunched the numbers on the job market, and they’re brutal: for every 10 open roles on his hiring platform alone, there are 2,539 applicants fighting over them.
His advice for standing a chance? Stop applying to the companies everyone’s heard of.
“Don’t just apply to, you know, OpenAI, because they’re in the news every day,” Chait exclusively told Fortune. “Think of the job you want and apply to less-known companies who do that type of work—you’ll find a lot more success.”
The numbers back him up. There are currently 175,000 live jobs on Greenhouse’s platform—and on average, for every job ad posted, around 254 job seekers are applying, pushing applications per recruiter up by 412%—and that’s before accounting for the handful of household names soaking up a disproportionate share of that flood.
Essentially, it’s not you—it’s who you’re applying to that’s the problem.
“It’s actually less about the roles, and it’s more about the companies,” Chait explained. “So across thousands of organizations, what we see is there are certain companies that have really high-profile brands, and they get massive numbers of job applications.”
“If you’re a company that’s been in the headlines or that’s very popular with consumers, you get tens of thousands of job applications for an open role. They’re swimming in it,” he added. “If you go to a very similar company with a very similar type of work that isn’t as well known or that doesn’t have a flashy consumer brand, they might have very few applicants.”
“And so my encouragement is: go beyond the headlines.”
Other ways to stand out in this ‘hiring nightmare’, according to hiring managers and CEOs
It’s no secret that getting a new job is hard—and it’s not just because there are more candidates on the market. There’s also the AI doom loop to contend with (employees spamming bosses with AI-written resumes to try to cut through the noise, because employers are leaning on AI). And then there’s the endless new hoops that recruiters are making candidates jump through to prove they’re the perfect match, from 6-hour interviews and 90-minute assessments to coffee cup tests and weird curveball questions.
But for young people in particular, the challenge is even steeper. About a fifth of Gen Zers worldwide are classified as “NEETs” and are currently locked out of the job market. Last year in the U.K. alone, more than 1.2 million applications were submitted for fewer than 17,000 graduate roles. Even Goldman economists have admitted Gen Z’s hiring nightmare is real—and it isn’t going away anytime soon.
But for desperate young workers who want to take action in their own hands, there are some ways to stand out. For one, the extra bit of effort it takes to handwrite a note could be an easy win, especially as one Gen Z hiring manager pointed out that they’re few and far between these days.
Meanwhile, Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri recently told Fortune that the only reliable way to land a job these days is to skip the applications entirely and build a relationship with someone on the inside—because, as he put it, some of the best jobs are “never published” at all.
His advice for job seekers who are young, hungry, and child-free is to get out and network at least two to three times a week: “Who you know, how you get to know them, and building your network will pay off over time.”
And then there’s the obvious. If you can’t beat it, you might as well join it: AI may be shrinking jobs, but CEOs are consistently saying that AI fluency is the one standout skill they’re looking for from talent right now.
“This is the time of opportunity,” Glean CEO Arvind Jain told Fortune. “You have this phenomenal tool, and it allows you to do so many cool things.” In his view, a candidate who has genuinely embraced AI can work at ten times the speed of one who hasn’t—and that gap is only going to widen. “If you’ve mastered these tools, you can create amazing software, systems, applications, imagery, videos. Show your creativity with it.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com