The price of uncertainty

When I was in high school and college I worked for Domino’s Pizza. It was a good first job but there was one thing in particular that I loathed. You would be scheduled for a shift starting at a specific time but you did not know when your shift ended.

It worked this way because management could not know how busy it would be. Once business started to slow the shift manager would start cutting staff for the night.

This was the absolute worst on the weekends. Friends would call me while I was working and ask when I was getting off. I could never tell them and it always annoyed me.

There’s something about uncertainty that is just absolute torment.

A couple years ago I was working for a startup that suddenly went belly up. The details don’t matter but we were expecting a new round of investment and suddenly they pulled out when were were already stretched thin. Everyone was let go that day.

I spent the next few months unemployed and the torment of uncertainty reared it’s head again.

Job searching has never been a pleasant experience. However, the current job market feels extremely rocky. You have more information than ever. More jobs to apply to than ever. It’s easier than ever to apply.

But, then, that access and ease is the root of a big problem.

Applicants are overwhelmed with options. You can apply to a hundred jobs per day with Easy Apply or AI resume slopguns. But then, employers are on the receiving end of that. They get swamped and they get overwhelmed. They don’t reply to everyone because they just can’t.

Job seekers are in uncertain waters because they don’t know how they stack against the other 5000 applicants. They don’t know if they’ll hear back. So, they turn to bigger and better application padding.

Employers don’t know how to deal with what they’re getting so they adopt questionable AI tools for filtering and ranking. People get sued. People get apprehensive.

In situations like this we can’t always fix the root issue. People demand easy application tools. People love remote work and options. Employers benefit from options too, even though it’s overwhelming. Unless we just let the AI overlords assign jobs there’s no easy solution.

But, we don’t need absolute certainty. We just need a little.

I’ve been reading Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. In the book he talks about this issue and gives a great example. Would you rather:

• Your flight is delayed.
• Your flight is delayed by 40 minutes.

Most sane people will pick the latter. At least you know what to expect.

We can’t fix all the problems in the job market. We could do a better job of tracking the process.

An employer doesn’t need to respond to 5,000 people. They just need a tool to say, “Hey we’re interviewing a few folks now. If it goes well the job will be closed. If not we’ll interview some more.” Like a Pending status on the sale of a house. And then, the applicants just need a way to see it.

We can create tools to help people understand how likely they are to get a given job. Similar tools can be built to inform the employer about the status of applicants.

Problems like this don’t need to be over-solved. We just need improvements that consider the human struggle.