To Find Your Next Job, Ditch the Online Resume Portal
Companies and candidates frustrated by online applications are reverting to in-person meetings.
4 min
The job market is confounding. Managers say they’re still struggling to find good people to hire, while job seekers say that applying online can feel like shooting their résumés into outer space. Why bother?
I hear from a lot of bosses who say the software they use to screen job candidates is failing them. A lot of good-on-paper job candidates fall short during the interview process because they are lacking in the soft-skills department.
At the same time, people who want new jobs are telling me they’d make great employees if only they could talk with the person who’d be their boss.
There’s an idea: Human connection. A foot in the door, a shake of the hand and a face-to-face conversation could be a way to fix this disconnect, according to companies and candidates who are refocusing on in-person recruiting and pitching.
The walk-in strategy that landed your first job bagging groceries or scooping ice cream just might help secure your next one. Taped-up invitations to “apply within”—rendered obsolete by digital HR portals and impractical during the pandemic—are reappearing on office doors and storefronts for white-collar and skilled trade jobs from Reno, Nev., to Cincinnati to Hyannis, Mass., business groups say.
“Are you awesome? Because we’re NOW HIRING,” read a sign this month on the door of the Classic Arcade Pinball Museum in Chattanooga, Tenn., which was in need of an assistant manager. “Apply inside!”
Owner Dave Alverson told me the role isn’t complicated and pays a modest wage but requires strong interpersonal skills—and he’d grown frustrated with online application systems that couldn’t vet people’s ability to make conversation and create a welcoming atmosphere. So, he went old school in search of someone who’s passionate about games from the ’70s and ’80s. He hung a sign to solicit walk-ins, interviewed several promising candidates, and last week filled the position with someone he thinks will connect with customers.
An in-person introduction helps judge qualities that don’t show up on a résumé, bosses say—like whether an applicant seems reliable, or someone apt to “ghost” the company after a few days. Tom Sullivan, vice president of small business policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, says members’ top concern is finding people who will show up for the second week of work, instead of quitting soon after starting.
Worker flakiness is rampant and reflects a sense that another job is easy to come by, although fears of a recession are beginning to shake some employees’ confidence. Some others are discovering job searches are tougher than they expected.
Nicolle Allred says she has struck out on about 100 online applications for remote project-management positions. The trouble, she suspects, is that her experience as an Air Force reservist and stay-at-home mother for the past six years doesn’t translate well to the software that is scanning forms and winnowing pools of candidates.
The 36-year-old from Utah says her next move might be walking into local companies, résumé in hand.
“You really just need to be given that chance to reflect your passion and your ability to learn,” she says. “I think that’s all it takes: just put me in front of somebody instead of online.”
As some companies cut back on hiring, job seekers who take the initiative to apply in person could have an advantage over those who hit an online “submit” button. Several managers seeking workers in fields such as education, carpentry, retail and hospitality told me they consider walk-in applicants who impress them, even if those candidates don’t satisfy every requirement and would be screened out by software.
At a new Wyndham Destinations resort in Atlanta, recruiter David Cohn has been trying for four months to fill 120 full-time positions in sales, marketing and operations. Typical compensation is about $75,000, and good sales professionals could earn six figures with commissions, he says. Though the company uses digital applications, “I would be more than happy to talk with anyone coming in off the street,” he adds.
Ohio Living Llanfair, an eldercare facility in Cincinnati, started “walk-in Wednesdays” earlier this year because digital job boards weren’t producing enough qualified candidates and some new hires were leaving almost as soon as they started, says executive director Ann Roller. The move has attracted new staff, she says—some of whom were offered jobs on the spot, pending background checks.
Some companies are experimenting with versions of drop-in hiring for more advanced positions, like software developers.
Intel plans to simulate this kind of old-fashioned hiring by hosting a job fair in the metaverse early next year. Tech workers—or people who want to be tech workers but have unconventional backgrounds—will strap on virtual-reality headsets, select avatars and pitch themselves to Intel.
“We’re still working through the details, but I’m assuming people will look like aliens or something,” says Intel spokeswoman Chelsea Hughes, adding that the goal is to prevent imperfect algorithms and unconscious biases from filtering out good candidates.
The company will use a voice changer in interviews, too—one that hopefully won’t make every applicant sound like a kidnapper in an action movie.
“I wonder if I could be Deadpool,” aspiring software developer Kenny Hazlett said when I told him about Intel’s idea to represent candidates as avatars. The South Carolina man figures he might have better luck as a Marvel Comics character.
Mr. Hazlett, 29, estimates he has applied unsuccessfully to 400 tech jobs, all online, since graduating from a coding boot camp in May. A former car salesman, he’s trying to make a career change and wants a chance to meet and win over a manager—whether in the metaverse or in the flesh.
It has worked before. He says he broke into car sales several years ago by donning a suit and going door to door at dealerships, asking for a job until he got one.
“I didn’t even have a car at the time,” he says. “I just walked from place to place, shaking hands.”
Some people are trying that method now, and in unconventional settings. Grace Olivia Croson was in her backyard in Virginia a couple of weeks ago, checking the progress of a patio and gazebo project, when a man wearing a polo shirt and khakis strolled onto her property.
“He just walked up to my contractor and said, ‘Hey, I saw your truck outside, and I was wondering if you’re looking for workers,’” Ms. Croson recalls. She says the contractor seemed surprised but asked about the man’s experience and took his number.
Ms. Croson, a 40-year-old education recruiter, was so struck by the man’s chutzpah that she wrote about the episode on LinkedIn and included an invitation: “If you’re a #speechlanguagepathologist #schoolpsychologist or #specialeducation #teacher please feel free to walk in my backyard and apply.”
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Food prices continue to rise at a rapid pace, surprising central banks and pressuring debt-laden governments
4 min
LONDON—Fresh out of an energy crisis, Europeans are facing a food-price explosion that is changing diets and forcing consumers across the region to tighten their belts—literally.
This is happening even though inflation as a whole is falling thanks to lower energy prices, presenting a new policy challenge for governments that deployed billions in aid last year to keep businesses and households afloat through the worst energy crisis in decades.
New data on Wednesday showed inflation in the U.K. fell sharply in April as energy prices cooled, following a similar pattern around Europe and in the U.S. But food prices were 19.3% higher than a year earlier.
The continued surge in food prices has caught central bankers off guard and pressured governments that are still reeling from the cost of last year’s emergency support to come to the rescue. And it is pressuring household budgets that are also under strain from rising borrowing costs.
In France, households have cut their food purchases by more than 10% since the invasion of Ukraine, while their purchases of energy have fallen by 4.8%.
In Germany, sales of food fell 1.1% in March from the previous month, and were down 10.3% from a year earlier, the largest drop since records began in 1994. According to the Federal Information Centre for Agriculture, meat consumption was lower in 2022 than at any time since records began in 1989, although it said that might partly reflect a continuing shift toward more plant-based diets.
Food retailers’ profit margins have contracted because they can’t pass on the entire price increases from their suppliers to their customers. Markus Mosa, chief executive of the Edeka supermarket chain, told German media that the company had stopped ordering products from several large suppliers because of rocketing prices.
A survey by the U.K.’s statistics agency earlier this month found that almost three-fifths of the poorest 20% of households were cutting back on food purchases.
“This is an access problem,” said Ludovic Subran, chief economist at insurer Allianz, who previously worked at the United Nations World Food Program. “Total food production has not plummeted. This is an entitlement crisis.”
Food accounts for a much larger share of consumer spending than energy, so a smaller rise in prices has a greater impact on budgets. The U.K.’s Resolution Foundation estimates that by the summer, the cumulative rise in food bills since 2020 will have amounted to 28 billion pounds, equivalent to $34.76 billion, outstripping the rise in energy bills, estimated at £25 billion.
“The cost of living crisis isn’t ending, it is just entering a new phase,” Torsten Bell, the research group’s chief executive, wrote in a recent report.
Food isn’t the only driver of inflation. In the U.K., the core rate of inflation—which excludes food and energy—rose to 6.8% in April from 6.2% in March, its highest level since 1992. Core inflation was close to its record high in the eurozone during the same month.
Still, Bank of England Gov. Andrew Bailey told lawmakers Tuesday that food prices now constitute a “fourth shock” to inflation after the bottlenecks that jammed supply chains during the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise in energy prices that accompanied Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and surprisingly tight labor markets.
Europe’s governments spent heavily on supporting households as energy prices soared. Now they have less room to borrow given the surge in debt since the pandemic struck in 2020.
Some governments—including those of Italy, Spain and Portugal—have cut sales taxes on food products to ease the burden on consumers. Others are leaning on food retailers to keep their prices in check. In March, the French government negotiated an agreement with leading retailers to refrain from price rises if it is possible to do so.
Retailers have also come under scrutiny in Ireland and a number of other European countries. In the U.K., lawmakers have launched an investigation into the entire food supply chain “from farm to fork.”
“Yesterday I had the food producers into Downing Street, and we’ve also been talking to the supermarkets, to the farmers, looking at every element of the supply chain and what we can do to pass on some of the reduction in costs that are coming through to consumers as fast as possible,” U.K. Treasury Chief Jeremy Hunt said during The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London.
The government’s Competition and Markets Authority last week said it would take a closer look at retailers.
“Given ongoing concerns about high prices, we are stepping up our work in the grocery sector to help ensure competition is working well,” said Sarah Cardell, who heads the CMA.
Some economists expect that added scrutiny to yield concrete results, assuming retailers won’t want to tarnish their image and will lean on their suppliers to keep prices down.
“With supermarkets now more heavily under the political spotlight, we think it more likely that price momentum in the food basket slows,” said Sanjay Raja, an economist at Deutsche Bank.
It isn’t entirely clear why food prices have risen so fast for so long. In world commodity markets, which set the prices received by farmers, food prices have been falling since April 2022. But raw commodity costs are just one part of the final price. Consumers are also paying for processing, packaging, transport and distribution, and the size of the gap between the farm and the dining table is unusually wide.
The BOE’s Bailey thinks one reason for the bank having misjudged food prices is that food producers entered into longer-term but relatively expensive contracts with fertilizer, energy and other suppliers around the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in their eagerness to guarantee availability at a time of uncertainty.
But as the pressures being placed on retailers suggest, some policy makers suspect that an increase in profit margins may also have played a role. Speaking to lawmakers, Bailey was wary of placing any blame on food suppliers.
“It’s a story about rebuilding margins that were squeezed in the early part of last year,” he said.
From faulty family villa to modern beach house.
What goes up, must come down. But not necessarily this fast. Canadian marijuana stocks that posted staggering gains on Wednesday fell just as fast Thursday, while U.S. multistate operators, or MSOs, were dragged down, but fared a bit better. Tilray stock (ticker: TLRY) fell 49.7% Thursday, erasing all its gains from the prior trading day. Aphria stock (APHA) closed down …
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