Somewhere in Britain this morning, a young man with a first-class degree and exactly 400 unanswered applications is probably staring at his inbox. Sending off CVs used to feel like casting wishes into a well. Now it feels more like shouting into an abyss. The abyss does not reply.
Enter the new employment tsar, a figure appointed to diagnose this very malaise. Her diagnosis: the system is broken, opaque, and frankly, rude. She wants legislation that would force employers to acknowledge every application, and explain why they said no. A fair chance, she calls it. A courtesy, I would call it. But we live in an age where courtesy has been outsourced to algorithms.
The numbers are staggering. A survey suggests the average graduate now fires off over 100 applications before landing a single interview. Four hundred is not uncommon. It is a number that speaks to a peculiar kind of modern hopelessness. You are not being rejected; you are being ignored. There is a difference. Rejection, at least, is a conclusion. Silence is a slow drowning.
Why are employers so silent? Some blame the sheer volume of applications. Others blame applicant tracking systems that filter out perfectly good people for reasons no human understands. I once heard of a candidate rejected because his CV used a serif font. A serif font. The software did not like it. That is not a hiring process. That is a lottery machine.
But the cultural shift here is deeper. We have created a labour market where visibility is everything. If you do not have a personal brand, a LinkedIn profile polished like a cathedral floor, and a referral from someone’s brother’s cousin, you might as well be invisible. The human cost is not just on the economy. It is on confidence, on mental health, on the belief that hard work still matters. I have spoken to graduates who describe sending off applications as ‘ghosting themselves’. They feel erased.
The tsar’s proposal is practical but it also feels quixotic. Can you legislate decency? You can force a company to send a rejection email. But you cannot force it to read your cover letter with humanity. Still, something must change. The current system is not just inefficient. It is cruel.
On the street, the mood is grimly pragmatic. In a pub in Hackney, a young woman told me she had applied for roles in three different sectors. ‘I have no idea what I want to do anymore,’ she said. ‘I just want someone to write back.’ That is the bar now. A reply. Not a job. A reply.
Perhaps the legislation will pass. Perhaps it will nudge companies towards a more human process. But the deeper problem is not about legislation. It is about scale. When a single corporate job can attract 500 applicants, most of them qualified, most of them desperate, the system breaks under its own weight. The employment tsar cannot fix that. But she can remind us that behind every application, there is a person. And that person deserves an answer.
In the meantime, I hope that young man with 400 unanswered applications keeps going. Not because the system will fix itself, but because he deserves better than silence. And maybe, just maybe, application number 401 will get the reply he has been waiting for.
