Beware the 'Doomjobbing' Trend: Why Mass Applying Could Hurt Your Job Search

Aussies are being warned against jumping on a new work trend gaining momentum among job seekers and inundating workplaces. It's called 'doomjobbing', a sort of portmanteau of 'doomscrolling' and 'job hunting'.

Doomjobbing involves job seekers endlessly scrolling through job boards and then applying for roles en masse. There's often little thought or tailoring involved, with job seekers instead taking a scattergun approach to applying for roles.

Lauren Haxby, practice director at recruitment agency Robert Half, told Yahoo Finance she's seen a spike in the trend over the last two years as the jobs market has gotten more competitive and it has become easier to apply for jobs online with generative AI.

"It's never been easier to apply for jobs than it is these days. Everybody's got a smartphone with an app, everybody's scrolling on LinkedIn, and a lot of job advertisements have what they call quick apply, so it's essentially two or three clicks and you can apply for a role," Haxby said.

"What it's taken out of it is candidates really tailoring their CV specifically to each individual job opportunity and company. They're just scrolling and clicking, and scrolling and applying, and essentially applying for 10 or 20 jobs in the space of 5 or 10 minutes."

A Robert Half survey of 500 Aussie hiring managers found 82 per cent had seen a rise in overqualified applicants, which it said signalled a growing "apply-to-everything" approach among job seekers.

It's not only Aussies who are guilty of doomjobbing, with a report from employment website Monster finding 48 per cent of candidates had applied without reading an entire job description, with 32 per cent spending one minute or less reviewing a posting before hitting apply.

While the approach may seem efficient and tempting at a time when job seekers often receive no responses to job applications, Haxby warned that it could backfire.

"My biggest advice is to not doomjob because you're just throwing the same generic CV at every opportunity and you're limiting your chance to have a conversation with somebody and get in front of somebody," she said.