Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?
I thought I&#x27;d add a data point to this discussion.<p>I&#x27;m in the UK and the traditional dev&#x2F;tech job route was via something like JobServe, Indeed etc., where you see a role advertised via an employment agency and you send your CV hoping for a callback.<p>I&#x27;m in a stable contract so I&#x27;m not looking but two weeks ago, I was contacted by two agents, one day apart, both unrelated to one another, completely out of the blue.<p>The first agent was more like a headhunter-type in that he arranged to &quot;interview&quot; me the following day via Teams to drill into my background and skillset. It lasted about 40 mins. Now, I can say, hand on heart, that in all my 20+ years of work that has never happened. Ever. He didn&#x27;t have a role in mind, just that he wanted a few good candidates to pimp around to his contacts (CTO&#x27;s and such).<p>My experience in the UK has been that you apply for a role you find on JobServe, you phone and chase the agent, and you hope to get through the cattle market, not this US-style agent-works-for-me stuff.<p>The other agent had a role in mind but he also grilled me extensively. Again, never happened before... they usually ask you about the keywords they&#x27;re looking for and that&#x27;s it: call done in 2 mins. This call took over 30 mins.<p>I asked the first guy what was going on as his style was more like the US system where a recruitment agent will work for YOU, and try to get you a role somewhere, whereas the UK model (unless headhunted!) was very much that the agents worked for the companies in question and acted like a CV-buffer to filter out the crap.<p>One of the agents hinted that there are a lot of average candidates out there at the moment looking for a smaller number of roles so they are aggressively filtering them before handing over to the clients.<p>I suspect that there have been a bunch of rejected CV&#x27;s sent to the clients and they&#x27;re now wanting better candidates... either that or agencies are indeed swamped in average candidates (not pissing on them, but if you have avg candidates and good candidates, the avg ones will lose out).<p>Anyway, things are a bit weird in the UK at the moment so I thought I&#x27;d chime in.