If you are a job-seeker you will be familiar with this scenario: week after week of sending in job applications, you don’t hear back from employers. You might have a few automatic emails, courteously reminding you that you should not expect to get any feedback, or even a rejection from the employer. You are not alone: according to Stepstone, one of the main job boards in Belgium, less than 1 in 4 job-seekers receive a response regarding their application, despite 85% of them finding themselves to be a good fit for the job. Belgium fared better than France, where only 15% of applicants got a reply, but significantly worse than the Netherlands (35%) and Germany (52%).

In this extremely competitive age this dynamic leaves job-seekers at loss. Having no feedback means that you do not know whether you were directly rejected, made it into a first shortlist and were dropped out of the interview stage, or if the job was not filled by anyone. Considering that it took an average of 18 applications to get an interview, and that it took on average 3 interviews to get a job, this can be quite a frustrating process. The job funnel gets very narrow very fast: around one in twenty got an interview and less than 2% received a job offer.

This could be either that the gap between employer and applicants’ understanding of the right profile for the job is huge, or that the job market is a buyer’s market and so many people are looking for jobs that the competition is huge. The truth probably lies within a bit of both. More feedback would certainly help job-seekers to better understand why they are not a good fit and improve their skills to be more successful in future applications. As Eva Ba, product manager at Stepstone says: «We encourage customers to put themselves in a job-seeker’s shoes. That way we help them being more transparent in the recruitment process & providing feedback to candidates systematically.  We even facilitate personalized feedback in our StepStone application management tool. Companies should rethink the full application experience to be simple and accessible. »

So if you are hiring, remember, don’t make applicants input the same information as the CV you requested in an online form, prepare an automatic reply that will clearly state what the candidates can expect from the selection procedure, and if you can, provide some valuable feedback at least to those that came close.

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High demand for project managers, foremen and electricians

StepStone analysed the advertisements for all Belgian online job sites over the past two years. They examined the advertisements of the 20 construction companies which most frequently publish job advertisements. From the 8,948 job postings examined, the following profiles emerged as the most in demand:

Almost a third of the advertisements examined requested one of these five profiles. It is not entirely surprising that companies are looking for skilled employees who possess either managerial qualities or technical knowledge. Moreover, the top five remained stable over the past two years.

Demand for workers in the construction sector continues to increase

In general, the job-site also notes that the number of advertisements posted by the construction sector is also increasing. This is what transpired from a second analysis carried out by StepStone based on data from all Belgian job websites via the aggregation tool Index. When comparing the first three quarters of 2017 and 2018, we see a 14% growth in job advertisements. For the same period throughout 2017-2018, there was also an increase of 7% in the number of companies in the construction sector posting advertisements.

StepStone as official HR partner for BATIBOUW

To address this need and to connect employers with employees, StepStone has been selected as the official HR partner for BATIBOUW in 2019. Expect, among other things, a true “Jobwall” on which vacancies from the construction sector are displayed, as well as a specific Jobday at BATIBOUW.

Meet StepStone at BATIBOUW 2019 from Thursday 21 February through Sunday 3 March at Brussels Expo. Save the date & practical information can be found on the official website.

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