Employers were exploiting this in order to over-look the issue of
on-the-job training for people out of work.
Since 2003 I have seen figures of between 36 and 5,000 quoted for the
number of people applying for the same job,
every time one is advertised publicly, in engineering and technology.
Figures appear for the number of people applying for the same job only on extremely rare occasions and with little substantiation – as if, in fact, the business community knows that it has some dirty “secret” that it wants to avoid discussing.