Hiring today is like playing darts blindfolded

Do we even know what we’re aiming at?

Right now I’m on the “looking for work” side of the job market table, but I’ve been on the other side too. I’ve hired plenty of great people over the years and, yeah, the process hasn’t always been fun. So I have some sense of what HR and hiring managers are going through right now. Some sense, because I’ve heard that it’s really bad out there right now for everyone. Both sides of the hiring process are equally lost and equally frustrated with the entire process. Great candidates struggling find the right job for them and employers have jobs to fill and not able to find the right people for them.

Job seekers all know the drill. See an interesting job posting, do some research, tailor your resume and cover letter so they pass through the Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) (you hope), submit the application, and wait. And hope.

At the same time, hiring managers are swamped with thousands of applications for each posting. Applications where a lot of the applications aren’t even from real people. It was bad enough when I had a few hundred applications to go through; I can’t imagine thousands. I’m sure from the hiring side seeing hundreds of applications that make it through the first ATS sieve is daunting. Then to have to actually deal with them quickly. I remember getting more resumes than I could possible deal with in a few days, so I shut down the posting. It just wasn’t fair for people to take time to submit an application that I wouldn’t even read. Did miss some a stellar rockstar or three? Almost certainly.

So I don’t blame companies for using ATS software to help find a few good people to call for a first interview. If I were in their shoes, I would be using every tool I could lay my hands on to help separate the wheat from the chaff. At the same time, as a job seeker, it feels like every application is falling into the void. When I submit a resume and cover letter, I have no idea if it got through ATS to a human. Not getting that feedback, is a feature not a bug to keep bots from really throwing a wrench into the works. So I get it. You can’t tell us if the application got through, because that feedback would help the bots learn from their mistakes.

All the while, accidentally leaving a hyperlink to LinkedIn or your website portfolio, might tank a real person’s application*

* So I was told by the outplacement company I was paired with.

It seems like a no-win, damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation for everyone.

Sorry, did I just hit you with a dart?!?

I was thinking about the whole situation, and the best metaphor I came up with is that we’re all playing darts blindfolded. We’re pretty sure there is a dartboard somewhere in the room, but we’re not quite sure where. Did that resume hit the board at all? Is it in the wall? Did I accidentally hit the hiring manager instead? Are my ATS filters too narrow? Am I missing out on great candidates because the system didn’t like how they formatted their resume or cover letter and tossed them out even before hitting the filters?

And the advice (as a job seeker) I get is that networking is still the best—maybe only—way to get hired. Find a connection and try to get your resume in the “considering” pile. The thing is, this isn’t new advice; I’ve been getting the same advice for 20 years. It’s not wrong or bad advice, it’s just not particularly helpful either. It’s stressful reaching out to people, sometimes strangers or through a mutual connection, to hope you can get a chance to talk to the person doing the hiring.

I’m old enough to remember going from “crap I’m out of my good paper for cover letters and resumes” (remember buying “resume paper?”) then to emailing your resume and cover letter to then online job boards to now and whatever hiring hellscape this is. I wish I could claim I have a genius idea for fixing the mess of finding a job/hiring a person for a job.

But I don’t. Not at all.

What this post is getting at is applying for jobs through the myriad online applications isn’t just broken, it’s leaving us unprepared for the hiring problem that is barreling down on us like a steam train.

The problem?

The white collar job losses that AI will bring. Job losses that might make the mass tech layoffs look like a rounding error.

We’re not ready for the layoff tsunami that’s coming

For a while the internet made finding a job and hiring someone easier. It’s a lot easier than printing out resumes and cover letters and mailing them, that’s for sure. But something happened in the past 4–5 years that fundamentaly broke the system. Maybe it was the sheer number of people applying with massive tech layoffs. Maybe it was easy access to AI tools that let bots take over. Whatever it was, we all know the system is pretty broken. If we can’t handle number of people looking for work now, how can we handle the tsunami of layoffs coming as AI transforms white collar jobs in the next 2–3 years? Lots of people are talking about it. My friend David Armano hinted at it on LinkedIn and gave some sobering examples of “safe” work as a follow up. I read Saul Colt’s newsletter on AI devaluing humanity and had my own thoughts that led to this post. All of which point out that not only do we have little clue what AI will do that’s good, we have no idea wha it’s going to do to a lot of jobs that exist now.

I’ve seen posts looking at anything that’s basic data entry, even accounting, can be replaced by AI. A lot of paralegal and legal research work being done with AI and minimal supervision. And I don’t even want to think about creative industries.

So here we are. Lots of great folks—like me—looking for work and having little luck. Lots of folks finding themselves frustrated with the system—on both sides—and nowhere to turn for insight or path forward.

And I don’t see how it will get any better before it gets a whole lot worse.