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Why do you say this? I mean, I wish it would, but why do you think someone is coming to save us?
I suppose that things could get worse than I could (or would want to) imagine before they get better, but at some point things get so pathological that they outright stop working. There are a lot of very powerful parties that have a strong interest in things actually working (both employers and employees alike) and I don't see a whole lot of strong beneficiaries of dysfunction that could resist such motion. It's just that the two major parties who have an interest in the system working well have a typically adversarial relationship, and the problem hasn't yet gotten big enough for them to set aside their differences.
But eventually it will.
It's really only dysfunctional for employees, who have to spend the effort applying to dozens or hundreds of jobs filled with broken interfaces and astrology quizzes. For employers everything's working fairly well, or at least it's not materially worse than it's ever been. It costs next to nothing for them to filter out more candidates, especially if the process is partially automated.
No, it's broken from both sides. Employees are presented with job listings that are mostly junk, either pure junk (no real job behind them) or inappropriate jobs without enough information to determine that. Employers get resumes which are crap or pure lies. Both sides employ filters, but the amount of junk is so high, the amount of information easily available so low, and the filter-makers so incompetent that the filters have low selectivity and sensitivity.
The basic problem is just that the market is too big.
I really don't see why employers would see that as a big problem. Filtering out junk is not expensive or hard. ATS exists, and this is one of the tasks HR uses to justify its existence. Big companies like being able to grab talent from all over the world.
Of course it is.
Yes, but it doesn't work very well. You've got a job. You post it somewhere. You get 10,000 applicants. 10 of them are good, the rest are bad. You need to cut that somehow using very cheap filters. Say you get your cheap filters to cut you to 100 applicants... but unfortunately while they've filtered out over 98% of the junk, they've also filtered out all the good applicants.
Grabbing talent from all over the world exposes them to junk from all over the world.
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As someone who has gotten a first-hand glimpse into certain hiring pipelines, I'm not at all convinced this is the case. Resume stuffing and spamming seems to be a serious issue, one that has even managed to waste some of my non-HR time, and while I didn't get to see what it was like before, it's difficult to imagine that GPT et al hasn't made it worse. I think hiring agents are turning to AI bots for a reason.
I can buy that things have gotten worse faster for job seekers, but I think that ultimately only delays the inevitable. Like any market, while the buyer and seller have a large adversarial component to their relationship, it's ultimate a cooperative exercise because they both want the deal to close. If one party is so disadvantaged that they begin to drop out, both parties lose.
But sure, that doesn't mean that whatever new equilibrium asserts itself has to be a good one. Perhaps the endgame really is AI agents screeching at each other, producing a barely functional market with a large, profiteering new middle man. Maybe that reality is already here, and I'm an old man who needs to get with the times.
I've considered feeding Claude an omnibus resume with all reasonably delineated units of experience on it, and asking to to pare that down for individual listings. But I'm honestly afraid that might be too honest for today's meta, and I'm nowhere near desperate enough for new employment for change that radical.
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