[timmaxw]

I think there's a dynamic where:

- Desirable job applicants get hired quickly, but people who can't get hired stay on the market

- People who can't get hired will keep applying to more and more jobs

- So every new job opening gets flooded with applications from people who couldn't get hired elsewhere

- Employers don't have time to read the flood of applications in detail, so they rely on cheap filters (keywords on resume, where they went to college, did they work at FANG, etc.)

- Which makes the process worse for everyone

What if there was some way to limit job seekers to e.g. 10 job applications per month, industrywide? Feels like that could cut down the noise and allow employers to consider each individual applicant more carefully.

(It would be hard to implement this limit, though. You could do it via data-sharing between Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, etc., but there are huge privacy concerns and it would run into the same sorts of issues as credit reports do.)

[ar_lan]

> What if there was some way to limit job seekers to e.g. 10 job applications per month, industrywide? Feels like that could cut down the noise and allow employers to consider each individual applicant more carefully.

Beyond the actual difficulty in doing this without a completely centralized hiring process, this feels incredibly immoral. People have families to feed.

[timmaxw]

> People have families to feed.

People would submit fewer applications, but each individual application would have a higher chance of success, because everyone else would _also_ be submitting fewer applications. The number of job openings is the same either way, so the same number of people get hired in the end, right?

[ar_lan]

I don't know? I'm mostly arguing against the industry-wide comment, and thinking from the perspective of someone who has been laid off.

I think individual companies should do whatever they want (within legal bounds), but such a big overhaul just seems ripe to screw people over.

[tuatoru]

repeat of my comment above: -

I sometimes think requiring people to telephone and navigate a voice system to get an application ID before they can apply might help.

Tiny barriers can have disproportionate effects.

[ufmace]

This, and a few more dynamics, including:

- The better applicants usually have several warm leads and often don't bother with high-effort application processes, since they have a pretty decent chance of getting hired wherever they apply, and they're also not bothering to apply for things they're wildly unqualified for

- The worse and more desperate applicants have the time and motivation to stick through the most bizarre and convoluted application process until they get kicked out, with no regard to how well they actually match the requirements

So thus, the more hoops you put into your process to try and stem the tide of the hoards of desperate unqualified applicants, the more you disproportionately screen out the highly qualified applicants who have better things to do and better opportunities to pursue.

[avidiax]

> So thus, the more hoops you put into your process to try and stem the tide of the hoards of desperate unqualified applicants, the more you disproportionately screen out the highly qualified applicants who have better things to do and better opportunities to pursue.

Exactly. Asking me to upload a resume, and then data entry all the facts from my resume into form fields, just so that a company can not even reject me, basically tells me that I will be expendable drone #88238875 if I get a job there.

I feel a little bad that sometimes the recruiter probably fills the form out for me if their process requires is, but at least they actually intend to follow up on me as a lead.

[bumby]

The shortcut around this problem is for companies to rely on networking/recommendations rather than a large net, but that comes with its own downsides.

[milesvp]

A video came across my feed recently talking about this in tech. Was talking about how the advice for getting into tech that worked really well 1+ years ago isn't as effective today. Basically, the idea was that tech was hiring so voraciously, that they couldn't keep up with hiring by relying on networking bringing in enough candidates, so they needed a lot more recruiting efforts to fill the pipeline. This meant, that just grinding leet code and applying was enough to significantly increase the odds of getting hired. Basically the proportion of random application hires to referral hires was high. Today, not so much. I'd expect to need to jump though a lot more hoops today (not that leet code studying isn't it's own major hoop) to get hired. And of course, this proportion will shift again with the next major tech hiring boom.

[sokoloff]

This is also how 80% of companies can believe they’re hiring mostly top-1% programmers.

No, you’re hiring top-1% of applicants, not top-1% of employees!

[BeFlatXIII]

All companies share a common pool of bottom 99% applicants.