[nerdponx]

Emergent? Hardly. Employers love it this way. I'm not saying there's a centrally-coordinated conspiracy at play, but there's certainly very little incentive for any individual employer to "defect" from the current equilibrium.

[noirbot]

Do they? Everyone I know in recruiting is stressed out of their minds wading through thousands of applications, meanwhile it's taking 6+ months to even get a double-digit amount of interviews with vaguely qualified candidates for important roles that we were offering pretty good salaries for.

I really don't get the feeling, internally or externally, that most companies are happy with the current situation either. What sort of "defection" do you think they could be doing that would make things better? I interviewed recently with a company that, in my mind, did everything right in terms of an easy and honest interview process, upfront salary and benefits info, all that. I barely got time with the recruiter for it because they had 20+ screens that day because they were swamped with applicants.

[ryandrake]

It sounds kind of like the online dating dynamic: One side spams requests into the void, knowing they're going to get MAYBE a 0.1% response rate, and the other side is inundated with requests and are overwhelmed with the task of sorting through the 99.9% unacceptable ones. Everyone is looking for drinkable water. Candidates are in a desert with no water in sight and employers are in a swamp full of water--none of it drinkable.