Mar 1 JDN 2461101

This has been my “career” for the last two years:

I search through thousands of job postings, which, despite various filters and tags on my searches, almost none of which are actually good fits for me—in part because the search engines simply do not contain a great deal of information that would be vital, like “LGBT friendly”, “supportive of neurodivergent employees”, or “good at accommodating disabilities”. Instead it’s all sorted by “job title”, which at this point is clearly an arms race of search-engine optimization, because I keep getting listings called “tutor” which are actually some sort of interactive training of yet another large language model nobody actually needs. (Actual tutoring of actual human students often is a good fit for me—though it pays much better if you’re freelance than if you work for a company, because the companies take a huge cut of what the customers pay.)

But, after an hour or two of searching, I find a few that seem like they might be worth applying to. They’re never a perfect fit, but beggars can’t be choosers, so I decide I’ll go ahead and apply to them.

They ask for a resume. No problem. Perfectly sensible, I have one handy; maybe I’ll tweak it a bit, but if it’s an industry I often apply to, I may already have a tweaked version ready to go.

They ask for a cover letter. Okay, I guess. There usually isn’t much I can really say there that isn’t already in my resume, but occasionally there’s something worth adding, and it’s only maybe half an hour of work to update an existing cover letter for a new application.

Then, they ask me to input my work history in their proprietary format on their website. WHAT!? WHY!? I just gave you a resume! You aren’t even willing to read it? You want to be able to automate the reading of my resume, so I have to enter into your proprietary database? But okay, fine; beggars can’t be choosers, I remind myself. So I enter everything that’s in my resume again.

Then, they ask me what salary I want. I know this game. You’re trying to make me reveal my preference in this bargaining game so you can gain bargaining power. So I look up what kind of salaries companies like them usually offer for jobs like this, and then I hike it up a bit as the opening bid in a negotiation.

Then, they ask me to fill out some questions that are supposed to assess… something. Some kind of personality test, or “culture fit”, or something similarly fuzzy. I try to interpolate my answers between my genuine feelings and the kind of hyper-obedient corporate drone they’re probably looking for, because I’m not an idiot who would answer honestly (I’m not that autistic), butI wouldn’t actually want to work for anyone who required the very topmost corporate-drone answers.

And then, what happens?

Absolutely nothing.

No response. Weeks pass. At some point, I have to assume that they’ve filled the position or closed it, or maybe that the vacancy was never real at all and they posted it for some other reason—likely to give some sense of searching when they in fact already have someone in mind. (Apparently over a third of online job postings are fake.)

I have done this process over two hundred times.

And in doing so, I have chipped off pieces of my soul. I feel like a shell of the person I was. And I have absolutely nothing to show for it all.

I am not even unusual in this regard: Recruiters often complain that they are swamped because they get 200 applicants per posting—but that means, mathematically, that an average job-seeker must apply to 200 postings before they can expect to get hired. (And which is more work, do you think: Writing a cover letter, or reading one?)

How could we make this better?

There are a lot of problems to fix here, but I have one very simple intervention that would only slightly inconvenience recruiters, while making life dramatically better for applicants. Here goes:

Require them to show you the resume of the person they actually hired.

There should be a time window: Maybe 30 days after you applied; or if it’s a position like in academia where they don’t do interviews for a long time after the application deadline, within 7 days of them starting interviews.

Anonymize the resume appropriately, of course; no photos, no names, no contact information. We don’t want the new hire to get harassed by their competitors. (And this takes, what, 5 minutes to do?)

But having to send that resume solves several problems simultaneously:

1. It means they have to actually respond—they cannot ghost you. It can be a two-line form letter email with a one-page attachment that’s the same for all 200 applicants—but they have to send you something.
2. It means they have to actually hire someone—the posting cannot be completely fake. If they are for some reason unable to fill the vacancy and have to close it, they should have to tell you that, and give a reason—and that reason should be legally binding such that if you ever find out it’s not true, you can sue them.
3. It means that person had to actually apply—they couldn’t have been someone’s nephew who was automatically given the job and the posting was only made to make it look like there was a hiring process. At the very least, said nephew had to actually cough up a resume like the rest of us.
4. It allows you to compare qualifications—you can see how you stack up against the new hire. If they are genuinely far more qualified? Well, fair enough; perhaps this job was a stretch for you, or it’s a very rough market. If they are about as qualified, or better in some ways, worse in others? Well, you surely were to apply, but you can’t win ’em all. But if they are far less qualified? You now have the basis for a lawsuit, because that looks like nepotism at best and discrimination at worst—and they had to give you that evidence, in writing, in a timely fashion.

The penalty for failing to comply with this regulation could be a small fine, perhaps $100—per applicant. The more people you ghost, the more you have to pay up.

This is clearly a very small amount of extra effort for the recruiters. They already have the resume—hopefully—and all they need to do is anonymize it, grab a standard form letter rejection email, BCC all the applicants to this position (which are—again, hopefully—already stored in one place in the company’s database), attach the anonymized resume, and click Send. We’re talking 15 minutes of work here, regardless of the number of applicants. In fact, it could probably be automated so as to require almost zero marginal effort for each new job: Just check the box next to the name of the person who was hired in the applicant tracking system, and it does the rest. (And if the person you hired wasn’t in the applicant tracking system? That sounds like a you problem, because you’re clearly not treating the other applicants fairly.)