I was just thinking the other day about writing exactly this post. I've been many times on the hiring side as the interviewer, and now also am on the employee side. On both sides, the process looks extremely broken and extremely frustrating. People in the system sometimes help to get it from "screaming eldritch horror" level to "root canal every day for a month" level but I'd still easily nominate this as the worst problem in the industry, without even a shred of a solution surfacing so far.

We are wasting an enormous amounts of money and effort. I know that employers spend month to look for a suitable candidate, and I know there are thousands of qualified candidates - myself included - spending months in doing process dances that frequently lead nowhere despite there being thousands of jobs matching them and being unfulfilled. And this is not a temporary phenomenon - this is going on for years and decades, without any shred of a solution.

In fact, it's probably getting worse - with the industry growing, the amount of jobs you have to sort through to get some prospects is humongous. You have to reduce the amount of effort you spend to each position. Which in turn prompts the employer to erect more filters because they are afraid of low-effort submissions. And the high-effort submissions are lost in those filters so often that it becomes useless to do anything but low-effort. I mean, how many thoughtful, detailed, well-researched, specific to a position, cover letters can you write in a day? Now many you are willing to, when you know probably nobody would even read it because cheap AI would just scan it for keywords anyway? So, the cost and the length of the process is rising. I really hope somebody somewhere has some ideas on how to fix it...