I hope you'll address a few points:
1.Job hunting is dehumanizing: Most of the time you will receive no response to a carefully worded cover letter. There is no option to speak with a human, or point of contact. (I dub this /Throwing hope into the void and see what sticks/.)
2.Job hunting is primarily online. From searching job posts to application, the reach of an open position is literally world-wide.
3.Due to Covid, remote work is now in the zeitgeist, opening up remote work to many who otherwise wouldn't have considered it.
4.Digital tools for resume writing and bulk sending.
5.The stagnation of salaries, increased cost of living, and poor investment options has forced many into living paycheck to paycheck. In order to /get ahead/ the only option is to constantly seek new positions.
The deluge recruiters are feeling is merely the tip of a iceberg.
I see parallels between this comment’s points and online dating
Many job postings are far too open versus the reality of who they’d accept. If you’re expecting a deluge, then make sure you are highly transparent on how you’d vet or sift the initial applications. That doesn’t mean to introduce new “high bars” just to reduce the number, it means to be clear about the checklist you’d use to classify those who get to the next round.
Various people have told me over the years that you have to write the job ad broader or else you will get nothing but applicants that satisfy all requirements. By making it more vague about precisely what you want, you can then narrow it yourself afterwards based on the real job requirements. I don't think this is a good strategy personally, but I have been told this repeatedly.
The problem is that so many job advertisements have typically listed the nice-to-haves as requirements. So people have been trained over the years to apply if they have most of the requirements.
Not saying it is impossible but you need to be very explicit and realistic in the language of the advertisement.
That works for people like you or me who are good faith applicants and wouldn't want to waste anyone's time. But people like you or me aren't really the problem.
The real problem is spam. Of those 2,000 I bet at least 75% are just useless time wasters (no work authorisation, wrong TZ, complete mismatch in what was asked for, outright fraud, etc.) They're just shot-gunning everything. Much of this is probably bot'd.
Like most spam, you can't really lose by sending it: it's free to send and there is no global "time wasting shitdicks" blacklist to put these people on (many companies don't even keep internal list for this). So you can endlessly vomit in everyone's face and never suffer any consequences.
I want to see a site that makes it non-free to send an application and non-free to ghost an applicant.
A site where employers can find the worse candidates?
Are there hundreds of applications for every engineering role? Yes. But most of those applications don’t meet the minimum requirements. A senior position requiring 4yrs experience will see > 90% of its applications coming from new grads with zero experience. It’s mostly noise.
It should be noted that many companies don’t have any entry-level roles open. That’s not ideal, but new grads are arriving with minimal practical skills while the landscape of complexity continues to increase. Sure the top tier are amazing but they go to FANG to get rich on RSUs, or become a founder themselves.
There is probably an opportunity here for someone to provide a service offering advertisers a simple customisable form that includes some basic questions that needs to be completed prior to submission. It would have to be simple (e.g. no programming tests). Bonus points if the advertiser can then filter submissions based on various combinations (and possibly assigned weights) of answers.
e.g.
- Do you have a legal right to work in x
- Have you had y years experience in z
- Could you indicate which of the following you are familiar with
Obviously, all of these things are usually included in an application, but having them associated with applications in a standard format that can be used to filter or prioritise applicants could be very helpful I imagine.
This probably exists, but I'm not in the field and very rarely apply for jobs so I wouldn't know.
Joel Spolsky suggests the problem is you are probably in a market for lemons in Finding Great Developers
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...
Working within the staff’s professional networks is the way to avoid the deluge. As a consequence, you need to be a place people want to work and hire people who other people want to work with.
Otherwise, you hire staff that allows the organization to manage the deluge. Managing the deluge needs to be someone’s priority — not be a distraction from someone’s performance metrics. It’s the kind of thing that makes a place a place people want to work.
What I have seen is some minor resume CAPTCHA in the job description, like "answer 7 + 12 in your cover letter" or something similar.
I imagine that will filter out a good swath of robo-submitters as well as those with low attention to detail (but maybe not the chatGPT responders).
Anecdotally, if there is any extra step after submitting a resume I notice my response rate is much much higher. Whether an email to verify information in their ATS or a small test, just any secondary step.
I attribute it to so many people shotgunning resumes and this weeds them out, so I’m more likely to be noticed.
A survey with a few informational questions also probably works.