In July 2024, Magdalena Robinson was laid off from her job as a vice president of talent acquisition at a media agency. The news came as a shock by all accounts she was doing well but she saw a silver lining: Maybe it was finally time for a career break. She took the rest of the year off, soaking in the extra time with her husband and teenage daughter. Then she started applying for jobs in January. Eleven months and 300 applications later, she still doesn’t have a single offer. “I don’t know what’s going on right now,” she tells me. She has a great resume lined with reputable employers and a steady ascension to bigger titles. And as a recruiting executive, she thought she knew how to navigate the modern job market. Was it her age? Her experience? Some black hole sucking up all her applications before they ever reached a human being? “I think about what I’ve done in my professional life,” she says. “And I’m like, am I that unemployable?” It’s a question I’ve heard from dozens of professional jobseekers I’ve spoken to over the last two years. They’re accomplished and articulate and seem like exactly the kind of candidates companies say they want. Why are so many of them struggling in an economy with low unemployment? One explanation is the unusual nature of the current market. Many businesses stopped hiring after overstaffing in the pandemic, leaving too few openings to go around especially in white-collar, middle-manager roles. But a hiring slowdown alone isn’t enough to capture just how hellish the white-collar job search has become. Something deeper is going on. At the heart of it is Robinson’s application count: 300. A few years ago, a number like that would have floored me. Now, it’s utterly ordinary. Two other people I spoke to recently told me they’ve applied to more than a thousand roles. To see how bad it’s gotten, I asked Greenhouse, one of the leading providers of hiring software, to take a look at their data. Last quarter, the average job opening received 242 applications nearly triple the amount in 2017, when the unemployment rate was at a comparable level. That means that when someone submits a resume today, they have the abysmally low 0. 4% chance of actually getting the job. (That’s just for the average job. At the big-name employers, the odds are even worse.) Applying to a job in 2025 really is the statistical equivalent of hurling your resume into a black hole. You’d think employers would be loving this, getting to pick from such a big pool of candidates. But they’re just as frustrated. Recruiters are swamped with resumes, many from people who aren’t remotely qualified for the roles they’re hiring, and they’re completely unequipped to sort through the deluge. The result is something far more dangerous than a hiring slump. Gridlocked to the point of paralysis, the job market isn’t working. “Nobody’s happy with the current situation,” says Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait. “Something broke in the technology.” This isn’t the first time a market’s grown so overcrowded it stopped functioning. Economists even have a name for it: congestion. Big markets hold the promise of creating better matches, but they also tend to devolve into total chaos. “Congestion is the bane of a lot of markets,” says Alvin Roth, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Stanford who’s helped design programs to better match students with schools, organ donors with patients, and hospitals with new doctors. “Successful marketplaces have to fight hard to defeat congestion.” Take what happened in the early days of the romantic equivalent of job sites, online dating. Gaining access to a seemingly infinite number of potential partners, men bombarded the inboxes of the hottest women. Overwhelmed, those women didn’t reply. So the men messaged even more women, sending generic “hey”s they could recycle over and over again. The women hated that even more. The result? A vicious cycle of spam and rejection. Few people found love. Over the last three decades, something similar has played out in the labor market. Before the internet, job seekers had to pore over the classifieds in newspapers, trek to Kinko’s to print out their resumes, and mail them off and then wait weeks or months to hear back. Job sites like Monster and CareerBuilder changed all that, centralizing job listings into one searchable forum and letting people apply on the spot. Every innovation since then from email job alerts to LinkedIn’s Easy Apply button made applying ever more seamless. That very convenience, though, also encouraged people to send out more applications. Recruiters tried to keep up with the influx, learning to skim resumes in mere seconds. On Greenhouse, the applications-to-recruiter ratio is now 500 to 1, four times what it was four years ago. The tipping point, Chait says, came when ChatGPT arrived just as companies slammed the brakes on hiring. Faced with fewer callbacks, candidates turned to AI to churn out more applications, customizing resumes and cover letters to each job at the click of a button. Some even deployed bots to mass-apply on their behalf. In a recent Greenhouse survey, 74% of candidates said they use AI in their job search. The surge in volume increased competition for each job even further, prompting people to cast wider nets and apply to roles they were less suited for. Recruiters, meanwhile, were left to manage the flood alone. And as companies shrank their HR teams in the white-collar downturn, the workload only grew. On Greenhouse, the applications-to-recruiter ratio is now 500 to 1, four times what it was four years ago. Stretched thin, recruiters resorted to emergency triage say, skimming only the first 100 resumes, or considering just the candidates with referrals. That’s come at the expense of missing out on so many qualified candidates. Which has led to a bizarre observation I’m hearing from more and more companies: They’re getting no shortage of eager applicants, but they’re still having a hard time finding good hires. “The forces that make it cheap to send more applications are working faster than the forces that allow you to quickly process many applications,” says Roth. “We’re deep into congestion.” Chait started seeing the warning signs in late 2022. But it was last year that he remembers thinking: “OK, this is really happening.” Suddenly the crisis was everywhere: in Greenhouse’s data, in its surveys of jobseekers, in conversations with customers. So he marshalled his staff to try every fix they could imagine. One of the first was a new website where candidates can manage their applications to Greenhouse’s clients. There, it introduced a feature called Dream Job, which lets people mark one application a month as a job they especially want. The idea is that recruiters don’t just want qualified applicants. They want to know amid the sea of people applying with a single click who’s actually serious enough that they’d likely accept an offer. Online daters might recognize the concept as the “rose” on Hinge or the “super like” on Tinder gestures borrowed from a landmark study in market design. Dream Job launched in June, and the early data is promising: Employers have been five times more likely to hire Dream Job applicants than standard ones. Human beings are still good at a lot of things machines aren’t. We’re sort of wired to figure out who we are like and who we should like. Alvin Roth, Nobel Prize-winning economist Other intermediaries of the job market are trying their own fixes. LinkedIn, for instance, introduced its own “rose,” called Top Choice, to its premium members (Top Choice candidates, the platform says, are 43% more likely to get a recruiter message). It also shows people whether they’re a high, medium, or low match for the roles they view (“try exploring other jobs,” it gently advises low-match candidates). And this year it’s been testing daily limits on Easy Apply submissions. While these measures might help on the margins, to me they feel like slapping band-aids on a severed limb. In the age of AI-generated mass applications, companies will never be able to keep up until they have tools that can evaluate candidates at scale and so far those tools have been lacking. Job seekers now widely assume employers are already using AI to reject them. In reality, many of the companies I’ve spoken to have been hesitant to adopt AI screening, fearing they’ll run afoul of regulations banning potentially discriminatory hiring practices. Their caution makes sense: Already, a group of job seekers has sued Workday, alleging its AI-powered technology disproportionately screens out older candidates. In May, a federal judge let the case move forward as a collective action, paving the way for more people to join the lawsuit. “We deny the allegations in the suit,” a Workday spokesperson wrote in an email. “Our products, both AI-enabled and not, are built to help our customers manage this increasing volume of applicants with a focus on human decision-making.” Greenhouse is taking a different approach. It’s testing a tool that, for every job opening, allows hiring managers to essentially teach the system the kind of candidates it’s looking for, ranking which attributes matter most. The company plans to roll it out to a broader set of customers next year. “We can help you do it more rapidly with an algorithm,” Chait says. “But it’s not like there’s a secret Greenhouse algorithm that’s going to tell you who to look at.” If that works, it could be an improvement on the current market, where so many qualified resumes go unseen. Still, it assumes hiring managers know what they’re looking for and that what they want is in fact what the company needs. Roth, who’s spent much of his career studying different labor markets, notes there’s still so much we don’t understand about how we decide who to hire especially the intuition behind those decisions that might be hard for software to replicate. “Human beings are still good at a lot of things machines aren’t,” he says. “We’re sort of wired to figure out who we are like and who we should like and who’s on our team and could be on our team.” Robinson, the recruiting executive, prided herself on that very intuition throughout her career. For her, a good hire doesn’t emerge from a mechanical formula of credentials it’s about recognizing the potential of who the candidate could become. “You can’t be so close-minded to say, ‘Oh, you have to check all the boxes,'” she says. Being on the other side of the table now, it’s the kind of potential she longs for someone to see in her. But every rejection has made it harder and harder to hold out that hope, and in this broken job market, she can’t afford to wait forever. For now, she’s taken a job at a grocery store so her daughter won’t have to quit figure skating. “It breaks my heart that I can’t provide what I was providing,” Robinson says. “I just want to work.” Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.
https://www.businessinsider.com/technology-broke-job-market-ats-recruiters-hiring-application-2025-11