Candidate discovery is absolutely miserable right now. For a lot of people standing out is their resume and their LinkedIn page and the processes that exist just plain aren't getting the right eyes on those.

If you're getting recruiters continually its probably less about your qualification (not to downplay them, I'm sure they're lovely) and more about being on a handful of company's candidate and talent banks.

Everyone hates resumes, and being involved in any process a company can pay to bypass them is a huge advantage.

You can also tell how garbage a pipeline ATS screening and other such shit is by the sheer number of positions you see that are advertised for four to six weeks, go off-market only to re-appear 2-3 months later.

You know what's even more exhausting for an employer than having to invest energy into the top of your hiring funnel? Having to redo it every few months because an ATS filtered much of the cream off the top and sent you keyword stuffers to choose between.

Those are the "visa applicants ghost jobs".

Yes, and also the "we're not actually hiring, but we're leaving the listing up anyway incase we get an application from some rockstar/unicorn/whatever candidate" ghost jobs

I'm not even seeing them taken down for a few weeks. I've been seeing the same job postings for years now from companies who don't even reply.

Have to be honest, I do sometimes wonder how many of those might be cases of literal liars/scammers getting the roles thanks to heavily puffed up CVs and lots of AI usage, only for said companies to end up needing to lay them off again when they realise their claimed skills don't match reality.

I feel like someone has to be getting past these systems, and I get the feeling it's not the people these companies want to be hiring.

And some of the frustration there is I suspect then that some of those companies don't want to then return to their final round participants to see if they're still available because they're hit with a duality of "we don't want to admit we passed you over for a BS artist" and "well, if they haven't found something yet, were they really a final round person for us?" (not saying that's a valid perspective or not, but I could absolutely see it happening).

I think there's just an plain faulty assumption that hiring is optimized for best candidate in lowest time for the optimal work done delta improvement.

Hiring is a process with many different motives. Like:

- Signaling company growth

- Appeasing overworked employees that something is being done

- Signaling that you or your team is important by gatekeepimg the role

- Signaling that you are important by participating or contributing to the hiring process

- Endlessly window shopping candidates simply because finding the perfect one is fun

There's a simple fact that if no one is pressuring hiring to pick someone sooner, there is simply no motivation to. And hiring is everyone involved. Managers, engineers, c suite, anyone with a veto in the process of a candidate. A single kink in the pipe can drag on the process forever. Even if engineering is slammed, if the recruiter screen or even the final CEO interview doesn't interalize that, the process is borked.

Now the real question is where are the hiring platforms that optimize for these weird motivation. I bet a platform where you swipe candidates for fun and encourage the whole team bikeshed screener quizzes would do gangbusters. Straight up make it a company tinder where unless recruiting, engineer, and CEO all swipe right on a candidate its a match! (Barf)