Photo by Pavel Danilyuk.
The numbers are getting sillier. We’re hearing from folks who have sent out hundreds of applications and still haven’t landed their next role. Four hundred applications. Five hundred applications. Callbacks you can count on one hand, that is, assuming there are any to count at all.
We lived through the dotcom bust. We lived through the 2008 crisis. We aren’t strangers to tough hiring climates in tech. But a few things are different this time around. Chief among them, talent seems to have nothing to do with it. There’s something wildly discordant about watching colleagues who could kick your ass around the block several times over and not break a sweat rock a green “Open to Work” sash for months, sometimes years, on end.
It’s not that no one is hiring. Many of the organizations we talk to have plans to grow, some for the first time since 2022. And not adding people in anticipation of aspirational growth, but in support of existing and ongoing business needs. This should be good news. Hiring managers with newly approved and much-needed head count. Plus a sea of phenomenally talented folks looking for work.
But if you’re in this spot right now, either as a hiring manager, or as an applicant, you already know. The lived experience feels less like good news and more like swimming through a pool of jello. Made worse by robots standing outside the pool who just keep dumping in more gelatin packets. And because they are robots, the rate at which they are turning the water to jello far outpaces your ability to move through the water or even get out of the pool and power down the robots. A sort of terrifying, drowning feeling is what we hear from hiring managers. And from applicants.
It’s hard to chlorinate jello
You shouldn’t swim in jello. For one thing, it’s really hard to chlorinate. For another, there’s both buoyancy and density issues to consider. And finally, it just seems pretty inefficient overall.
Pretty inefficient overall is an accurate tagline for the single most tech-optimized hiring process that’s ever existed. Like, if you think about the sheer number of developers and designers who helped build the applicant tracking systems, manage the careers pages, cross-post roles across two-sided-marketplaces of economic advancement. And that’s the first wave of gelatin.
For the second wave, we add machine learning to pattern-match between your existing high-performing employees and your candidate pool. We pull in LLMs to build keyword soup job descriptions based on stolen postings. And we add to the mix, applicants using their own LLMs to generate resumés that align to the keyword soup.
Our most-optimized process includes job postings that no one wrote, no one has read, responded to with resumés that no one wrote, with AI coming in to whittle it all down to a list of ideal candidates where not a single person can explain how the system determines ideal.
We submit to you that however you define ideal, this ain’t it.
What do you do when the whole thing is suboptimal
The delightful thing about working with tech bosses is that they can spot a tech-busted process from a mile away. For some of them, spotting tech-bustage is the literal thing you hired them to do. So forgive them for seeing your robot-enabled applicant tracking chaos and simply opting-out of the entire thing. Sure, the roles can still get posted the same way. And sure, as an org, we can pat ourselves on the back for the 3000 applicants we’re getting per role. But at the end of the day, the hiring manager is trying to fill the open headcount. And, based on the past couple of years, they know that the longer open headcount stays open, the more likely some change in SLT focus is to disappear it. Don’t even get them started on their “hiring freeze, no backfill” scars from 2023.
Can you guess what happens next? If you’re a hiring manager who wants to close the role but finds the tech part to be slow and clunky and not correlated with success? We can.
They hire their friends. They hire former colleagues they enjoyed working with at their last job. They ask in discord and slacks if anyone knows anyone who would be good for the role. And sure, they miss out on candidates they don’t already know. And yes, there’s the whole issue of homogeneity. And, ok, maybe they can’t claim the referral bounty for their own roles. But those roles do close. And they close way faster than the optimized route with way less headache for the hiring manger. Which is its own kind of optimization.
The front door is fucked
As a candidate — whether you are out of work right now, or just looking to understand your options as the 11th round of layoffs rolls out within your org — this is bleak.
In many industries, the last 40 years have been the years of the resumé. It hasn’t been a perfect system, at all, and some groups have always had to deal with much more bullshit than others to make it in the front door. But the sell was always that, with enough grit and hustle and getting the details right on your cover letter and your action verbs and your fonts — you could get in the door and then impress them in the interview. As shitty as that experience was, it at least gave a sense of predictable return on effort. Whatever ability you had to swim in it has become almost irrelevant. Overnight.
The result of that for a lot of folks is, tbh, despair. Despair of ever getting work in your field again. Worry about making ends meet. Isolation, and the sense that your shelf-life is expiring. Deciding whether to move back home as adults, if you even have that option. This general drowning sense of lacking any agency except to try to guess what will please the next applicant tracking system, and whether keyword stuffing is still a good strategy, or now a bad strategy, and whether anyone reads cover letters, and how much of a salary hit or seniority hit can you reasonably take if anyone will ever actually reply to your fucking application in the first place.
Bleak.
If you know someone in the bleakness, or if you’re in it yourself, the thing we want to say is that the front door is fucked. The shit you’ve been dealing with isn’t a commentary on you, or your grit, or your worth, or your hustle. It’s structural fuckery. Recruiting is a feminized role in many industries and just like other feminized roles — customer success, HR, admin assistants — companies rush to replace it with half-baked AI sludge because they fundamentally undervalue that work. Sure, we can all hope that this sludge is short lived. But for the rest of 2026, you should assume that the front door is well and truly fucked. And that isn’t a message of despair, it’s a message of hope.
Everybody out of the pool
Once you accept that the front door is pointless, you get so much time back. Yeah, you still need a gig, we get it. But what if, instead of applying all your creativity and energy to the attempt to pass some invisible set of hurdles, or to writing exactly the right tone of follow up email when an interviewer ghosts you, what if instead of all that you just abandon the front door entirely and find another way?
That other way, by the way, is human connection.
OMG stop. Don’t roll your eyes. You hate networking. It’s so transactional and fake. It’s all small talk and you hate small talk. Yes yes yes. We hate it, too. That’s not what we mean. We mean that if the Applicant Tracking System Jello isn’t where the hiring managers are any more, then you should start spending time elsewhere.
Connection can look like lots of things. It can look like going back to the monthly meetups you used to attend. You haven’t felt like going lately because you don’t want to be the only one there who’s job hunting. But you won’t be. It can also look like building a new thing — don’t over-architect it, it’s fine to make it a one-off. You can do an out-of-work librarians picnic. You can do a current-and-former-vfx-artists bowling night. It can be a discord instance or a mailing list or a parent-and-baby coffee shop meet up. Not capital-N, sweaty-business-card, only paying attention until I know if you’re useful, networking. Just connection.
There are a few reasons to do this. First, is because you need it. Work is, for all its bullshit, a site of connection for a lot of people, and not having colleagues can be really isolating. You will go weird if you are too deeply on your own, and your spouse/partner loves you but they already love your weird so you’ve gotta be around other people.
Second is because these things are new inputs. New conversations, new perspectives. Talking as humans without the power bullshit of trying to impress an interviewer is important. Someone may say something that causes you to rethink what you’re after, or consider a new direction. You may hear yourself say something that surprises you. You may find you have a friend in common with the stranger you’re talking to, and that friend might be a connection that matters in your current search, and now you have an organic reason to reach out.
And yes, fucking third is that you might meet someone in a position to connect you with a role. Remember that if the front door is fucked for you, it’s fucked for hiring managers, too. And every room at every organization has multiple ways in. You can’t go into every conversation shaking people down for roles, but you can come in as the cool and creative and moderately weird person you are, and you may end up meeting people who are weirded-in. It’s not a guarantee but, we hasten to mention, neither is the front door. At least this approach could lead to a good conversation.
And if you’re the hiring manger in this story, maybe you have an exceptionally great person for every single open role based solely on your existing relationships. But our put to you is that however much you loved the squad at your last role, your current org probably has a set of needs that weren’t well-covered there. By all means, speak people’s names into rooms. Sing their praises. Refer great people until the cows come home. But also, meet new people. Mentor folks who are trying to establish or re-establish their footing. Grow your own network. And if you spot someone stuck swimming in jello, help them out.
— Melissa & Johnathan
