How one-click job listings overtook the process — and slowed down tech hiring

There’s no broad consensus that the experience of looking for tech work in this current period is objectively different from that of the past. 

But the formal and anecdotal evidence seems to be piling up.

When I say “tech work” I mean roles associated with building, selling and supporting products based on computer software and hardware. That could mean software engineering, product management, customer success and the constellation of other roles supporting such efforts.

By “this time period,” I mean the post-pandemic, between-recessions, pre-election, high interest rate, layoff-heavy, early generative AI environment we inhabit in this second half of 2024. 

Recently the Wall Street Journal reported that tech workers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are discovering a distinct lack of enthusiasm about their availability for new roles. It doesn’t look the same as it did in the past, workers say 

I felt this personally. I’m a tech product manager who has been seeking new employment since being laid off by a large tech company last year.

“I kind of know the boom-bust cycle,” Chris Volz, who was laid off last year, told the publication. “This time felt very, very different.”

Many of us have experienced what is described in the article: Networks one usually falls back on have no opportunities and companies are indifferent to submitted applications. The layoff drumbeat continues and the demand for narrow and deeply technical skills in AI becomes more pronounced. 

This feels like an inflection point.

Remote work floods the market with applicants, and it’s hard to be seen

Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel Corporation, coined the term “inflection point” as a business concept in the 1990s. Formally it refers to any major change taking place in the competitive environment that requires a fundamental change in business strategy. 

Normally in business, we may think of inflection points as affecting strategy and execution at a global enterprise level, but their impacts can be felt to the bottom. Like former steelworkers crowding into a union hall in the 1970s, individuals seeking work in such an altered environment may find only continued unemployment by pursuing job-hunting strategies that were previously productive and fruitful. 

An example of this is the seemingly changing utility of LinkedIn as a discovery service and matching marketplace for labor and employers. To continuously improve the quality of its offering, LinkedIn has worked to reduce friction for those who wish to offer jobs in their marketplace, and those who wish to apply for them.

To a very great extent, it has succeeded. But the world in which these improvements were once envisioned is not the world in which they are now instantiated. 

Remote work has flattened the boundaries between once localized labor markets and globalized the employment marketplace. Third-party tools built on well-intended APIs enable simultaneous AI-tailored applications to be sent to literally thousands of listed opportunities with the push of a single button. 

Such friction-reduced globalization has resulted in a skyrocketing quantity of applications recruiters now receive for opportunities posted on Linkedin even as the number of actual opportunities available seems to have significantly diminished. 

Recruiters are swamped with hundreds or thousands of shotgunned applications for opportunities where only a few were expected. Many of these come from applicants lacking relevant skills or experience. 

The natural next step for recruiters is to implement and tighten helpfully-provided friction-reducing automated filters, reducing the number of applications seen by a human to a vanishingly small subset most perfectly matching the defined requirements.

In this highly pressurized environment randomly applying for any position feels a lot like gambling at a casino. In the same way you can play every hand of blackjack perfectly and still lose all your money to the house, even the most well-formed of LinkedIn applications, with perfectly relevant keywords and a refined and filter-friendly resume, can be lost in the immense volume of applications and the defenses erected against them.

Meetups, community building may start improving the hiring landscape

Friends and former co-workers of mine on both coasts have relied heavily upon LinkedIn as a venue for job seeking for literally decades. 

Now, they tell me stories about how they have been applying more or less carefully for tens or hundreds of opportunities over many months with only scarce feedback and little to no resulting prospect of future employment. This experience seems widely shared, although admittedly the data suggesting this is still substantially anecdotal

In any case, the inflected reality seems to be that crowding into the LinkedIn hiring hall as a default strategy for seeking employment is much less effective for tech workers now than it once was. At some point, it becomes time to admit what you are doing is no longer working.

The most obvious of alternate strategies is to network with the hope of meeting hiring managers or people who know them. In pre-pandemic times, formal and informal opportunities for such interactions abounded in after-work meetups and social activities. 

In some locations, including Philadelphia, a revitalizing set of meetups does present opportunities. But the hollowing of physically present workplace communities by the pandemic threat of illness and resulting work-from-home realities has severely reduced these events and the numbers of people who attend them. 

Attending such events is a good idea for all sorts of reasons, but their effectiveness as a job-seeking solution cannot be relied on.

The reality is that for tech workers today there appears to be no reliable way to seek and find new employment. 

But there is evidence we may be at an inflection point, where significant change in the volume and type of work available is occurring. Coupled with changes in technology and environment, previously trusted avenues such as a heavy reliance on LinkedIn may now yield only frustration. 

As individuals, we cannot do much to change this situation. 

As a community, promoting and attending meetups and social networking gatherings helps to provide much-needed opportunities for job seekers in our community to grow their social graphs and forge connections to hiring managers with real needs now or in the future.