The hiring market did not run out of people or jobs. It ran out of attention.
Easy apply, job-board syndication, and AI drafts turned every public req into a magnet. Employers celebrate “2,000 applicants” in a board deck and then ghost 1,980 of them. Candidates treat volume as strategy and spray the same resume at fifty tabs. Both leave exhausted and underinformed.
What employers feel
Inboxes and ATS queues that no recruiter can honestly read.
Time-to-screen balloons, so “urgent” reqs sit while the pile grows.
Quality feels worse even when absolute strong candidates exist, because signal is buried.
Leadership asks why fill rates fall while “interest” looks record high.
What candidates feel
Applying is infinite and replies are rare.
Strong fits look identical to spray-and-pray in a volume funnel.
Waiting weeks with no status update reads as disrespect.
The rational move becomes apply more, which feeds the spiral.
What actually changed
Distribution got free. Screening did not. Public postings that once drew dozens now draw hundreds or thousands. The old recruiter habit of “post and pray” became a denial-of-service attack on your own team.
Fix it this week
Cap public distribution. Not every role needs every board.
Add a hard screen that takes 10 minutes for the candidate and saves 10 hours for you. Work sample, knockout must-haves, or short structured form.
SLA the silence. Auto-close and notify after N days so people are not waiting forever.
Prioritize named sources. Referrals, communities, and school pipelines before the open ocean.