Let’s Fix Hiring

Last updated: March 4, 2025

Hiring has been a dumpster fire for at least 10 years, but widespread adoption of applicant tracking systems (ATS), coupled with the more recent emergence of AI tools, has made that broken process fail faster.

The result is countless auto-generated position descriptions (most with unrealistic requirements) and (increasingly) a blizzard of auto-generated applicant responses hoping to get past the ATS “candidate matching” filters. Worse, many candidates still spend hours manually “tailoring” resumes and job applications in usually fruitless attempts to get past this value-draining HR process so they can be considered by a human hiring manager.

How Did We Get Here?

Zooming out a bit, one could argue that hiring (and getting hired) has not been easy for at least 30 years, and that the process has become progressively less effective for all parties. A key driver of the downward spiral has been a combination of the internet creating worldwide reach for both hiring screeners and job candidates, which created an explosion in the volume of (allegedly) open positions that can be discovered and the ability for software tools (like ATS) to make defining bullshit job descriptions and bullshit candidate responses increasingly more “efficient.” Recent AI tools have put that dance into hyper-drive, but this core problem has been building for at least 25 years.