Pick Up The Pieces

Spend a day reading posts on LinkedIn, and assume for a moment the posts are written by real humans, not AI bots, and it’s clear that the unemployed and underemployed are spending serious time trying to determine ‘who the fuck to blame for what’s happening in the job market.’ 

That act is a near-daily ritual for me. Of course, immediately afterward, I spend ten minutes meditating to cleanse my spirit and mind of the bad vibes. 

Most fingers are pointing straight at LinkedIn – how ironic. The very place where the overwhelming majority of these types of social posts appear.

Three years ago, LinkedIn voluntarily underwent its initial transformation and became Facebook for corporate professionals. Then the second transformation. 

Now, LinkedIn’s new destiny seems to be turning into TikTok for corporate professionals. Of course, when they’re not entertaining you, they’re selling you. 

On a week-to-week basis, offers to sign up for LinkedIn Premium find you again and again and again. 

Undoubtedly, their days as the leading job board or platform connecting job seekers with talent acquisition professionals are over, and that’s happened intentionally. 

The revenue they can generate with paid ads tied to short-form videos beats anything they could get by staying committed to their original purpose. 

But, guess what? LinkedIn isn’t the biggest perpetrator muddying the job-hunting waters. 

It’s the leading job board. Welcome Indeed!

Let's Stop Blaming LinkedIn for Everything

Yes, many consider LinkedIn to be a job board. They’re wrong.

It’s always been a professional social networking platform. The place where job seekers could build a personal brand in front of talent acquisition professionals and others in similar professions. 

In the 2010s, many executives and aspiring executives alike dreamed of becoming true 'thought leaders.' Honestly, they still have this dream.

But most of them have deserted LinkedIn in favor of platforms like Substack, and what you have now are content creators more interested in rehashing ideas lifted from elsewhere, or perhaps they’re skilled at developing standard bullet-point pieces using well-written prompts. 

Increasingly, it’s a bunch of gobbledygook. Can we tell the truth here? 

Monster.com, Hotjobs.com, and Craigslist, which emerged in the mid-1990s, have more to do with the demise of newspapers as the primary sources for job postings, well before LinkedIn ever became a major factor. 

The same is true for Indeed. It was founded in 2004, and didn’t overtake Monster.com until the 2010s when it became the leading job board. 

In the 1970s and 1980s, newspapers earned nearly 25% of their annual revenue from job-related classified ads. While hard data remains somewhat tough to obtain, the peak for newspapers arrived around 2000, when Web 2.0 gained steam and help-wanted ad dollars began migrating to Monster.com and Hotjobs.com. 

At its peak in 2000, newspapers collectively took in close to $9 billion in annual revenues from these services. Twenty-five years later, they’re irrelevant.

The Consolidation Nobody Notices Until They’re Job Hunting

When frustrated job seekers aren’t busy reading pointless posts on LinkedIn about the five different ways to enhance their LinkedIn profile to gain the attention of recruiters, they’re applying for jobs on Indeed. 

Well, it’s not just Indeed. Most job seekers have resumes posted on half the major job boards. Which ones are you using?

• Glassdoor
• SimplyHired
• CareerBuilder
• FlexJobs
• ZipRecruiter
• ResumeBuilder

Sometime last year, I was surprised to discover that the bulk of the job boards we know and use are owned by the same two holding companies.

• Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd: Indeed, Glassdoor, SimplyHired 
• BOLD Holdings: CareerBuilder, FlexJobs, ResumeBuilder.com 

Does that explain why you feel like you're reviewing and applying for the same jobs? 

With all the job boards under the same ownership umbrella, we’re getting the illusion of choice without a real choice. Meaning you must recognize that, behind the scenes, they are sourcing job postings from the exact same sources, and they’re merely using a database to decide which sites to post the open jobs on. 

In essence, they’re playing a game of artificial selection. 

Mergers and acquisitions eliminate friction and competition, accelerating the need to elevate services and perform better. So, what if you feel like you’re seeing the same jobs over and over? 

“There’s no place else for you to look, so you’ll be back," becomes the attitude.

Drowning in Resumes from the Talent Pool

You’d be hard-pressed to find professionals or talent acquisition managers who would dispute one major reality — the job market sucks. 

Prominent job boards make it easy for job seekers to see open roles in locations where they don’t live, and it’s easy to apply. So they apply. 

Talent acquisition managers seem hesitant to post new roles with language indicating they are only considering local professionals, so they’re flooded with resumes from every corner of America. 

Meanwhile, they have no intention of covering relocation costs for candidates below the executive or leadership levels.  

Riddle me this! How does this help either side? 

So, job boards open the floodgates for resumes from everywhere. Hence, creating a situation where AI is now needed to review 900 resumes for one role, and there’s no evidence suggesting AI can thread the needle and find the best candidates. 

More importantly, there’s no evidence proving that a larger pool of candidates will result in a better hire. It’s wasted time, resources, and energy.

In fact, the use of AI is amplifying this flawed process. Job seekers can apply for more jobs than ever in minutes, with less effort than before. 

This often triples the number of resumes submitted for each role posted. The end result is more email messages thanking you for applying, telling you they have decided to pursue other candidates, and encouraging you to apply again.

Premium LinkedIn Memberships and Phantom Recruiters

I’m a seasoned corporate professional. I have been a job hunter in three different eras. 

• Pre-2000: Newspapers dominated (The New York Times, The Washington Post, and more) 
• 2001-2019: Job boards dominate + LinkedIn emerges 
• 2020-Present: LinkedIn and Indeed (twin pillars)

More candidates from more locations doesn't equal better hiring decisions. However, this proposition seems too good for most corporations to resist. 

Localization matters. 

This is the element that was removed when newspapers were usurped by job boards and professional social networking platforms. 

They have zero connection, linkage, and understanding of local markets. Their primary value has been automating pieces of the hiring process without adding tangible value. 

During the last days of newspapers as the central place for job seekers, you bought the Sunday edition of the newspaper for the classified job advertisements, and you applied for roles in your local markets. 

You can rightfully compare me to a fresh-faced member of Gen Z in the tail end of that era. Filled with energy and fresh knowledge. 

My one big mistake during that time period was not finding an internship to bolster the relevance of my school knowledge, so I had to compromise. My first job out of college ended up being an office assistant role rather than being an entry-level reporter or editorial assistant. 

Regardless, I started working less than two months after college graduation, and around eighteen months later, the nonprofit I joined would create a role for me as an editorial assistant and junior graphic designer. 

How many members of Gen Z can expect to land a role in less than two months now?

The emergence and rise of any new platform or technology should be termed the “Honeymoon Period.” 

Scrolling back, I learned that I made my first LinkedIn connection in March 2007. The first connection was the person who suggested joining it. 

Then I was new to the Bay Area, having relocated from Maryland, and I needed to land a new job fast. In three months, using a combination of LinkedIn, Monster, and HotJobs, I would land a role at McKesson Corporation, where I worked for the entire five years in the Bay Area.  

During the 2010s, I’d receive outreach from talent acquisition managers around 5-7 times per year via LinkedIn. Always legit. Most times, I didn’t bite. 

Let’s compare that to now. For the last 18 months, the job hunt has been real and straight-up grueling for me. 

The In-Mail messages about jobs are generally from people who are hard to trace, often from locations outside the U.S., and who share vague details and reasons for approaching you. 

Absolutely, none of these roles turned out to be legit. I stopped biting on these random messages six months ago. All of these are known problems. 

But LinkedIn has no real desire to address these problem. They’re too busy working hard to sell you on Premium membership. 

To be transparent, I did that for a year. It didn’t change my experience one iota. 

For a second, let’s forget LinkedIn. Forgot Indeed. Forget, you fill in the name. 

When are we likely to see something new emerge that’s goal is to fill the white space being left behind by LinkedIn and others? 

Job seekers and talent acquisition professionals both deserve something better.

The AI Hiring Era is Creating Noise, Not Clarity

Here’s the thing: one must step back every so often and think, is automation, digital, and speed achieving the best results?  

Job seekers can apply for more job opportunities than ever before, using a plethora of AI tools designed to facilitate speed.

In reality, with all of us using the same tools, similar prompts, it’s harder than ever to differentiate one resume from another, or one cover letter from another. 

Employers have more places than ever to post open job opportunities, and the AI tools needed to analyze resumes faster than ever, but still cannot tell you if the right candidates are coming through their doors, or just those who know how to use these AI tools best for this purpose. 

Maybe the best path forward utilizes three approaches:

• Localization. Go back to limiting roles to the region where the job will be performed. Plenty of talent exists in every region. Executive search should be the sole exception. 
• Digital and automation. Speed and efficiency haven’t led to better hiring practices or greater fairness. Bring the process back into the hands of skilled talent acquisition managers. 
• Paper-based resumes, cover letters, and work samples. My gut tells me job seekers would stop applying for every open role if they were forced to put a stamp on every application and march to the post office.

There’s a real argument to be made for bringing back the practice of publishing open jobs in a formal publication that comes out weekly, maybe biweekly. 

Do I think newspapers can reinvent the process for the 2020s and beyond? No. 

They have shown they lack the innovative thinkers needed to make this happen. I think it’s the largest employers (1,000 or more employees) who could pull this off right. 

They could easily create and deliver a monthly publication that includes all the normal articles and thought pieces, but also insert job postings for their company with specific instructions on how to apply. 

Only subscribers to the publication would have access to the roles, as they would stop posting them on job boards and LinkedIn. 

The professionals who apply would be truly interested in working at that company. They could even offer small- to mid-sized companies in their local region the chance to publish their open roles in the publication for a fee. 

Obviously, this doesn’t represent a bulletproof idea.

Yet, it stands to reason that this could work better than continuing to throw more automation and digital tools at a process that shattered into a million pieces years ago. ■