The combination of fake listings, ghosting, and generic emails that provide no feedback seems almost designed to hold them back. There are a few tricks to learn, but without insider knowledge, they may remain undiscovered.
I spend over 20 hours a week searching, tailoring my resume, and submitting applications, only to receive minimal responses. This is demoralizing, not to mention the stress from diminished income.
And those same employers will scream from the mountaintops that workers don't exist and the only solution is to import more labor from places that just happen to have far lower wages.
In fact some employers will create listings with very specific requirements they have no intention of filling so that they can site it during visa applications.
I actually don't know if this is still a thing, but it was absolutely happening back in the early 2000s. In order to sponsor a TN visa you needed to show several months of trying to find local talent to fill the position. The only proof you actually needed was dated classified ads.
Most employment-based green cards for people already in the country require a fake job listing. If a company is willing to go through the trouble of sponsoring a green card for an existing employee, they are obviously not interested in hiring a replacement. But the government makes them pretend they are, because there are no other ways of keeping the employee.
There are some exceptions, such as EB-1s and tenure-track faculty positions, but fake job ads are the norm.
This reminds me of how things sometimes work in totalitarian states. Some everyday things are effectively impossible to do by the rules. The government does not enforce the rules, because it wants the activity to continue. But when they decide they don't like someone, they can start enforcing selectively and show that the undesirable person is breaking the law.
> Job seekers are facing a broken, emergent system.
This is not an 'emergent' thing - it was this way 20+ years ago when I was starting out. The most important thing I've learned in that time is that all of my best jobs come through people I know.
I've gotten a grand total of one job in 26 years from a 'blind' application, and that was working for a local government who had a very strict interview process.
Build your network, work your network. Read The Proximity Principle by Ken Coleman if you need some direction and inspiration.
Emergent? Hardly. Employers love it this way. I'm not saying there's a centrally-coordinated conspiracy at play, but there's certainly very little incentive for any individual employer to "defect" from the current equilibrium.
Do they? Everyone I know in recruiting is stressed out of their minds wading through thousands of applications, meanwhile it's taking 6+ months to even get a double-digit amount of interviews with vaguely qualified candidates for important roles that we were offering pretty good salaries for.
I really don't get the feeling, internally or externally, that most companies are happy with the current situation either. What sort of "defection" do you think they could be doing that would make things better? I interviewed recently with a company that, in my mind, did everything right in terms of an easy and honest interview process, upfront salary and benefits info, all that. I barely got time with the recruiter for it because they had 20+ screens that day because they were swamped with applicants.
It sounds kind of like the online dating dynamic: One side spams requests into the void, knowing they're going to get MAYBE a 0.1% response rate, and the other side is inundated with requests and are overwhelmed with the task of sorting through the 99.9% unacceptable ones. Everyone is looking for drinkable water. Candidates are in a desert with no water in sight and employers are in a swamp full of water--none of it drinkable.
Job seekers are facing a broken, emergent system.
The combination of fake listings, ghosting, and generic emails that provide no feedback seems almost designed to hold them back. There are a few tricks to learn, but without insider knowledge, they may remain undiscovered.
I spend over 20 hours a week searching, tailoring my resume, and submitting applications, only to receive minimal responses. This is demoralizing, not to mention the stress from diminished income.