Hiring and getting hired is harder than ever

July 31, 2026

~3 min read

And yes, it's AI's fault.

In the past 2 years, I have recently been involved at hiring and talking to hiring managers in tech. I have also been on the other side of this. I also have friends who are trying to get hired right now.

Hiring managers, job seekers, and recruiters all agree that hiring has broken to the point of time that nobody trusts the other party at all—unless they're sitting there face to face looking at them.

I have had multiple recruiters and hiring managers tell me about how they've had candidates who were obviously using a face filter on a video stream try to pretend to be someone else. I've had more than one company say that they hired someone only have to rescind the offer while validating their identity, because it didn't line up with who they interviewed.

The most extreme case is a story where a person who started at a job was challenged by several of the coworkers and the hiring manager that they weren't the person who they talked to on a video call, and the person simply denied it and then resigned. I know these people. They're not suspicious by nature. If anything they'd usually be too nice and assume it was some misunderstanding.

On the other side of the table, people are getting ghosted the vast majority of the time now. I have friend that has applied and spoken on the phone probably approaching 100 recruiters at this point, and >90% of them ghosted him. I know the feeling. I used to get a call back from places to say that I didn't get the job if I went all the way thru the hiring process. About 2 years ago when I was looking for a new gig, I was getting ghosted about 50% of the time. Many times 3+ interviews into the process.

I had one company that actually ghosted me 3 times within a span of 9 months. Do multiple rounds of interviews in a few days and then radio silence for a few months. And yes, I'm a pain in the butt candidate. I will follow up with you probably too many times. Each time they just went entirely silent and wouldn't respond.

I do not know what the solution is, but what I do know is that continuing to do the same thing because it's what we've been doing is utterly insane.

The side with the power historically—the employer—is going to have to figure something out, because this game we're playing is entirely set up by the employer.

And I suspect the answer will be less efficient on the individual applicant level.

Perhaps, companies will have candidates visit on site somewhere in an interview—even if they're working remotely. Perhaps candidates applying for jobs will insist that they talk to a real person earlier in the process potentially face to face, just so they can stop the spray and pray over 1000s of applications. Perhaps job fairs will become a big thing again.

The cost of spending time in person will be its own signal that both sides are serious about hiring and being hired.

I do not know what the answer is exactly, but practically, the answer seems on both sides to become more human again and less automated. And I'm here for it.

— Robert

This message is 100% organic human effort, so it will have typos. No, I didn't send it through an LLM to typo check it. It was made with just my fingers and my eyes.