> Companies are increasingly filtering resumes/candidates in a sufficiently aggressive fashion to the point that they're strongly incentivizing, if not actively selecting for, people that are gaming the system in some way or another.
The gaming of the system has been happening for a very long time. When I was a teen looking for my first job, companies were being flooded by resumes due to cheap laser printing (either custom to the employer, or simply duplicated en mass). A few years after that, it was being flooded by online applications or applications via email. Each time businesses had to take a more aggressive stance at filtering since they had more applicants per opening than before.
I suspect that we are going to have to go back to the bad old days of relying on real social networks (not the imaginary ones people create build around finding work) or applicants walking door to do with printed resumes in hand (simply because it is going to be easier to vet someone who walk in the door than false positives from software that filters applicants out).
Kind of reminiscent of the online dating market, at least for hetero relationships: From the man's point of view, he is flooding the field, swiping yes on every woman on the site, because there's a 0.0001% chance that he's matched. Consequently, from the woman's point of view, she is flooded with an absolutely huge deluge of "applicants" with nothing but blunt tools to hopelessly try to filter the garbage out. Neither side is satisfied, yet there appears to be no systematic way to improve the market. The status quo probably optimizes only the dating site's revenue at the expense of everything else being dysfunctional.
The main difference, of course, is that in the employment market people are generally taken out of the market when they get a job (although fully remote has driven a huge rise in moonlighting).
In the dating market, women are inundated with matches from hundreds of guys, so they just pick the hottest guy, have a short term fling, and the guy ditches her after a couple of dates and continues working through the rest of the women (often in parallel). So, the hottest guys are never taken off the market, meaning the middle tier guys get few chances, and women complain that "men are all the same" and only want ONS not a relationship.
I’ve worked with HR in order to assist at a job fair. I don’t think people truly appreciate how inundated with resumes HR can be once a position is announced. About a fifth of the way through the pile I started zoning out because they all seemed to blend together.
We wound up trudging through the stack. In order to lighten the mood I told I joke I heard from somewhere else:
“We should shuffle the pile and throw half of them in the trash. I don’t want to hire unlucky employees”
> We should shuffle the pile and throw half of them in the trash. I don’t want to hire unlucky employees
Modern filtering using "AI" and ATS of all kinds is such a loaded dice that I believe an honest randomizing like you described would be a significant improvement for both ends of the funnel. Beyond jokes.
People don't trust people they just met anymore. The person who walked up could be a murderer. They would rather filter them through ai first or common networks.