The Brutality of Online Job Hunting

How technology promised to connect talent with opportunity but created a dehumanizing maze instead.

Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash

Meredith stared at her screen, its glow illuminating the room as the clock headed towards midnight. This was her 48th job application of the month. She’d found the opening on a job site, which clicked her through to the company’s hiring portal. It had taken her half an hour to fill everything in. She’d hit submit, but it didn’t save. It took her 3 tries. Then the cheerily worded email saying thanks. She wondered if anyone did feel thankful at the company.

She’d even spent an hour beforehand researching the company, looking on company employee reputation sites, tweaking her resume. Using an answer engine to help her with keyword stuffing. Checked a few subreddits and discords to get tips on how to work with AI screening tools to “game the system.” For one job application she’d spent 3 hours.

And Meredith knew that the front-end of applying is all about the ATS (Applicant Tracking System), that the likelihood of even getting her resumé in front of a human was probably less than 5%. A few weeks later, she discovered through an acquaintance that the job had never even existed. It was a “ghost Job” for the company to project to competitors it was growing.

The online job hunting world is broken. And with the current economic climate, it’s not about to get any better. It’s easy to blame technology, but it’s not about the technology. It’s about complex systems, bureaucracy and the resulting structural violence. Which sounds harsh. Because it is.

In the world of cultural anthropology, we would also call this out as a classic case of “ritual without meaning”. An elaborate and largely performative dance applicants perform, detached from practical outcomes.

An aspiring job applicant today has to contend with AI screening tools that reduce human complexity to keyword patterns. Finding resumé services that promise they can crack the algorithm, but can’t really. Having to use multiple online job platforms, each with different rules and algorithms. Hundreds of different hiring tools companies use, that fit a bureaucratic, opaque process. Mostly designed for the company, not applicants.

How did we end up here?

I’ve been around long enough to remember the launch of Monster.com in the late 90’s. It was the golden age of promising technologies that would democratise the job hiring market. No more relying on newspapers and local networks. Other platforms came along.

They were, in large parts, victims of their own success. Now, companies got thousands of applications instead of a hundred or so. Soon, these platforms became what they are today, not smart databases, but gatekeepers. Designed more to filter than manage.

This has resulted in what gaming theorists would term as a matching market with incomplete information. The applicants don’t know what really matters to the employer, employers are limited by weak digital signals. So both sides have developed strategies to game each other. Those strategies in turn distort the whole process making it even messier.

Even when organisations know someone they want to hire, policies (bureaucracy) requires them to use whatever their hiring platform is. Even when someone works at that organisation. They end up having to tweak the job description and parameters of their own platform, effectively hacking it and probably creating a job description that isn’t actually representative of the real job.

For employers, this creates more costs and brings risk. When job definitions are reviewed, there’s a good chance many of them don’t even reflect the actual jobs. The constant gaming of the system by job hunters means the value of the system itself is wasted. This creates stress and anxiety for those in the HR department and hiring managers.

For prospective employees, the effects of this structural violence leads to people questioning their own worth and value. Which feeds depression and identity anxiety. The strain of maintaining professional identities across multiple platforms and constantly adapting their performance. Which is a sort of existential displacement.

The online job hunting system over the past couple of decades has become a sort of cultural infrastructure, what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai defines as “technoscapes”. Digital landscapes of platforms that mediate cultural flows. They aren’t neutral. They are powerful, algorithmically driven cultural mediators.

These platforms created classification schemes through taxonomies of skills, industries and roles. Essentially reflecting existing power dynamics. Platforms like LinkedIn and similar with high levels of toxic positivity create intersubjective realities. Application platforms strip human context and reduce interactions to procedural compliance. A death spiral of efficiency. They optimise for transaction volume instead of the quality of matches.

It’s an efficiency paradox too. The deployed technologies lead to more applications, which then need more sophisticated algorithms and filters. This results in greater incentives for applicants to game the system, which they are doing. This results in the erosion of trust between employer and prospective employee. No one receiving a thank-you email even cares. It’s a soulless indicator that you are in a machine. The applicant dehumanised and reduced to a binary of zeroes and ones.

How Do we Fix The Online Hiring Process?

If the answer was easy, I’d be diving into startup mode right about now and polishing up a pitch deck. Companies use various hiring tactics for more than just hiring. Such as creating ghost jobs or playing competitor and shareholder games. That’s not an easy cultural behaviour to shift.

For organisations, it means being more human-centric. prioritising the human over the machines. Using tools that augment rather than replace human judgement. It means valuing authentic engagement over ritualistic performance.

It also means understanding where and when to accept some costs can’t be stripped or reduced to base transactions that lower quality. The job market isn’t just about economic opportunity, it indicates how we value human potential and how we understand our place in society.

This systemic nightmare isn’t about technology, it’s about how humans have applied technologies. It reflects what I’ve oft said, that technology doesn’t solve problems, humans do, yet we have this odd notion that technology solves problems. It never has.

And no, Generative AI via LLMs is not going to solve this problem. LLMs regurgitate what we’ve already done. Sure an LLM can offer up some suggestions, but they are not innovation tools but can be used to show what doesn’t and isn’t working.