applying for jobs? the system is the problem. not you
30 May 26
A couple of weeks ago, I posted on Linkedin about my 2 sons' experience and struggle in trying to find casual work. The feedback was pretty consistent; not just from parents watching their kids apply to dozens of jobs and hear nothing back - but also people mid-career doing the same thing.
Over the past few days, the UK media have started talking of a the risk of a "lost generation", reflecting what's happening to a young people caught in a cycle of high-volume applications and systematic silence. It's damaging to their confidence.
But this job search problem affects everyone.
The mechanism is straightforward. Job boards have made applying frictionless. A candidate can submit twenty applications in an evening. From a platform perspective, that's success—engagement, activity, value. But on the employer side, something else is happening. A role that might once have attracted fifty applications now attracts five hundred. Or five thousand. No human can read all of those. So employers do what any rational actor would do: they automate. They use filters, algorithms, rejection letters. Or they simply don't respond at all.
For the candidate, silence feels personal. It feels like rejection. So they do the obvious thing—they apply to more jobs. If fifty applications yield nothing, maybe a hundred will. Maybe two hundred. The logic is sound. The outcome is predictable and corrosive.
What makes this a trap rather than just a difficult job market is that the incentives are completely misaligned. Platforms profit from volume. Employers are forced to automate because of volume. And candidates, faced with silence, have no choice but to contribute to that volume. Everyone is behaving rationally within a system that serves nobody except the platform extracting data and engagement from the process.
The psychological cost is understadable. Effort becomes disconnected from any feedback or acknowledgment. You send your best application to a role you genuinely want, and you get the same silence you'd get if you'd spent thirty seconds on a half-hearted submission. After enough repetitions, the distinction stops mattering. Applying stops feeling like presenting yourself and starts feeling like throwing applications into a void.
This isn't about candidates applying too much. It's about a system where applying thoughtfully offers no advantage over applying recklessly.
It's a system that works for job boards - not jobseekers.
A broken system.
