I’m not convinced “unqualified candidate spam” is the right category to draw. Both qualified and unqualified candidates send out lots of resumes today. It seems to me that putting a sacrificial gate will reduce the number of resumes, but the ratio of qualified:unqualified will stay mostly the same, determined by the ratio of qualified:unqualified candidates seeking jobs at any given time.
The real problem is more candidates chasing fewer jobs. The solutions to that are as I described: 1) make wages more floaty, 2) reduce pressure to find jobs. You could say there’s also 3) add more credible signals to make job search more informative and efficient. But given what happened with education, I’m skeptical. It turned into this clownshow where you spend years of your life, and go into lifelong debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars, just to send the credible signal. This sours me on the whole signal thing, to be honest.
I think the crux here is that I actually do think this is mostly a problem of unqualified candidate spam, not too many qualified candidates.
In the age of zero-cost applications, qualified candidates apply to a targeted set of jobs so they can get the job they want most, then stop applying when they get one; but unqualified candidates apply to every job and keep doing it because they can’t pass interviews or quickly get fired. A gate like the one proposed in the post would reduce unqualified candidate spam by orders of magnitude while barely impacting qualified candidates.
Another way of looking at this is that companies aren’t stupid. If there actually was an excess of qualified candidates, they would absolutely take advantage of that by lowering wages.
I’m not convinced “unqualified candidate spam” is the right category to draw. Both qualified and unqualified candidates send out lots of resumes today. It seems to me that putting a sacrificial gate will reduce the number of resumes, but the ratio of qualified:unqualified will stay mostly the same, determined by the ratio of qualified:unqualified candidates seeking jobs at any given time.
The real problem is more candidates chasing fewer jobs. The solutions to that are as I described: 1) make wages more floaty, 2) reduce pressure to find jobs. You could say there’s also 3) add more credible signals to make job search more informative and efficient. But given what happened with education, I’m skeptical. It turned into this clownshow where you spend years of your life, and go into lifelong debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars, just to send the credible signal. This sours me on the whole signal thing, to be honest.
I think the crux here is that I actually do think this is mostly a problem of unqualified candidate spam, not too many qualified candidates.
In the age of zero-cost applications, qualified candidates apply to a targeted set of jobs so they can get the job they want most, then stop applying when they get one; but unqualified candidates apply to every job and keep doing it because they can’t pass interviews or quickly get fired. A gate like the one proposed in the post would reduce unqualified candidate spam by orders of magnitude while barely impacting qualified candidates.
Another way of looking at this is that companies aren’t stupid. If there actually was an excess of qualified candidates, they would absolutely take advantage of that by lowering wages.