I haven’t had to resort to applying to jobs I couldn’t or wouldn’t do to fulfill unemployment insurance requirements, but who knows what will happen in December if this goes on.

>Why shouldn't employers do the same?

proportions. 1 uninterested candidate wastes maybe 5 hours at best of a million dollar company's time. All the while those doing the interviewing were paid anyway.

1 bad post wastes dozens, hundreds of applicant's time. Especially the damn Workday apps. That time is not compensated and only gets worse the farter in you go.

I mean the reason I can think of off the top of my head is that one is wasting the time of people who are looking for a job so they can continue to live, and the other is wasting the time of a person who's job is reviewing resumes?

I don't agree with the attitude of the grandparent poster either, but work at a small company where I've been on the receiving end of many extremely low-effort applications from ineligible individuals, so it definitely goes both ways. Companies are also bombarded with spam from recruiters, just as candidates are.

There would be less application spam if there were fewer spam job postings.

Because only one in a hundred postings is real, we have to send out hundreds of applications before even getting a rejection. There's no way to tell if a posting is real or if anyone will ever read your application, so the only option available is to apply to everything.

A lot of people pose this as a prisoner's dilemma, but it really is not. This problem is not mutual, it's entirely one sided. If companies would only post jobs they intended to hire for, there would be exponentially fewer spam applications. They've fucked around by posting spam and now they're finding out by receiving even more spam.

When the average applicant has to send literally hundreds of applications to get any response at all, absolutely nobody is going to handcraft a thought out application to any one posting. There's literally not enough hours in the day. Because we don't even get rejection letters back, the only way forward is to firehose as many applications as possible and just hope you win the lottery by getting your resume in front of a human.

It's absolutely terrible for everyone involved and the only ones who can stop it want to act victimized by the problem they created

> "There would be less application spam if there were fewer spam job postings."

I disagree with this; in fact, I think there would be more application spam with fewer postings. Most of the application spam is from people who are either completely unqualified and just pressing the 'apply' button (which is made easy by websites which get paid per application), or people looking to move to a wealthier country (without any pre-qualification). I think both of these groups would actually be more aggressive about applying if they were more likely to be reviewed by a hiring manager.

I think it would bifrucate the obvious spam from the obvious real posters and make your job easier, even if there's more apps to go through. Lot of the worst is that vague middle land of "is this qualified? but it also kind of looks like AI because job applications expect a very specific format of resume".

So you'd win out that way. But I also don't sympathize too much as the "unqualifies just pressing apply" was a natural endstate of years of bad job requirement postings.

Sure but what I'm saying is that the stakes for a company having to go through spam applications are significantly lower than the people trying to find a job who are getting spammed with dead ends while their savings drain lower and lower.

Maybe for a big company, with an HR department and lots of resources, but not for a small company when >>90% of applications are from ineligible individuals.

yeah, but at worst, you waste time on the dime of a company from the recruiter's/hiring manager's POV. on the other side, you're wasting precious capital (time & money) from someone who may instead be hanging out with their kids, or taking care of their sick mother--i understand these are contrived examples. from a pure utalitarian perspective, both are a complete waste of time. but from a moral/ethical perspective, i think there's a clear loser in terms of precious time wasted.

I am an individual who works at a small company, and going through ineligible applications takes away from time I could spend with children or family. I am not an HR professional, but we don't have a massive staff to delegate these matters to. The situations are morally equivalent.

do you do this outside of work hours? sounds more like a failure on how the company operates than the nature of the problem. taking a wild guess that if it weren't for combing through through applications, then those extra hours spent on mindless HR stuff would simply be filled with other work.

It doesn’t matter when you waste someone’s time; work hours are fungible for most professionals. Your ‘wild guess’ seems very convenient with respect to your previous comment, and happens to be incorrect.