Three years back, Andrew Stockwell, head of people at software purchasing firm Vendr, had refined his entire hiring routine into a predictable, well-tuned process. After posting a job opening, he would wait a few days before sorting through applications—usually a few dozen, topping out at 100 on a strong hiring cycle. In-house recruiters would source extra passive candidates to round out the pool, then Stockwell would review resumes, run interviews, and pass the highest-performing contenders along to hiring managers. "The whole job boiled down to seeking out great talent, vetting them, speaking with them, and picking out the strongest possible candidates," Stockwell explained to WIRED.

Somewhere in the last 12 to 18 months, that entire system flipped upside down. The opening step of posting a role stayed the same, but instead of a manageable pool of 100 candidates after a day or two, Stockwell was inundated with hundreds of submissions—sometimes totaling more than 1,000 for a single opening. A huge share of these were "completely bogus," he says, from non-existent fake candidates. Many more were clearly drafted by artificial intelligence, filled with generic, inflated claims that made it nearly impossible to tell one qualified applicant apart from the next. The sheer volume was crippling. Before long, Stockwell found his high-cost, high-skilled talent acquisition team spending every working hour just sifting through unqualified submissions, rather than doing the strategic work they were hired to do.

Stockwell is one of a growing group of recruitment leaders who argue the modern job search is fundamentally broken. In 2026, hunting for a new role has become as frictionless as ordering a product online: AI can draft customized resumes and cover letters in seconds, browser extensions can auto-fill entire application forms with no human input required, and LinkedIn serves users dozens of new job listings daily, most with a "just a few clicks" apply option.

"A year ago, every recruiter told me they wanted to make applying as easy as possible, to give candidates a seamless experience," says Ophir Samson, head of voice AI at recruiting platform Greenhouse. Samson joined Greenhouse earlier this year when the company acquired his AI-powered job interview startup. "What they ended up with was 2,000 applicants in 24 hours for one role. That’s a terrible experience for everyone." Strong candidates get lost in the crowd, while unqualified or fake applicants slip through initial screening, leaving recruiters stuck sorting through thousands of submissions every single day. Instead of proactively hunting for ideal candidates on LinkedIn, they are glued to applicant tracking systems, tweaking keyword filters just to figure out which applications are worth a 30-second glance. Now, Samson says, recruiters have completely changed their tune: "They actually tell me they want friction. Friction is good. They want to make applying harder."

The original push to remove every possible barrier from job applications made logical sense on paper: if as many qualified candidates as possible apply for an open role, a company maximizes its chance of finding the perfect fit. For years, that logic guided recruiter choices: posting broadly on job boards and LinkedIn, enabling LinkedIn’s Easy Apply feature, advertising one-click application processes. After the COVID-19 pandemic, when employers scrambled to fill thousands of open roles, the push to simplify applications accelerated even faster. "Back when openings were abundant, everyone was jumping jobs—you could literally get three offers in one afternoon," Jane Curran, chief transformation officer at global real estate giant JLL, told WIRED. "Now, it’s the polar opposite."

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows job openings hit an all-time high of 12.3 million in March 2022, and have declined steadily over the past two years. Since mid-2024, open roles have hovered around 7 million, fluctuating by roughly 500,000 month over month. But as the number of open jobs shrank, barriers to submitting applications dropped even faster.

AI, which went mainstream in late 2022 with the public launch of ChatGPT, lets applicants rewrite resumes and track new job openings almost instantly. Third-party services like JobAssist, Sonara, and Ladder’s Apply4Me even promise to handle all the tedious busywork of job hunting for candidates, submitting "10x as many applications with less effort than one manual application." If a job seeker wanted to, they could apply to dozens of roles every single day with almost no personal input.

This dynamic has led to ballooning candidate pools and increasingly slow, laborious hiring processes. LinkedIn told WIRED that the average number of applications per job seeker on the platform is up 46% compared to February 2020, and total applications have jumped 22% since ChatGPT launched. The flood of automated, low-quality submissions even pushed LinkedIn to add new limits to cut back on spam. This month, the platform is rolling out a new feature that alerts seemingly underqualified applicants that they are unlikely to be a good fit for a role, and suggests more relevant alternative openings instead.

"Right now we’re stuck in a place where employers complain they can’t find good people, and job seekers complain they can’t find jobs that will hire them," says Tessa White, a former HR executive with 20 years of corporate experience who left corporate America in 2018. During the pandemic, White built a TikTok following of 800,000 sharing job market advice and commentary, and she argues the current system is unworkable, a direct result of recruiters’ obsession with speed and convenience. "Every time we strive for efficiency in hiring, we end up giving up quality," she says.

Recruiters are well aware they have a problem. While a flood of applicants is welcome for some roles, such as skilled trades where employer demand consistently outpaces worker supply, Curran says for most unemployed white-collar knowledge workers, "there is not enough churn, not enough new jobs entering the market." That means every time a company in these industries posts a new role, recruiters are immediately hit with a barrage of thousands of resumes.

Many recruiters are now turning to AI tools themselves to try to wrangle the sea of applications into something manageable. Companies have used automated applicant tracking systems to screen resumes for at least a decade; now, many are using AI to conduct first-round interviews with candidates. "We frequently hear from recruiters: they have 1,000 applications, but they know only 30 of them are serious," Greenhouse’s Samson says. An AI interview can sort serious candidates from the unserious, he explains, giving recruiters more context than a resume alone can provide. While Samson notes these AI screenings are not just adding friction for friction’s sake, they do have the added bonus of weeding out application bots and half-hearted candidates.

Curran says she expects more companies will add knock-out screening questions that cut down the applicant pool via strict criteria early in the process, while others will move skills testing to earlier stages of hiring to filter out unqualified candidates faster. But White is not convinced these small changes fix the underlying problem: that the rise of frictionless one-click resume submissions has made the entire first round of hiring essentially useless.

"Employers are having such a hard time hiring people with the current outdated process," White says. "Even AI and applicant tracking systems, which sound so high-tech, are an antiquated way to evaluate people and their skill sets." AI simply does not have the capability to accurately judge a candidate’s true potential, she argues. "I definitely think recruiting, as we currently practice it, is long overdue for a massive overhaul," White says. "And I don’t even claim to have all the right answers."

The deluge of applications has also made recruiters far more reliant on employee referrals and internal hires. While person-to-person connections have always mattered in hiring, today many see them as the only reliable way to cut through the glut of spam applications. Stockwell argues this benefits candidates who already have backgrounds and connections that align with existing employees, which works directly against efforts to build a diverse workforce. "The whole thing is a big mess," he says.

These days, Stockwell is experiencing that mess from the job seeker’s side of the application portal. He left Vendr in February and is currently hunting for a new role, treating the search like a full-time job: he networks constantly, attends in-person industry events, and knows that without a personal connection, his chance of landing an interview is close to zero. He estimates that less than 2% of his online job applications lead to even a preliminary phone interview. "I’m biased, of course, about my own capabilities," Stockwell says. "But companies are missing out on fantastic talent right now."