If it’s a platform, I’d sign up as an employer. If it’s an plugin to the jobs portal on our website, I’d add it.
The number of completely irrelevant applications with cover letters written by AI is mind-numbing. Some of the absolute best looking applications and cover letters were written by people with zero experience working at target, while some of the best employees had the boilerplate resume format you see everywhere else.
Who we hired literally depends on completely random factors like whose resume I read first today, and how many hundreds I just never read because it’s a pain. I wouldn’t trust some HR rep to handle it any more than I’d trust an AI to usefully sort through those resumes.
Sounds like we have our first customer! Glad to get this validated from an employer's perspective - mass applications are not just harmful to applicants, making it hard to find good employees hurts both sides of the matchmaking process.
Reading your comment, I wonder if reduced volume might make it feasible to do more direct hiring - e.g. have the actual person hiring review every resume. For even 50 applications it'd be burdensome, but maybe there's a breakeven point where HR goes from a gatekeeper to a validator that "this person sent a real resume."
I'm really interested in the point you made about application polish not correlating with quality. I think historically you had a mix of good and bad resume advice, with well-connected candidates getting better guidance. Today that signal is probably scrambled; there's lots of influencers advising people on how to format their applications. Maybe a whole different problem to solve: what's the right way to structure applications that doesn't just filter for "good at applying to jobs"?
The trick that worked for me was in the middle of the job description, I wrote the instruction:
- Send an email to (email) with the subject “I actually read the job description” with your resume and a 4 sentence cover letter.
Literally less than 5% of people compared to the number applications on LinkedIn followed through, which tells you a lot about who’s actually applying for this job, and what percentage are just applying for any job without actually reading the description.
It’s not so much about polish as it is about people using AI + our website to generate a cover letter that relates their experience to our company and the role we are hiring for in a cover letter. AI is really great at writing 3-4 sentences that are really well targeted and hard to recognize as AI, since it’s not long enough to be recognized, so from my perspective I see an applicant who understands our company, has experience that relates to our company, and is uniquely interested in working here.
When interviewing you can very quickly tell who is just not min-maxing their application game but are great options independent of their resume, which people used AI and actually have no idea what your company even does, and who lied on their resume. Interviews take a lot of time, and get really boring really fast, so it’s very easy to get frustrated/lazy as an employer, and rely even more heavily on (in my opinion) useless signals like internships and university. Every time I do an interview, ask about some specific experience, and it turns out their resume was grossly exaggerated in terms of responsibilities, it kills a few hundred brain cells.
This would work if the employers were also mandated to follow certain rules like no leaving people hanging, hard deadlines, no more than 3 rounds of interviews etc. They should also be required to provide a reason for rejection if the candidate clears the first two rounds.
This would make the job application process unique enough to actually be worth paying 1 $.
This is an interesting addition! Part of the idea behind this is rebuilding a social contract through incentives. The hope is that with fewer applicants, companies would treat them better - but maybe we need to formalize that social contract, especially at first.
I wonder if you could do this indirectly though. Maybe build a Glassdoor competitor for the companies that participate in this? Or have some transparency built in, and share what % of applicants got an interview and average time to hire?
Yes. Exactly. One of the reasons in the current job market that everyone just applies to every job possible is because it is a coin toss. If employers acted like they were equal to their employees by doing even a fraction of what is mentioned above, people would sign up.
I remember applying for a job and being told by the HR why they were rejecting me. That was wayy better than being ghosted. People want to be treated as people not resources.
The company should match fund the donation to the non profit. I run a software platform for non profits. Next time we're hiring, we are definitely going to try this.
The first job I ever got, I received because I sent a photo copy of my resume with a 1-page summary of my graduate school thesis. This was 16 years ago. But even then, online applications were the norm. They had 300 applicants (a HUGE number for an entry level role at the time), and I was the only person to send a hard copy. They were about to hire someone but called me in for an interview because they were just so shocked to get a hard copy.
Fast forward to today, I’ve seen exactly what you are describing. Virtually any job now gets not 300 applicants but thousands. Even small no-name startups that I work with will get 2,000 applicants. Technology has almost gotten too good so everyone applies to everything. It becomes impossible to stand out, and employers have to sort through the junk.
It’s a big problem for everyone, and I have no doubt a $1 fee would help. I just wish there was a way to improve the system in a way that puts the onus on the companies, not the applicants.
That is such a great story! I think that gets to a fundamental truth - there's power in uniqueness. If you're the only one sending a hard copy it's a reason to give you a real look because it's a signal of differentiation; if everyone does it, it would be significantly worse than the status quo of online applications.
And each time we discover one way to stand out, it doesn't last very long. Information travels so fast that anything successful tends to become the norm quickly.
I'd love to hear any ideas for putting the onus on the companies - I think it's a really difficult problem to solve compared to the candidate side. The first one I thought of is reversing the job process and having companies pitch themselves to candidates instead. Although, maybe that's just how the market works when recruiters reach out to highly specialized candidates today?
Yeah, I guess it's all about allowing people to show their uniqueness, which is really the problem with online applications. They strip away individuality. It was manageable when jobs received 200–300 applicants. But now, with AI making it easier to scale applications, you end up with 20 times the applications and no practical way to sift through them.
The problem is tricky to solve. While a $1 application fee might help, the resulting PR nightmare from the backlash would likely prevent almost any company from implementing it. Instead, companies accept a flood of applications and then rely on AI or keyword filtering to select the best candidates. The issue with this strategy is that AI-generated applications often feature the best keywords, since they were likely produced from a prompt that included the job description.
I wish there were a way for companies to create more opportunities for candidates to demonstrate their uniqueness beyond the standard online application. How? I'm not entirely sure—maybe video applications, or even allowing candidates to mail in their applications (which, like a $1 fee, isn't free). Perhaps a version of "office hours" where candidates can drop by and have a minute or two to showcase who they really are.
There has to be a way, but any solution would require more effort from both applicants and companies.
Companies need to stop using applicant tracking systems and large job boards.
My company posts jobs on our corporate blog and promotes in network and using Wellfound, which is kind of an ATS, but much more gated. We also require a cover letter (since this term is apparently confusing to people, we require an "intro paragraph" to be submitted along with the resume).
I've been a hiring manager for 8 years, and I'm definitely seen the number of low quality applications increase, but it's not unmanageable. I think we get several hundred applications for each position, and I personally review all of them as they come in.
I like the transparency idea! But maybe transparency is best for the company side; something like how many applicants actually get reviewed and responded to?
On the candidate side transparency could start to backfire if you really are unlucky; I imagine it’s a negative signal to a hiring manager if you’ve applied to lots of jobs unsuccessfully. That’s fine if you’re mass applying with AI, but it seems a bit unfair to punish you for trying to apply to stretch jobs.
I think the same thing hits with rationed applications; your best move in that world is probably to only apply to jobs you’re overqualified for, then once you have an offer you can take risks. Ideally we don’t totally kill stretch jobs - that said, everything has downsides. Even a required video feels tough for folks with social anxiety 😅
I think people who haven't hired recently probably have no idea how bad this problem is. You can get thousands of generated resumes in a day from a linkedin job posting. No matter how many questions you add or things you state clearly, 75% of them will be a truck driver in Kansas with no bearing on the actual opportunity. Some resumes will even be tailored to exactly what you asked for even though it's clearly a lie.
Recently when hiring, I simply asked every somewhat reasonable resume to meet me in a coffee shop. It was the only way to add enough friction and figure out who was real / fake.
As someone who worked at Upwork on the freelancer experience, the connects approach really works! It was an incredibly powerful approach to drive a healthy marketplace for both the demand and supply side.
It allowed the business to get high intent freelancers and it allowed the freelancer to also sus out the business (i.e. they weren’t willing to waste their connects on a job that wasn’t worth it).
I wonder if there’s a way for the employer to have a higher stake in their job postings in this $1 per application idea? So many open jobs today are high demand and low/lower pay but aren’t incentivized to create quality roles/postings. They’re relying on a tougher job market. Maybe something like if you don’t meet x threshold of submissions in a given timeframe, the business either pays or is forced to update the role, pay, description etc in order for the posting to stay open.
Such a great point about it being a signal of intent both ways! The quality of the post is a really interesting problem in itself - like you said, a crappy job post isn't really a deterrent in a tough job market. But it does probably impact applications at the margins, especially among high quality candidates.
I know Upwork has been pushing AI job descriptions to improve baseline quality, but I think that actually creates some of the same issues that occur with AI job applications. There's sort of an AI style of writing that becomes ubiquitous, and at least to me starts to be a negative signal (they can't even bother to write a job description, have they thought through what they want?)
I wonder how much of it is lack of a feedback mechanism vs a choice they make. On Upwork there's a review system, so candidates have some transparency into the job poster (and may choose to save their connects because of it). But the review system is only there for people they actually hired! So if a poor quality job description or low pay leads to not getting the applicants they want, it's not totally clear which part of the process is breaking down.
Maybe you could add a "cancel" button in the application flow that leads to a quick "why are you not applying"? Low pay/unclear duties/want you to be in person? The big issue I see is that it's not clear whether the people complaining are the same as the ones you want to apply - by definition that'd only gets people who don't finish!
I like the idea of adding friction, I do wonder whether it would be more effective if the currency was time rather than $...
I've heard from several hiring managers how much difference it makes when applicants submit a Loom video or a voice note. I do wonder what would happen if you made that mandatory.
I reckon a tonne of people would not apply, and you'd get some of the very real benefits you mention in this post.
It’s a great callout! I agree that money isnt the only option - it just has to be something that’s not easily scalable. I think the three options are money, time/attention, or networks/connections.
The interesting part is that the Loom/voice note example works whether or not it’s actually part of the hiring process! If you require applicants make a recording and nobody ever watches it, it serves the exact same purpose of culling low intent candidates. The question is, how many people would rather pay the $1 than have to watch a video recording of themself 😅
Although thinking about it - a Loom requires effort, but you could even imagine just requiring them to just spend some time - sitting in a corner for 5 minutes and staring at the wall may be just as effective. Although maybe it’s not healthy for the job market if we start hazing candidates to prove interest?
Great idea, especially because you didn't dismiss it right away and gave it a complete gameplan. Love what you're doing with this newsletter, I've recommended it to my readers in my post today.
Think about how this will affect the mind of a rich kid and a kid who is a first generation university student. If you think $1 is not much, you are already in the privileged class.
I think it’s a great idea and it’s even a bit puzzling that it wasn’t implemented yet. Probably because job market was rarely (if ever) in such a dire condition, but possibly also due to psychological aspects.
I would use it happily.
Somewhat similar dynamics exists in personal messaging, popular people often get tons of low value incoming messages which could be greatly reduced by “pay 1 dollar to message me”.
Disagree, because we already know how corporations would abuse this to charge applicants increasing fees to apply over time then still ghost them and play games.
I like the idea of friction, but giving corporations another way to charge people without providing something wouldn’t work well.
If it’s a platform, I’d sign up as an employer. If it’s an plugin to the jobs portal on our website, I’d add it.
The number of completely irrelevant applications with cover letters written by AI is mind-numbing. Some of the absolute best looking applications and cover letters were written by people with zero experience working at target, while some of the best employees had the boilerplate resume format you see everywhere else.
Who we hired literally depends on completely random factors like whose resume I read first today, and how many hundreds I just never read because it’s a pain. I wouldn’t trust some HR rep to handle it any more than I’d trust an AI to usefully sort through those resumes.
Sounds like we have our first customer! Glad to get this validated from an employer's perspective - mass applications are not just harmful to applicants, making it hard to find good employees hurts both sides of the matchmaking process.
Reading your comment, I wonder if reduced volume might make it feasible to do more direct hiring - e.g. have the actual person hiring review every resume. For even 50 applications it'd be burdensome, but maybe there's a breakeven point where HR goes from a gatekeeper to a validator that "this person sent a real resume."
I'm really interested in the point you made about application polish not correlating with quality. I think historically you had a mix of good and bad resume advice, with well-connected candidates getting better guidance. Today that signal is probably scrambled; there's lots of influencers advising people on how to format their applications. Maybe a whole different problem to solve: what's the right way to structure applications that doesn't just filter for "good at applying to jobs"?
The trick that worked for me was in the middle of the job description, I wrote the instruction:
- Send an email to (email) with the subject “I actually read the job description” with your resume and a 4 sentence cover letter.
Literally less than 5% of people compared to the number applications on LinkedIn followed through, which tells you a lot about who’s actually applying for this job, and what percentage are just applying for any job without actually reading the description.
It’s not so much about polish as it is about people using AI + our website to generate a cover letter that relates their experience to our company and the role we are hiring for in a cover letter. AI is really great at writing 3-4 sentences that are really well targeted and hard to recognize as AI, since it’s not long enough to be recognized, so from my perspective I see an applicant who understands our company, has experience that relates to our company, and is uniquely interested in working here.
When interviewing you can very quickly tell who is just not min-maxing their application game but are great options independent of their resume, which people used AI and actually have no idea what your company even does, and who lied on their resume. Interviews take a lot of time, and get really boring really fast, so it’s very easy to get frustrated/lazy as an employer, and rely even more heavily on (in my opinion) useless signals like internships and university. Every time I do an interview, ask about some specific experience, and it turns out their resume was grossly exaggerated in terms of responsibilities, it kills a few hundred brain cells.
This would work if the employers were also mandated to follow certain rules like no leaving people hanging, hard deadlines, no more than 3 rounds of interviews etc. They should also be required to provide a reason for rejection if the candidate clears the first two rounds.
This would make the job application process unique enough to actually be worth paying 1 $.
This is an interesting addition! Part of the idea behind this is rebuilding a social contract through incentives. The hope is that with fewer applicants, companies would treat them better - but maybe we need to formalize that social contract, especially at first.
I wonder if you could do this indirectly though. Maybe build a Glassdoor competitor for the companies that participate in this? Or have some transparency built in, and share what % of applicants got an interview and average time to hire?
Yes. Exactly. One of the reasons in the current job market that everyone just applies to every job possible is because it is a coin toss. If employers acted like they were equal to their employees by doing even a fraction of what is mentioned above, people would sign up.
I remember applying for a job and being told by the HR why they were rejecting me. That was wayy better than being ghosted. People want to be treated as people not resources.
Yeah that is a good idea. The company at least owes you a response.
I fully endorse this idea and will happily promote it. For the small cost of $1.
You can have $1 for every person who misunderstands and yells at you as the face of the concept - best compensation package in the industry
5/5 for me - a wonderful way to trim the fat in the early stages of job application!
Btw, just discovered this newsletter and it's awesome. No dumb ideas!!
There are none!!
The company should match fund the donation to the non profit. I run a software platform for non profits. Next time we're hiring, we are definitely going to try this.
PLEASE give us an update if you do, I would love to hear how it works for you in practice
The first job I ever got, I received because I sent a photo copy of my resume with a 1-page summary of my graduate school thesis. This was 16 years ago. But even then, online applications were the norm. They had 300 applicants (a HUGE number for an entry level role at the time), and I was the only person to send a hard copy. They were about to hire someone but called me in for an interview because they were just so shocked to get a hard copy.
Fast forward to today, I’ve seen exactly what you are describing. Virtually any job now gets not 300 applicants but thousands. Even small no-name startups that I work with will get 2,000 applicants. Technology has almost gotten too good so everyone applies to everything. It becomes impossible to stand out, and employers have to sort through the junk.
It’s a big problem for everyone, and I have no doubt a $1 fee would help. I just wish there was a way to improve the system in a way that puts the onus on the companies, not the applicants.
That is such a great story! I think that gets to a fundamental truth - there's power in uniqueness. If you're the only one sending a hard copy it's a reason to give you a real look because it's a signal of differentiation; if everyone does it, it would be significantly worse than the status quo of online applications.
And each time we discover one way to stand out, it doesn't last very long. Information travels so fast that anything successful tends to become the norm quickly.
I'd love to hear any ideas for putting the onus on the companies - I think it's a really difficult problem to solve compared to the candidate side. The first one I thought of is reversing the job process and having companies pitch themselves to candidates instead. Although, maybe that's just how the market works when recruiters reach out to highly specialized candidates today?
Yeah, I guess it's all about allowing people to show their uniqueness, which is really the problem with online applications. They strip away individuality. It was manageable when jobs received 200–300 applicants. But now, with AI making it easier to scale applications, you end up with 20 times the applications and no practical way to sift through them.
The problem is tricky to solve. While a $1 application fee might help, the resulting PR nightmare from the backlash would likely prevent almost any company from implementing it. Instead, companies accept a flood of applications and then rely on AI or keyword filtering to select the best candidates. The issue with this strategy is that AI-generated applications often feature the best keywords, since they were likely produced from a prompt that included the job description.
I wish there were a way for companies to create more opportunities for candidates to demonstrate their uniqueness beyond the standard online application. How? I'm not entirely sure—maybe video applications, or even allowing candidates to mail in their applications (which, like a $1 fee, isn't free). Perhaps a version of "office hours" where candidates can drop by and have a minute or two to showcase who they really are.
There has to be a way, but any solution would require more effort from both applicants and companies.
Companies need to stop using applicant tracking systems and large job boards.
My company posts jobs on our corporate blog and promotes in network and using Wellfound, which is kind of an ATS, but much more gated. We also require a cover letter (since this term is apparently confusing to people, we require an "intro paragraph" to be submitted along with the resume).
I've been a hiring manager for 8 years, and I'm definitely seen the number of low quality applications increase, but it's not unmanageable. I think we get several hundred applications for each position, and I personally review all of them as they come in.
This idea seems too reasonable for this newsletter! But seriously, not sure if this exact plan is right, but some sort of friction would be good IMO.
Maybe everyone can only apply to X number of jobs per month. And/or everyone can see how many jobs you’ve applied to.
I like the transparency idea! But maybe transparency is best for the company side; something like how many applicants actually get reviewed and responded to?
On the candidate side transparency could start to backfire if you really are unlucky; I imagine it’s a negative signal to a hiring manager if you’ve applied to lots of jobs unsuccessfully. That’s fine if you’re mass applying with AI, but it seems a bit unfair to punish you for trying to apply to stretch jobs.
I think the same thing hits with rationed applications; your best move in that world is probably to only apply to jobs you’re overqualified for, then once you have an offer you can take risks. Ideally we don’t totally kill stretch jobs - that said, everything has downsides. Even a required video feels tough for folks with social anxiety 😅
I think people who haven't hired recently probably have no idea how bad this problem is. You can get thousands of generated resumes in a day from a linkedin job posting. No matter how many questions you add or things you state clearly, 75% of them will be a truck driver in Kansas with no bearing on the actual opportunity. Some resumes will even be tailored to exactly what you asked for even though it's clearly a lie.
Recently when hiring, I simply asked every somewhat reasonable resume to meet me in a coffee shop. It was the only way to add enough friction and figure out who was real / fake.
As someone who worked at Upwork on the freelancer experience, the connects approach really works! It was an incredibly powerful approach to drive a healthy marketplace for both the demand and supply side.
It allowed the business to get high intent freelancers and it allowed the freelancer to also sus out the business (i.e. they weren’t willing to waste their connects on a job that wasn’t worth it).
I wonder if there’s a way for the employer to have a higher stake in their job postings in this $1 per application idea? So many open jobs today are high demand and low/lower pay but aren’t incentivized to create quality roles/postings. They’re relying on a tougher job market. Maybe something like if you don’t meet x threshold of submissions in a given timeframe, the business either pays or is forced to update the role, pay, description etc in order for the posting to stay open.
Such a great point about it being a signal of intent both ways! The quality of the post is a really interesting problem in itself - like you said, a crappy job post isn't really a deterrent in a tough job market. But it does probably impact applications at the margins, especially among high quality candidates.
I know Upwork has been pushing AI job descriptions to improve baseline quality, but I think that actually creates some of the same issues that occur with AI job applications. There's sort of an AI style of writing that becomes ubiquitous, and at least to me starts to be a negative signal (they can't even bother to write a job description, have they thought through what they want?)
I wonder how much of it is lack of a feedback mechanism vs a choice they make. On Upwork there's a review system, so candidates have some transparency into the job poster (and may choose to save their connects because of it). But the review system is only there for people they actually hired! So if a poor quality job description or low pay leads to not getting the applicants they want, it's not totally clear which part of the process is breaking down.
Maybe you could add a "cancel" button in the application flow that leads to a quick "why are you not applying"? Low pay/unclear duties/want you to be in person? The big issue I see is that it's not clear whether the people complaining are the same as the ones you want to apply - by definition that'd only gets people who don't finish!
I like the idea of adding friction, I do wonder whether it would be more effective if the currency was time rather than $...
I've heard from several hiring managers how much difference it makes when applicants submit a Loom video or a voice note. I do wonder what would happen if you made that mandatory.
I reckon a tonne of people would not apply, and you'd get some of the very real benefits you mention in this post.
I enjoyed reading this, thanks :)
It’s a great callout! I agree that money isnt the only option - it just has to be something that’s not easily scalable. I think the three options are money, time/attention, or networks/connections.
The interesting part is that the Loom/voice note example works whether or not it’s actually part of the hiring process! If you require applicants make a recording and nobody ever watches it, it serves the exact same purpose of culling low intent candidates. The question is, how many people would rather pay the $1 than have to watch a video recording of themself 😅
Although thinking about it - a Loom requires effort, but you could even imagine just requiring them to just spend some time - sitting in a corner for 5 minutes and staring at the wall may be just as effective. Although maybe it’s not healthy for the job market if we start hazing candidates to prove interest?
Great idea, especially because you didn't dismiss it right away and gave it a complete gameplan. Love what you're doing with this newsletter, I've recommended it to my readers in my post today.
The job market is like sex:
Too much friction, and it’s painful.
Zero friction, and it just doesn’t work.
Think about how this will affect the mind of a rich kid and a kid who is a first generation university student. If you think $1 is not much, you are already in the privileged class.
I think it’s a great idea and it’s even a bit puzzling that it wasn’t implemented yet. Probably because job market was rarely (if ever) in such a dire condition, but possibly also due to psychological aspects.
I would use it happily.
Somewhat similar dynamics exists in personal messaging, popular people often get tons of low value incoming messages which could be greatly reduced by “pay 1 dollar to message me”.
Omg I literally was just thinking this same idea. Or something needs to change stat
Disagree, because we already know how corporations would abuse this to charge applicants increasing fees to apply over time then still ghost them and play games.
I like the idea of friction, but giving corporations another way to charge people without providing something wouldn’t work well.