Hiring Is Broken.

Hey there!

I spend a lot of time talking about job seekers. The anxiety, the ghosting, the 200 applications with two responses. That experience is real and it matters.

But I want to flip the lens today. Because the hiring crisis looks just as bad from the employer's side, and understanding it changes how you think about what's actually happening in this market.

The volume problem is out of control

Let's start with a number that should reframe everything.

Greenhouse, a hiring platform that works with 70,000+ companies, tracked 300 million job applications in a single year. Their chief product officer put it plainly: recruiters are seeing three times more applications per role today than just a few years ago. At large companies, a single job posting routinely receives thousands of applications. Their own data shows 20% of their customers see thousands of applicants for a single role.

Recruiting teams have not tripled in size to handle this. In most cases, they haven't grown at all.

So what happens? Recruiters are manually sifting through a flood of applications that has become physically impossible to review with any real attention. The average recruiter is now juggling 56% more job postings than a few years ago, according to Steve Bartel, founder of recruiting platform GEM. The math simply doesn't work.

And who created this flood? Largely, the AI tools built to help job seekers. Auto-apply bots. AI resume writers that produce hundreds of tailored applications in an afternoon. One former president of Allegis Group described seeing grad students who had submitted 1,200 applications in a few weeks using AI tools. That is not a job search. That is an arms race.

The quality collapse

Here is what makes it worse. It is not just more applications. It is more indistinguishable applications.

A recent analysis of hiring data from December 2025 found a single phrase appearing in 7,200 out of 10,000 applications reviewed across multiple industries. Word for word identical. "Strategic thinker with proven ability to drive cross-functional initiatives and deliver measurable results." Nearly three quarters of candidates submitting the exact same sentence.

When every resume sounds the same, the resume stops being a signal. Greenhouse found that nearly 1% of resumes contain outright falsified skills or inflated experience. One percent sounds small until you remember that 1% of 2,000 applications is 20 fraudulent candidates a hiring manager has to filter out.

A 2025 survey from Resume Now, which polled 925 HR workers, found that 90% reported an increase in low-effort or spammy applications, almost entirely driven by AI tools. 94% said they had encountered misleading or inaccurate AI-generated content in applications.

The result: 62% of hiring managers said they are more likely to reject AI-generated resumes that lack personalization. The tool that job seekers thought was helping them is actively working against them.

The "doom loop"

Greenhouse CEO Jon Stross named this dynamic in 2024 and the name has stuck: the doom loop.

Job seekers use AI to apply to hundreds of roles at once. Employers respond by using AI to screen out the flood. Job seekers, getting no responses, apply to even more roles. Employers, drowning in applications, automate more of the screening. Nobody wins.

SHRM's 2025 Benchmarking Survey found that both cost-per-hire and time-to-hire have increased over the past three years. That is the period of heaviest AI adoption in recruiting. The tools that were supposed to make hiring faster and cheaper have made it slower and more expensive.

Meanwhile, 53% of job seekers were ghosted by employers in the last year, according to a recent Criteria report. That is a three-year high. Job seekers are submitting more applications than ever and hearing back from fewer employers than ever. The system is producing worse outcomes for everyone simultaneously.

What employers are actually trying to do

Here is something that gets lost in this conversation: most hiring managers are not trying to make this harder. They are overwhelmed.

When you are a recruiter managing hundreds of open roles, receiving thousands of applications per posting, with a team that has not grown, you are forced into triage. You cannot read every resume carefully. You cannot respond to every candidate. The ghosting that job seekers experience is not usually malice. It is a system that has broken under the weight of volume it was never designed to handle.

The companies I have talked to in this space are not sitting back satisfied with how hiring works. They are actively trying to solve a problem they did not create. The volume explosion came from the outside, driven by AI tools, and the recruiting industry is scrambling to adapt.

What this means if you are job searching right now

The doom loop has a vulnerability. It was built for volume. It is not built for signal.

When a recruiter is drowning in 2,000 identical AI-generated applications, a human application with specific, relevant details stands out immediately. Not because it is fancy. Because it is different. Personalization, specificity, and real fit are the rarest things in a hiring manager's inbox right now.

That is the opening. The students and job seekers getting through the noise are not sending more applications. They are sending better ones, to fewer roles, earlier, with outreach that shows they actually did research. The playbook I laid out in Issue #2 is not just good advice in the abstract. It is a direct response to how the other side of this market actually works.

The system is broken from both ends. But it breaks in a way that rewards the people who treat job applications as a targeted decision rather than a volume game.

Hit reply and tell me: have you experienced the doom loop firsthand, either as a job seeker or on the hiring side?

Keep progressing,

Ford Coleman 
Founder & CEO, Runway

P.S. If you know someone building in the hiring or HR space, forward this their way. The more people who understand what is actually happening, the faster we find real solutions.