There are many, many things that are dysfunctional at the moment, but — in north America at least — the job market is egregiously bad. To invoke Corey Doctorow’s phrasing, it seems particularly enshittified, and it’s not serving anyone well.

I say this from both an employee and employer perspective. Let me explain.

My kids have been looking for work. A lot of job search sites, in order to appear useful, are stuffed full of “job ads” for positions that either never existed, or existed once and are long since out of date. That’s because the site has “scraped” (read: copied and pasted en masse) job listings from all over the Internet and slapped them up, usually without the original poster’s permission or knowledge. There they sit, for job seekers to waste time reading and applying to, unless they happen to notice the tiny disclaimer at the bottom.

These sites are also populated by any number of work from home scams, preying on people’s need to make rent, promising easy money and no commute. Of course, rather than properly moderate the content, job sites wash their hands of any responsibility with another tiny print disclaimer.

Then there’s the job sites where the job seeker has to pay a membership fee in order to view jobs, the promise being that they’re vetted and legit. Are they? Who knows? It would be impossible to tell whether your credentials are actually being forwarded and rejected or whether they just disappear into the ether. And by the time you decided it wasn’t worth your time, the company will have made a month or probably two of membership fees off you.

A lot of big companies don’t bother with job aggregator sites because they’re big enough and well known enough not to have to. Everyone knows about McDonald’s, for example. But from an employee point of view, this means you have to search up all these individual businesses, dig up the jobs page, and then begin the application process.

There is no standard for resumes. I mean, there theoretically is, but now some companies require you to upload a PDF, while others make you type all your stuff out all over again via a form on their website. Some want a cover letter. Some don’t. Some demand you upload some kind of identity verification, and you basically have to cross your fingers and hope the site stays secure.

Of course, these big, well known companies get so many applications, they resort to filters and AI to screen the applications. We all know how well those work in real life. How many good candidates have been passed over because they didn’t include a certain keyword in their application?

And references? I’ve written before about how these are really a waste of everyone’s time. Getting references is awkward and time consuming. Sometimes impossible if you don’t want your current position to know you’re looking and your previous positions were a long time ago. And no one is going to put down a reference that isn’t going to sing their praises, truthfully or not, so they really don’t add anything to the process. (Side bar: I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard managers talk about how they provided a reference for a troublesome employee solely to help them find a job elsewhere and become someone else’s problem. Which I can sort of, maybe understand but also: yikes!)

I run a small business. From the employer point of view, the job market is equally bad.

If you’re not a big company, you have to post frequently to social media and hope the algorithms show those particular posts to suitable job seekers. Or you have to resort to using job sites. The employer has to pay a fee to list a job on those aggregator sites above. The fees used to be flat, but certain sites now charge on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. This sounds good at first, because it looks cheaper. But you have to keep a careful eye on your budget, because if there are a lot of people looking work, your PPC will soon outspend what a flat fee would have been.

A job I posted recently got more than one hundred applications. I got resumes from… a phlebotomist … a furniture sales person… a bakery clerk… and someone who’s only job experience (a decade ago!) was a carnival ride operator. Can you tell what position I posted? Apparently neither could the majority of the applicants. That’s because these job sites make it easy to just throw your resume at absolutely everything. This wastes everyone’s time, but especially the person who has to review all those applications (and it’s why big corporations now make you type everything out in their web form). And remember, employers pay on a PPC basis, so we essentially paid to receive resume sp*m.

Of the one hundred applications, about eight had qualifications that were reasonably close to what we were looking for. Five responded to interview requests. One was a no show, with no explanation.

And of course, AI crap is at play on this side as well. I made the mistake of requesting cover letters for the last position I advertised, and was inundated with letters quite obviously written by some machine based on the job ad, not based on the person’s listed qualifications. Oi vey.

The whole system is not only broken, it’s ridiculously adversarial. And it makes the standard Boomer advice (“just get out there and bring in your resume directly to the owner, shake their hand”) absolutely laughable. Those days are long gone. Corporations don’t take resumes from people off the street anymore, and small business owners don’t have the time to meet everyone looking for work. Keeping resumes on file isn’t terribly useful either, unless you have a good system for dating and purging them, otherwise you waste a lot of time reaching out to people who found a job elsewhere since they came to your establishment.

How do we fix this? I am going to throw the question open to the comment section. Give me your best ideas, or if the system is working where you live, tell us why and how. And if you don’t have anything about that, talk to me about your job seeking or job filling experiences.

Visit the blog at The job market is broken.