There’s something strange that's been happening in hiring for a while now.

Job seekers are submitting more applications than ever.

Companies are processing more candidates than ever.

AI is helping both sides move faster.

And somehow it feels harder than ever for the right person and the right company to find each other.

I don’t think this is primarily a technology problem. I think we’ve redesigned hiring around the wrong objective.

Hiring used to have a relatively simple purpose: Find the right person for the right role.

Today, much of the process is designed around managing volume.

• Companies receive hundreds or thousands of applications, so they add filters.
• Candidates assume their application may never reach a person, so they apply to more jobs.
• Employers respond to the increased volume with more automation.
• Candidates respond by using AI to tailor more applications.

The system becomes more efficient at processing applications while becoming worse at creating confidence.

That’s why I’ve started thinking of modern hiring less as a matching system and more as a congestion system.

Low trust creates more volume

Consider what candidates increasingly encounter.

• A job may or may not actually be open.
• The company may already have an internal candidate.
• The timeline may change without warning.
• An application may be screened automatically.
• Candidates may go through several interviews and still receive no meaningful response.

So what’s the rational response?

• Apply to more jobs.
• Invest less emotionally in each one.
• Keep interviewing even when another opportunity looks promising.
• Assume nothing is real until an offer is signed.

From the employer’s side, that behavior looks like a candidate-quality problem.

Now consider what employers encounter.

• Hundreds of applications.
• Generic AI-generated materials.
• Candidates applying to jobs they only loosely match.
• Résumés optimized for keyword filters.
• People disappearing halfway through the process.

Their rational response?

• More screening.
• More automation.
• More interviews.
• More assessments.
• More stakeholders involved in the decision.

The result is a feedback loop:

Low trust creates defensive behavior.

Defensive behavior creates more congestion. Congestion creates more process. More process creates less transparency. Less transparency creates even lower trust.

Nobody has to be intentionally making hiring worse for the system to produce a bad experience.

More process isn’t necessarily more rigor

This is where I think organizations make one of their biggest mistakes.

Hiring is risky.

Nobody wants to make the wrong decision.

So when there’s uncertainty, the natural reaction is to collect more information.

Another interview. Another stakeholder. Another assignment. Another presentation. Another round.

But every additional step should answer a specific question.

Can this person do the work?
Can they collaborate effectively?
Can they navigate the kind of ambiguity this role requires?
Do their expectations align with ours?

If nobody can explain what new information the next step provides, it isn’t rigor.

It’s hesitation disguised as process.

The same applies to take-home assignments.

A focused exercise can be useful.

But asking candidates to perform hours of unpaid production doesn’t automatically produce better evidence.

More work isn’t the same thing as more signal.

We’re measuring throughput instead of confidence

Most hiring systems naturally measure what’s easy to count.

• Applicants.
• Screening time.
• Interviews.
• Time-to-hire.
• Conversion between stages.

Those measures can be useful operationally. But none of them represents the actual outcome we want.

A hiring process should create two forms of confidence.

The company should become increasingly confident that the candidate can succeed.

The candidate should become increasingly confident that the company is somewhere they want to succeed.

That’s the real product.

Not the funnel.

Not the ATS.

Not the number of candidates processed.

Confidence.

And every stage that doesn’t increase confidence for at least one side should probably be questioned.

A better hiring process might be smaller

I don’t think the solution is another hiring platform.

I think we may need less.

• Post fewer jobs, but make sure they’re real.
• Tell candidates the complete process before they enter it.
• Use fewer interviews, each with an explicit purpose.
• Keep assessments proportional to the question you’re trying to answer.
• Communicate when timelines change.
• Give people closure after they’ve made a meaningful investment.
• Use AI to schedule, organize, summarize, and remove administrative work.

But don’t confuse automated filtering with judgment. Because hiring was never supposed to be an application-processing contest.

It was supposed to help people find each other. And right now we’ve built a system where employers and candidates are increasingly optimizing against one another.

More activity.
Less trust.

More automation.
Less information.

More applicants.
Worse signals.

The answer probably isn’t to process more.

It’s to decide better.

That requires something no amount of automation removes:

Judgment.

—Jason