Employers can’t find talent, and talent can’t find jobs. Welcome to the most confusing hiring landscape in recent memory.
Imagine posting a job and receiving 300 applications within 24 hours. The recruiter is thrilled — until she opens them. Half don’t meet basic qualifications. A quarter clearly used AI to blast-apply without reading the job description. Maybe three are worth interviewing.
Meanwhile, across town, a data analyst with 10 years of experience hits “submit” on his 127th application this month. He’s tailored his resume and cover letter and sailed through every screening question. He never hears back, not even an automated rejection.
They’re both frustrated. They’re both exhausted. And they’re both wondering what’s broken in the job market.
The answer? Pretty much everything.
The Numbers Tell a Confusing Story
Something is seriously off in the labor market, and the data isn’t telling the whole story.
The most recent official unemployment rate was 4.3% in August 2025, up slightly from July, but historically low by most standards. There are 7.2 million job openings and 7.4 million unemployed people. That’s almost a job for everyone who wants one, a near-perfect balance of supply of demand.
But dig deeper and the cracks appear. Long-term unemployment climbed to 1.9 million people — that’s workers who’ve been searching for more than six months. Only 30% of this year’s college grads found entry-level jobs in their fields. Since early 2024, job openings have outnumbered actual hires by more than 2.2 million a month (7.2 million job openings versus 5.1 million hires). That leaves a huge number of “ghost jobs” that never seem to get filled, and they’re sucking up resumes from job seekers who are losing confidence, fast.
Per major benchmarks from 2025, the average job seeker now submits anywhere from 32 to over 200 applications to land a job, depending on the source and the type of role. Almost all candidates believe the job market is extremely competitive. Almost 8 in 10 job seekers experience some level of anxiety as a result — 1 in 5 say it’s extreme.
Normally, data like this would mean employers are in the driver’s seat. Yet, both sides feel stuck. In Indeed’s Survey with YouGov 2024, 58% of talent professionals said hiring has become much more difficult than three years ago. Nearly half of respondents to SHRM’s State of the Workplace 2025 report cited the ‘lack of qualified applicants’ as their top recruitment challenge.
It’s clear that candidates want jobs and employers want candidates. So why can’t these two sides find each other?
What Candidates Are Battling in Today’s Job Market
One big problem is that some employers are still hiring like it’s 2019. Visit any of the countless subreddits dedicated to job hunting and you’ll hear the same story – landing a job has evolved into a second job in itself, and the process is a problem.
Unrealistic role requirements
Entry-level positions demanding “five years of experience” have become a running joke, but the frustration is real. When job descriptions are bloated with difficult-to-fill requirements, and read more like wish lists than realistic expectations, qualified candidates self-select out, assuming they don’t stand a chance. Employers lose talent that could have thrived with modest training.
Lack of pay transparency
When it’s this hard to land a job, you at least want to focus on applying to the right job. But in a survey conducted by Indeed, nearly 31% of job seekers say they can’t find suitable roles because there’s no salary in the job posting – or the range is so wide it’s meaningless. Many are weeks into the process before they learn the salary falls short of expectations, and employers have wasted time interviewing candidates they can’t afford.
Disrespect for their time
What used to take days now takes weeks or months. What used to require an application and an interview now requires a skills assessment, personality test, video submission, multiple rounds of interviews and unpaid assessments. Some candidates report sitting through six or more interviews for a single role, sometimes taking full days off work just to stay in the running. Unsurprisingly, the average time to hire (49 days) is longer than it was 10 years ago (44 days).
Waiting in limbo
For many job seekers, the most painful part isn’t rejection, it’s silence. Companies never provide feedback about why candidates didn’t advance, and often don’t even acknowledge that positions have been filled. In our 2025 Candidate Experience Pulse Survey, 62% of respondents said they’d been ghosted, meaning they made an application, had a screening call, or exchanged emails only to never hear back from the recruiter. Lack of communication erodes trust and pushes good candidates out of the hiring funnel.
No human in the loop
Most candidates use AI to tailor resumes and research companies, but they’re worried about being screened, and rejected, by algorithms instead of actual people. This creates a strange tension: candidates see AI as indispensable for getting past the bots, yet they dislike it when recruiters use the same tech to communicate with candidates. Candidates feel passionately that if they make it to the interview stage, they deserve human feedback not an automated “no-reply” email. This feels like the bare minimum employers could do after someone took the time to participate in an interview.
What Employers Want (And Can’t Find)
While candidates feel burned out by the job search, employers and recruiters are drowning in a sea of mismatched applications. Here’s what they need but aren’t getting:
Quality applicants
One of the biggest frustrations is the quality of applications recruiters are getting. The net is extremely full, but they’re catching the wrong fish.
Some of this is due to opportunistic candidates applying for every role that comes up on their search results. “Easy apply” and AI tools let candidates blast out hundreds of applications in minutes, in the hope that something sticks. But many employers are shooting themselves in the foot because they’re not searching where quality talent actually spends their time. Job boards are an essential part of recruitment marketing, but relying solely on job boards may not reach the best candidates.
Faster processes
Recruiters need to move quickly to secure top talent, but cumbersome approval workflows, outdated systems, and interview inflation slow everything down. Most teams are interviewing 42% more candidates per hire than in 2021, and hiring manager feedback can take weeks, by which time the best candidates have accepted other offers. The hiring velocity many companies need simply doesn’t match the cumbersome systems they’ve built.
Technology that supports them
Technology was supposed to solve hiring headaches but instead, it’s making them worse. Applicant tracking systems, designed to organize and streamline hiring, force candidates to create accounts and manually re-enter information already on their resumes, and clunky interfaces feel like they were designed in 2005. When job boards redirect applicants to these systems, drop-off rates soar.
AI, the latest sexy tool, might be the only way for recruiters to parse the sheer volume of applications they’re getting. But machine filters can leave capable candidates without the interviews they deserve, making recruiters question whether they’re getting a true picture of the talent available. Integration issues compound the problem. Many recruitment tools don’t talk to each other properly, creating data silos and forcing recruiters to manually transfer information between systems. This is inefficiency and introduces frustration on both sides.
What Can We Do About It?
This isn’t a problem with a single fix, but there are solutions.
For employers:
- Make job postings realistic, focusing only on the essential skills for the role.
- Include your competitive pay (genuinely clear, not $60K-$140K) and benefits in the job description. Include information about your culture, growth opportunities and what makes your organization a great place to work.
- Extend your recruitment marketing beyond job boards.
- Use mobile-friendly, loginless application experiences that include your custom screening questions (candidate location, whether they hold a CDL license etc) to capture more qualified applicants.
- Use skills assessments early in the process to identify what candidates can do versus what an AI-polished resume says they can do.
- Question legacy practices that add friction and delay. Can you reduce your interview rounds, shorten interview feedback timelines, and give recruiters the authority to make offers without endless committee sign-offs?
- Send human updates, especially at key decision points.
- Measure the candidate experience, application completion rates, offer acceptance rates, and post-hire performance to see where processes break down and where interventions make the biggest difference.
For candidates:
- Use AI to help customize each application based on what the job requires, but don’t use it to “embellish.”
- Given that the average job hunt requires ~200 applications, volume does matter. But spray and pray won’t get past ATS filters. A smaller number of highly relevant applications for jobs you really want can beat a larger number of generic ones.
- A large chunk of hiring happens through referrals, so let your networks know you’re looking.
- If your skills aren’t current or there are certificates that keep popping up on jobs ads, start upskilling.
The Bottom Line
If there’s a word that brings this together, it’s respect. Respect your candidates; respect your recruiters. Both are struggling right now. And until you fix the systemic issues — the ghost jobs, the communication breakdowns, the technology that creates more problems than it solves — trust will be in short supply, and top talent will keep slipping through your fingers.
Organizations that address these challenges now will build competitive advantages that last beyond any particular market cycle. They’ll attract better candidates, make smarter hiring decisions, build teams that stick around. The rest will keep wondering why they can’t find anyone, even as thousands of qualified candidates scroll past their job postings without a second glance.
The disconnect is real. But it’s not inevitable.
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