The Hiring System Is Broken: Why Your Job Search Isn’t Working and What to Do About It

The hiring system has changed, but most job-search advice hasn’t caught up. From ghost jobs and AI screening to algorithms that can repeat bias across employers, there’s more happening between your application and a human than you may realize. In this episode, Jill Griffin breaks down what’s happening behind the scenes and why your strategy needs to go beyond applying for posted jobs.

• What the LinkedIn investigation, Workday lawsuit, and new AI hiring research reveal about the systems screening candidates

• Why applying to ten different companies may not mean you’re getting ten independent chances to be considered

• How to shift your strategy toward positioning, relationships, visibility, and opportunities that exist beyond the application process

Sources:
Lauren Weber & Leslie Kwoh, The Wall Street Journal, "Beware the Phantom Job Listing" (2013)

Te-Ping Chen, The Wall Street Journal, "Job Listings Abound, but Many Are Fake" (2023)

Isabel Berwick & Sophia Smith, Financial Times, "Beware of Ghost Job Listings" (2022)

Reuters Breakingviews, "Fake Jobs Hide Cooler Reality for US Workforce" (2023)

Reuters, Derek Mobley v. Workday lawsuit. 

Stanford University, Chapman University & Northeastern University, Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring

Michael Sinkewicz, Fox Business, Linkedin Investigation

Transcript

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The Job Search Silence

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey there, this is the Career Refresh, and I am Jill Griffin, your host. Today we're talking about it's not you, it's the hiring system. I want to start with a question. How long have you been looking for your next opportunity? Three months, six months, a year? How many resumes have you written? How many times have you customized your LinkedIn profile? Or how many cover letters have you tweaked? How many jobs have you applied to only to hear absolutely nothing? No interview? No rejection. Just silence. And now I want you to consider a different question. What if it wasn't you? What if it was the hiring system? You know, for years we've been telling job seekers the same story. Update your resume, use more keywords, optimize LinkedIn, you apply to more jobs. Stay positive. Stay positive. Network harder. Look, some of that is good advice. I've

Mindset Before Strategy

SPEAKER_00 0:58

been talking about for years that if you're approaching your job search or what's next for you with the heaviness of, I hate this, I hate LinkedIn, I hate having to do this, then that is going to create a feeling in your body of anxiety or frustration or anger or in this case hate. And then you're going to be taking your actions from that. And it is going to show up in your results because it's going to feel longer and heavier than it needs to be. And that's what we mean by it's really important to check your mindset. So if you are feeling that way, I get it. It's understandable that some days it's just like, oh God, I'm going to send out more resumes. Step away, take a walk, change your physical state where you're at. So if you're sitting, move. If you can, if you're able-bodied and you're able to move, you know, walk your dog, walk a neighbor's dog, change your state. A lot of times that can help you get a little bit of a shift of perspective and a little bit of a place where you can let some light in and come back to your job search. But for today's topic, I want to talk about the hiring system. And everything I said assumes the process works the way it's always worked for like the last 15 years. And it doesn't. The hiring system has fundamentally changed. And most people are still looking for work in the strategies that were built for a different era. So today I want to want to talk about what's happening behind the scenes, why so many talented people aren't getting interviews, and most importantly, what you can do about it. So while the system has changed, your ability to build a great career built on a strong career strategy hasn't disappeared.

Why Hiring Rules Changed

SPEAKER_00 2:36

That just takes a different approach. And that's what we're digging into today. All right. Let's do it. All right. I want to talk about what is making headlines. So first, this episode, and I'm going to put all of this research in the show notes, is informed by reporting from Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Fox Business, Public Court Filings, uh-huh, and the Texas Attorney General's office, right? This is also research from Stanford, Chapman University, and Northwest, North Eastern University. So again, I'm going to link everything that I find or I used in the show notes so you can also read and do some of your own research if you want. First, let's start with the Texas Attorney General's office or the Texas AJ.

Ghost Jobs And LinkedIn Premium

SPEAKER_00 3:23

They opened an investigation into LinkedIn over allegations of what has become known as ghost jobs. So a ghost job isn't necessarily fake in the sense that someone created it out of thin air. It may have been a real position that was either already filled, that funding may have disappeared, the budget may not have been fully approved, or it may be a company's way of collecting resumes for hiring future, which at that point I would say, then why not use a contingency recruiter and have them work the market, or have them start to get you people, or your own in-house recruiting team to get you people versus fishing for jobs in this way. Because to the job seeker, none of this is obvious and they don't know. So you're seeing a legitimate company with a detailed job description. You know, you hit the apply button, you invest in which resume version is going to hit the right keywords of what the job description says, and you submit it. And then of course nothing happens. So the investigation that the Texas AG is doing is asking whether LinkedIn profited from the listings that may have represented active hiring opportunities that weren't actually active hiring opportunities while encouraging users to purchase premium subscriptions with a promise that they would get greater visibility and access. Boom, bum, boom. Okay, premium subscription, uh at least through the US lens, a business subscription, I think is $539 a year. And a career subscription on LinkedIn is $239. Again, I think you can pay um monthly, which if you are looking for a job and the the bigger nut of the $240 or the $540 doesn't work for you, maybe buy it for three months and see if that works. Again, you'll pay more if it continues to roll on that way. But that might be a way to get around it, just a small sidebar. So if you think about that, right? So if LinkedIn is taking money from people who are posting jobs and then charging the people who are looking for the jobs and acting as this marketplace, but yet those jobs aren't real, but they're offering promises, therein lies the problem. So be clear, this is an investigation and has not been a finding of any wrongdoing. LinkedIn states that the employers are expected to post authentic opportunities. Duh. And the platform provides employers with verification tools, you know, hiring signals, uh, policies attended to reduce misleading listings. Um, the company has also made it clear, the company in this case is LinkedIn, has also made it clear that a verified employer or an actively reviewing label does not guarantee a position that is funded or that every applicant will receive a response. So the legal to process here will determine whether FLAC facts ultimately land and what will play, how this will all play out. But whether the investigation results in any changes or not, it does highlight the bigger issue. Job seekers increasingly don't know whether they're competing for actually real job openings. And that's only the first layer.

ATS Filters And The Workday Lawsuit

SPEAKER_00 6:32

The second layer is technology. And I know you know this. Okay, so many companies are using applicant tracking systems or applicant tracking software, the ATS. And these are AI-powered screening tools, which the recruiter may never even see because it's the filter, it's the filtering, right? This is before the recruiter ever actually sees the application. One of the largest companies out there is Workday. And I'm sure many of you have, if you've submitted an application, you have submitted it at some point through Workday. Workday is currently defending a lawsuit brought on by Derek Mobley, who applied for more than 100 jobs at companies using Workday's hiring platform and was rejected every time. His lawsuit alleges that the automated screening discriminated against him based on age or other protected characteristics before a human being actually viewed his app. Now, I don't know, Derek, but I know my own experiences and I know what hundreds of my clients have been through. I uh am self-employed and I get at times opportunities to contract out. A company may need an executive um coach to come in to help them through a three or a six-month process. They need somebody to help set study the ship or help with team dynamics. And sometimes those opportunities are posted on LinkedIn in which I um, you know, receive a you'd be great for this job and you know, submit. And some of them I've received, most of them I haven't. But recently I applied for something that was late. It was like a Thursday night. It was, I don't know, it was probably 11 p.m. It was East Coast, uh, East Coast of the US. Um, so um New York based. The opportunity was New York based, which is important. So I applied, it was like 11:39. Don't judge folks. Yes, I was up late and I applied for this um contracting opportunity. And I think it was 11:44 that I received uh, you know, thanks but no thanks right back. And I was like, I'm sorry, the odds that another person was working at that exact time to review my resume to see that I was not the right person for this job versus whatever filter in the AI, um, the ATS did not like whatever it was seeing, kicked me out. There's no, there's no way a human looked at it. Can I prove it? Absolutely not. But do I know that to be true? Yes, there's no way a human looked at it within those like three and a half minutes on a random Thursday night. I don't believe it. So again, these are the allegations that workday disputes. Workday argues that employers, not workday, make hiring decisions. And there's the language, folks, right? Because we haven't talked about a hiring decision. We're talking about a recruitment and a filtering. And that's the difference. And I think that's how I'm gonna say that there's squishiness in this because they can then say, well, we don't make that. That's on the employers. Our software just does X, Y, and Z, but it's the filtering in the software that's knocking it out, right? So the question will ultimately be decided by the courts. So definitely watch this space. But during litigation, one stat became really impossible to ignore. Ready for this one? Workday disclosed that its system rejected approximately 1.1 billion job applicants during the period covered by the lawsuit. Think about that. 1.1 billion job applicants. It tells us something very important that technology is not supporting hiring. Technology is driving the hiring. So for many applicants, the first interview is not the recruiter, it's the algorithm. You will never know how you scored. You will never know if someone else advanced and why they did. You don't know what you don't know. You won't know why. You will never know for sure whether a human ever viewed your resume. Okay, let's talk about the third piece.

AI Assessments And Hidden Bias

SPEAKER_00 10:41

The third piece of what's going on, researchers from Stanford University, Chapman University, and Northeastern conducted one of the largest independent studies ever performed on AI hiring tools. Now, let's add another piece of research because it gets bigger than whether or not your resume has the right keywords. Researchers from, again, Stanford, Chapman, and Northeastern studied 3.4 million job seekers who submitted more than 4 million applications. So people applied more than once across 156 large employers across 11 industries. Large employers has not been defined, but I will tell you the Small Business Associate Administration of the US just defined small business as 500 or less. So I'm going with large employers is 501 or more. Okay. So there was something important connecting all of these employers. They were using AI screening technology from the same vendor. Bump, bump, bum. Here's how the screening worked. Candidates applied for a job, completed a game-based assessment designed to measure things like focus, risk tolerance, generosity, other characteristics. I hate these. I've done a podcast about while these recruitment-related games or these quizzes are completely biased and BS, but you know, I'm not in charge of the world. So they will continue on, unfortunately. So the algorithm used their results to place applicants in two categories, recommended or not recommended. So before we even get to the interview, the algorithm may have already decided whether or not you should move forward. And I know I'm not the only one out there who maybe doesn't that do that great on standardized tasks. It doesn't mean that I don't have a high level of emotional intelligence or have not done extraordinarily well in school. I just didn't always do well on those tests. Being a traumatic brain injury survivor is sometimes the way my brain works. Also, any of our neurodivergent friends who are listening to this, it doesn't mean you're not smart. It just means that your brain is working a little bit differently. And the way maybe you read on a screen might be a little slower or differently. Or maybe your vision impaired, as I said here, wearing glasses, right? Anything along that arc, which may have had an impact on your results. So again, before we even get to the interview, the algorithm may have already decided whether or not you're moving forward. So the researchers from these universities wanted to know whether those recommendations showed evidence of racial bias. Hold on. This is where it gets really interesting. So when the researchers looked at the four million applicants, the overall numbers didn't really appear to show any racial disparity, right? Anything that would trigger concern under the US federal government's four-fifth rule. So let's talk about the four-fifth rule, right? It falls under Title VII, which is the 1964 Civil Rights Acts, that you can't discriminate based on race, color, um, gender, and on the sexual orientation, sexual side, meaning sexual gender, right? Uh there's a movie which you may have seen called On the Basis of Sex, which is the story of how in the US, Title VII was used to make sure that women weren't discriminated against. It's also the story of how Ruth Bader Ginsburg really elevated to the top and argued her first case against the Supreme Court before she actually became a justice. So let's look at the four-fifths rule, right? It looks at selection rates. So when you're doing hiring, there's something, um, it's it's basically the adverse effect, right? So it's this idea that is their adverse impact. So four-fifths or 80% is the way one regulators look for possible discrimination in hiring or promotion decisions. So what it says is first you identify the group that has the highest selection rate. And in this case, the highest selection rate was white people. Then you compare it to every other group's rate to that one. So, example, if you have 50 white males in the applicant pool and 25 are selected, that means your selection rate is 50%. Now you take that four-fifths rule or 80% of the 50% selection rate, that gives you 40. So another group would need to be selected at a rate of at least 40% to stay above the four-fifths threshold. So if 50 black applicants applied, at least 20 would need to be selected to reach that 40% rate. If only 15 were selected, now that's at a 30% selection rate. And therefore, that would fall below the 80% threshold. And therefore, you could say adverse impact. Now I want you to hear me. When I'm saying selection, I am not saying hired. I'm saying selected for the pool of applicants. So it's really important that you want the 80% of the selection rate, not 80% of people in a group. This is what your HR people, they're not, they're not doing this math anymore raw. They used to do it raw. What they're doing now is they're doing it in these systems where they're making sure that they're not discriminating against a certain class, uh, not of the hiring, of the selection pool. And it's that's essentially what the research has uncovered. The discrimination disappeared in the averages while showing up at the individual job level. Researchers calculated that if black and Asian candidates had been recommended at the same rate as the most favored racial group, the white group, for each position, approximately 40,000 additional applicants would have moved forward. 40,000. Now, that doesn't mean that 40,000 would have been hired, right? It's the application pool. And what the four-fifths of the 80% rule says is that you want to make sure you diversify the applicant pool. So I, as a white female who uh lives on the East Coast of the United States in New York City, went to St. John's University. If I only recruit white females who are East Coast, New York City specific, and went to St. John's University, guess what? I'm not gonna have a very diverse applicant pool now, am I? It is on me as an employer or as a hiring manager or however it's set up within your organization, if you have internal recruitment or external recruitment, however it's done, to go out of my way, yes, to go out of my way to make sure there are extraordinarily talented graduates of historically black colleges and university. And it behooves me to go to make sure, because when I have diverse teams and diverse people, in the end result, I have a diverse product and I have a stronger product in the end. Again, we are not talking about the hiring results. We are talking about the applicant pool. And if I diversify the applicant pool, I'm most likely going to have a more representative example of my end employees, which, as I just said, a diverse example of employees is going to be to bring diversity of thought, diversity of experience, diversity of our own biases, a stronger product, more innovation, more representative of the people who are actually using your product, right? It's why we want to make sure things are diverse. So that's number one. There's another thing from this study which I think matters just as much as anyone who's been searching for a job for months saying, what the heck is happening? And that is that the researchers are calling it the algorithmic monoculture. Okay,

The Algorithmic Monoculture Trap

SPEAKER_00 18:37

this is gonna be a new word that y'all are gonna be hearing. That's the academic term for a very simple problem, which is what happens when lots of companies using the same technology decide who looks like a good candidate. So we tend to think about job applications as independent opportunities. A company A they reject you. Okay, so maybe you're a better fit for company B. Company B rejects you. Okay, maybe company C will see something different. And that's how healthy employment markets should work. Different companies have different cultures, different priorities. They have different hiring managers with different ideas about talent. Again, diversity of thought, diversity of experience, diversity of uh the alcohol representation of your people. But what if companies A, B, and C are all using the same vendor and the same algorithm? Now you're not getting three independent evaluations. You are effectively getting variations of the same evaluation three times. So research has found evidence of that problem exactly. So among people who applied to 10 positions using the particular assessment system, 4% received do not recommend across all 10, the decisions for all 10. So research has found that universal rejections happened more often than they would have been expected if each company were independently evaluating their candidates. I mean, people, come on. So think about what that means for a job seeker. You apply to 10 different companies and you believe you created 10 different opportunities. But behind those 10 company logos is the same dang technology making highly correlated judgments about you. And that's the part of the research that I don't want us to miss. We constantly talk about how candidates can game the system. Did I use the right keywords? Is the resume the right format? Did you optimize for the ATS? Well, we might want to be asking ourselves if the system itself is creating the bottleneck. Because when a handful of technology companies build the tools that hundreds or thousands of employers are using, one flaw suddenly affects everything. It scales, it travels. And what looks to be like 10 separate opportunities that someone said no on, suddenly you're realizing that this is completely different and that all these opportunities are making the same judgments again and again and again and again because it's the same dang system. So

Building Side Doors Through People

SPEAKER_00 21:18

that changes about how I would tell you to think about job search strategy. This doesn't mean you stop applying, friends, right? Because again, across all of this, ageism is as is prevalent right now as is the things that we're seeing around the biases around race and gender, right? So it's across the board. I'm not telling you to stop applying. What I'm telling you is that it cannot be your only strategy. Right now, what I'm seeing is 90% of the time, people are spending all their time applying and 10% on relationships. And I'm gonna say to you if contact if technology is c is is basically controlling that filter and that front. Front door for you, you need to spend more time figuring out side doors that still involve humans. This is relationships and introductions and former colleagues and professional associations and industry events and alumni events and recruiters who know your work or get to call recruiters and get them to know your work, right? It's people, it's finding the people who can put your name directly in front of the decision maker. And this is why I keep coming back to networking. It's why it is so important. You want to be with people who can directly put your name in front of a decision maker. This is why the networking is so important. Because if one hiring platform is used across a hundred companies and that bias, again, everything from age, sex, gender exists, then it's not going to stay. It's going to continue to scale. So when we put these three stories together, an investigation into whether people are applying to jobs that they may not have been actively hiring, a lawsuit that's questioning how AI screens candidates before recruiters actually see them, and research examining whether those systems can unintentionally produce bias outcomes at scale, different companies, different legal questions, one common thread. Technology sits now between you and the opportunity. And I think that's where we need to change the conversation. Because before people start telling themselves that I'm too old or I'm not right or my resume isn't good enough or my experience doesn't matter anymore, or wisdom has left the building. I want you to think through and really pause. Because sometimes you're not going to be the right person for the role. Sure. But often that isn't true. That you have it is it's true that you have an outstanding resume, you have years of experience, you have excellent references, a strong profile, but you never actually got uh put in touch with or cross with a human being. And it's not because you failed, it's because the hiring system has failed you and it has changed. Listen, I don't want you to hear this episode as defeat. I want you to understand because awareness proceeds change. We need to accept where we are in the realities of a situation so that we can then move forward in it. And the reality of the situation is what I just told you. So I want you to leave thinking differently because you may not control the hiring system, but you absolutely can control your career strategy. And this is what I've done, folks. This is what I've done for years is helped people. What I've been seeing is exceptional backgrounds doing everything right, everything they were told to do. Then we started working together and realizing that it wasn't just about resumes. You need to tell a story. You need to tell them why you were the solution for the problem. But I think too many professionals are playing solely on yesterday's rules and they're spending the time applying, not the time building relationships. So if you've listened to my podcast for a while, you know that I've said this before. Careers are moving at the speed of conversations, not applications. So someone is going to say to a hiring manager, Oh, yeah, have you talked to Jill? You have to talk to her. You need to talk. This, I know someone who will be great. This is what you need to be on the short list for. That's not luck. That's the reputation, the relationships, the visibility. So instead of thinking to yourself, how many jobs did I apply to this week? I want you to be thinking, how many meaningful conversations did I have this week? How many colleagues did I connect with from my past lives? Did I help people? I don't want you to do invisible labor, but did you help people in some way to create value? Did you go to industry events or networking or workshops or talks? Did you ask for introductions? Did you speak with hiring managers before they were actually hiring? That's where it starts to shift. That's where I want you to think about the opportunities begin at that relationship level. And the second thing is we don't need to stop leading with the job title. We need to lead with the problem that you solve, right? Don't tell people you're looking for a head of role or a director of sales role or something. No one cares about the title. No one cares about your career. No one cares about the title. Tell them what you're exceptionally good at. Tell them that you're the person who helps organizational stabilize teams after restructuring, or that you build many high-producing sales organizations. Or maybe you're the person they call when they're looking to grow quickly and the systems start to break, and you're the person who understands operationally how to hold that together so that we don't bust at the seams. People remember problems. They don't remember titles. All right, third shift that I want you to do is visibility. I want you to start writing. Comment thoughtfully, share lessons, speak. Do not use AI for this. You can use AI as a strategic thought partner to help get your ideas, but you got to put it in human voice because we can all tell when it's AI and no one wants to read that anymore. I've even read that LinkedIn is trying to suppress some of those AI responses because they're just dopey and no one wants the soul is cut out of them. No one wants to read it. It's just that's that AI work slot that no one wants to read. So offering your perspectives, you don't need to become an influencer. And please don't become an influencer. We don't even anymore influencers. But you need to become visible as a writer, as a thought leader, as someone who has an opinion. And that might mean doing it through threads, it might be through X, it might be LinkedIn, it might be Substack, it might be your own blog, your own platform. I often recommend get, you know, building a digital portfolio. It could be there too. You decide where it is for you. And again, you don't have to become a content creator. You just have to be thinking through how are you offering your perspective? And then finally, I want you to expand your definition of opportunity. So many people are looking for full-time roles. And if that's what you want, I want that for you. However, in today's career landscape, it's including consulting, freelance, fractional, part-time. It's called different things in different areas. So you need to massage all of those keywords when you're looking. Fractional leadership, interim role, board service, project work, advisory, contract engagements, all different phrases and words that you can be using and looking for. Now, I don't want you to go into a conversation and say, I'm looking for fractional or full time, right? Because that can confuse the person on the end. I want you to lead with one, but then say you're also opening to the other, depending on the conversation. Again, if you and I aren't talking, it's hard to customize the specifics for you. But thinking through, you don't want to go into a conversation saying, I'm open to everything. No, you want to give a point of view that if I was to be full time, here's how I approach it. But I also look at an enormous value if I was fractionally helping the team and here's what I would do. That's what I'm saying. These opportunities often become permanent because someone behind them that's making the hiring decision now has a taste and a sample of your work. All right. Listen, one final thought. Most successful professionals aren't the ones with the best resume. Trust me, I see them. I see them all the time. They are the people who adapt. They understand the rules have changed. They stop asking, I gotta beat the algorithm. How do I get past the ATS? And they start asking, how do I become known for solving important problems? Algorithms, they rank resumes. People hire people. Relationships still matter, trust still matters, expertise, reputation, all of these things matter. We're not starting over. It just means your strategy needs to evolve.

Reach Out And Keep Your Worth

SPEAKER_00 29:21

Friends, if today's episode resonated with you, I want to hear from you. You know I do. I want to hear what it's been like, what the jobs have been like. Have you been experiencing this? You know, you can email me at hello at JillGriffincoaching.com. That is a great place. And if you are in this market and you're looking for help, this is what I will tell you to do. The traditional job search asks you to complete more for the posted roles. And I believe that you need to be a market maker, that you need to create demand for your experience through sharpening your positioning, building stronger relationships, and a strategy that reaches out beyond that application process. And if that is something that interests you, my information is in the show notes. I would be love to have a conversation with you and see how we can shape your results and what's possible for you. All right, until next time, remember this do not confuse a broken process with your worth. It's not you. This is really a new good time. You could say it's not you, it's them. It's a hiring system. And once you understand the system, you get a chance to build a smarter strategy for navigating it. Friends, work on your positioning. Don't let your mind run away with wild thoughts that are unhelpful for you. It's not helpful. And always, always, always be kind. All right. I'll see you next time.