Day: July 12, 2025

As I’ve written throughout this blog the job search process is horribly broken.

So broken in fact that companies are appearing whose sole job is to deal with the HR departments of companies that are hiring.

I got this email yesterday offering a service.

Notice what they’re offering, all for a subscription. 

Really? 

So now, for every position you apply for, apparently HR departments expect a customized resume and cover letter. The cover letter I understand, but the resume? 

Doesn’t that muddy the waters? Just how many resumes must one have floating around in the aether? If all of those resumes are consolidated might it not appear that a candidate was lying, (perhaps a better term would be overstating,) their capabilities?

I’ve paid for a resume rewrite. What I got back was almost completely a lie and it was certainly not something I would, or indeed could defend in an interview.

Do I really want 50 variations like that per week?

But there’s another thing, Something like this adds another layer to the already hyper layered hiring process.

Even now, the odds of getting your resume in front of someone that can actually make a hiring decision are extremely remote.

Job search site AI
Corporate HR AI
Corporate HR committee
Multiple “Interviews” with the equivalent of a Prom selection committee most of whom have no idea what the candidate actually does, or is talking about.
Then a Hiring manager gets a crack at the candidate.
The Hiring manager’s choices are sent back for review to HR and goes through committee again.
Then only on approval from the committee based on arbitrary data points like personality, gender identification, hair color, skin color, equal opportunity quotas, and all the rest of the bullshit that’s “important” today does the Hiring manager get to actually have a new employee. Probably not their first second or even third choice.

(HR and Hiring practices have almost reached the level of Douglas Adams Vogons from “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”)

Vogons: They are one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious, and callous. They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the ravenous Bug-Blatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, lost, found, queried, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. On no account should you allow a Vogon to read poetry to you. –– The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Now, along comes this company wanting add another layer of bullshit only they’re selling it to prospective employees as a valuable service for a weekly subscription.

Really?

There have always been professional job search corporations. Some of them charged the candidate upfront, and collected a percentage of the candidate’s starting salary on the back end. Others just relied on the backend fee.

This company seems like their model is to collect the subscription from desperate candidates, bleed them dry, keep them busy with do nothing, go nowhere interviews, and they have zero incentive to actually find a candidate a job. Without the backend percentage why would they? The subscription stream would be more lucrative.

I’m also not sure that I want someone creating resume variants for me that become a game of “Telephone”. This might work for a sales/marketing department, or a director position dealing with “Soft Skills”. But a technical position? The last thing you want is non-technical people writing a technical resume. 

There is ample evidence why that’s a bad idea in the job listings themselves. Tons of jobs listings are filled with technobabble that means nothing and is used just as filler to make the job description “Look” important or impressive to other non-technical reviewers.

I get that these folks are taking advantage of an opportunity. They’re filling a niche that has been created by the hiring process. I don’t begrudge them their business model.

What I do question is the need for this business model. How much of the hiring process has become a “Do Nothing” (Meaning no added value) series of hands in the pot? When did HR itself become an industry and what is fueling this behemoth?

When does the HR hiring mess reach the bureaucratic level of the Ouroboros?