Three years ago, Andrew Stockwell had his hiring routine down to a science.
As head of people for the software-buying company Vendr, Stockwell posted a listing, waited a few days, and then reviewed a few dozen applications—up to 100, if he was lucky. Recruiters identified other potential candidates, adding a few more applicants to the mix. Stockwell read résumés, conducted interviews, and passed along sterling candidates to hiring managers.
“It was really about finding that great talent, sussing out that talent, speaking with that talent, and identifying the best possible people,” Stockwell tells WIRED.
Sometime in the last year or so, Stockwell says, everything changed. The process started off the same way, but within a day or two, Stockwell wasn’t looking at 100 candidates. Instead, he was flooded with hundreds of applications. Sometimes, the incoming topped a thousand. A good chunk were “total bogus,” Stockwell says—fake candidates. Many more appeared to have been written using artificial intelligence, stretching the truth and making it difficult to distinguish one applicant from another. The sheer quantity was overwhelming. Stockwell says he found himself “paying my talent-acquisition professionals—who are high-paid, high-quality individuals—just to look through applications all day long.”
Stockwell is one of many recruitment professionals who believe looking for a job is fundamentally broken. In 2026, job hunting has become as easy as online shopping: AI can crank out tailored résumés and cover letters in seconds. Browser extensions can autofill applications, no human necessary. LinkedIn serves users dozens of jobs a day, many with the option to apply with “just a few clicks.”
“A year ago, every recruiter would tell me: We want to make it as easy as possible to apply for jobs,” offering candidates a “seamless experience,” Ophir Samson, the head of voice AI for Greenhouse, tells WIRED. Samson joined the recruiting platform earlier this year, when it acquired his startup, which used AI to conduct job interviews. “What they got was 2,000 applicants in 24 hours for a job. That is a shitty experience for everyone.”
Good applicants can’t stand out, while bad candidates slip through the cracks. Recruiters, Samson says, face the tortuous task of judging thousands of candidates, every single day. Instead of taking the time to search LinkedIn for dream employees, they spend hours in applicant tracking systems, tweaking filters to try to determine whose applications are worth a 30-second skim.
Now, recruiters are telling Samson, “actually, we kind of want friction,” he says. “The friction is good. We want to make it harder.”
The desire to remove pain points in the application process makes sense: If the highest number of qualified candidates apply for a role, it stands to reason that a company can maximize the chances of finding the best possible fit. So for years, recruiters have posted on job boards and LinkedIn; they signed up for LinkedIn’s “Easy Apply” feature; they promised candidates a “one-click” application process. Post-pandemic, recruiters’ efforts to simplify the process went into superdrive, as employers struggled to fill open roles.
“Everyone was job hopping, because you literally could have three offers in an afternoon,” Jane Curran, the chief transformation officer at real estate giant JLL, tells WIRED. Now, “it is the polar opposite.”
Openings peaked at a record 12.3 million in March 2022, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, followed by two years of decline. Since mid-2024, openings have hovered at around 7 million, give or take 500,000.
But as the number of job openings contracted, the barriers to entry for applying declined even further. AI—which entered the mainstream in late 2022 with the public release of ChatGPT—allows applicants to rewrite résumés and track new postings almost instantaneously. Companies like JobAssist, Sonara, and Ladder’s Apply4Me promise applicants that their technology will handle all the busy work of applying for jobs, by submitting “10x as many applications with less effort than one manual application.” If you wanted to, you could apply for dozens of jobs a day.