# resume limiting

## the problem

In America, it's become fairly common for people looking for a job to send out a lot of resumes, sometimes hundreds. As a result, companies accepting resumes online now tend to get too many applications to properly review.

So, some fast initial filter is needed. For example, requiring a certain university degree - there are even a few companies who decided to only consider applications from graduates of a few specific universities. Now that LLMs exist, it's common for companies to use AI for initial resume screening, and for people to use LLMs to write things for job applications. (LLMs even [seem to prefer](https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12856) their own writing.)

People who get fired more, or pass interviews less, spend more time trying to get hired. The result is that job applications are now a [lemon market](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons), and people who can get hired by references or anything other than online job applications prefer to do that instead.

People sending out hundreds of job applications just for most of them to be thrown away before a human looks at them amounts to a massive amount of wasted effort.

There [are also](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fake-job-listing-ghost-jobs-cbs-news-explains/) a lot of [fake job listings](https://builtin.com/articles/ghost-jobs).

> "They may do it to suggest that they're hiring so if you're an employee you'll think, 'We'll relieve you of your workload'," Haller said. "It may also be to say, 'We're a growing company.' On the darker side, it could be to say, 'We're looking to replace you, so you better work harder'." 

Such fake openings are also sometimes used to collect information about the worker pool, or meet legal requirements for hiring H1B workers.

> According to workforce analytics firm Revelio Labs, a job posted in 2024 is half as likely to result in a hire than a job posted four years prior. The findings, which analyzed online job listings and professional profiles, found that less than four people were hired for every 10 job listings in 2024, which is down from eight hires per 10 postings in January 2020.




## proposed solution

I think governments should offer a program that lets each individual get certification codes that prove that a job application is one of the first X job applications sent per Y time, perhaps the first 10 applications per month sent by that person. Companies would then have the option of providing a field for certification codes and looking at those certified applications first.

I think companies would be interested in using that as an initial screening approach, because if your company is one of the first choices for someone's limited number of job applications, that means:

- they're more likely to accept an offered job
- they're not disproportionately likely to be someone making up for poor success rates by sending a massive number of applications
- there's a decent chance they looked at what your company does and are a relatively good fit for that thing

I suppose you could also have some regulations that companies that accept these certification codes have to consider certified applications first and have to actually hire someone for that position, but I think just the existence of some way for people who don't want to send out hundreds of job applications to show they're not doing that would be a big help.


## government vs private

In theory, a private organization could provide such a certification system, but the trust and coordination problems seem to make that impractical. Coordination issues rule out any organization that's not large and well-known doing this, and if you consider large private organizations, trust issues include:

- Meta: What are they going to do with that information collected?
- large charitable NGOs: Are they going to limit people/companies according to some ideology?
- Apple: Are they going to try to monetize their status, and add fees until it's barely worth using the system?
- Google: Are they going to add a ton of advertising, or end the service after a couple years?

So yeah, it would pretty much have to be a government thing - but it wouldn't necessarily have to be from *your* government. Other countries could plausibly use a US or EU system. That might be how such a system could actually get implemented: by framing it as a way for the US and EU to compete over digital influence.