OP, there is no paradox.

A paradox is a circular contradiction and its fact that its gotten a whole lot harder on both sides (there is no contradiction).

Honestly, what's happening is a bit more nuanced. It is a purposeful economic attack. I know that sounds controversial but hear me out.

Towards the end of 2022, anyone unemployed saw marked increases in difficulty in finding work of all kinds starting shortly after the public release of Chat-GPT.

Within 3 months, conversion of application/resume to callback went from roughly 1.5% per 100 for System Engineer level positions to less than 0.0015% just ballpark (from personal numbers). The number of posted jobs greatly increased, but they were not real jobs, and the fake jobs that you used to be able to differentiate between could no longer be differentiated.

This is economic interference between employer and employee relations, its purposeful, and; mind you, this is largely before all the layoffs, its continued to get worse.

A solid 70% of IT related jobs posted on Indeed, Monster, and Linked in are employers who either have no position available, or are not actually hiring. The platforms do not appear to be removing listings of fake companies nor do they do a proper due-diligence vet on them. Its a free for all, and they are incentivized to make it this way to guide you to paid services. (Parasites)

For example, one infamous company that does this is Patterned AI, they used various iterations of that name on LinkedIn, and you get hit by a slew of various spam and advertisements the moment you apply (across all associated devices).

I've run across many companies that fail a very basic Secretary of State (SOS) lookup (i.e. they aren't companies who are registered with the SOS to do business in the state, but they advertise in that state (not remote).

Many also are companies that appear to be shill companies. They may pass a basic SOS lookup, but it may be a corporation who has only one person on the BOD, with alternating failures to provide the required Information forms, and the on-premise location may in actuality be registered to a UPS store or other type of mail location, any number of other red flags (not going to list them all here, but you can get a good idea of what I look for in terms of it being an operating business). Some are even registered in Google as being present at that physical location (when they aren't). I literally reported 14 companies yesterday that were doing that where there is no public contact/revenue stream that works (i.e. dubious website with contact info that is disconnected and no longer in service), yet job posted that day.

The problem is, there is no immediate penalty for companies engaging in this bad acting. Its not getting attention by legislators, DAs or AGs.

Additionally, head hunters are incentivized to do this since it makes their services more attractive to both employers and prospective candidates. This includes HR AI based services to algorithmically weed out resumes.

There are companies that engage in data harvesting without your knowledge, and thanks to a mail server I set up (unique resume attached to unique alias for each one), I've got a blacklist that I no longer apply to, but in general this is an extraordinary measure just to find out who not to apply to.

I've been looking for roughly 2 years now, thousands of resumes, 9 1/2 YOE in IT System's Engineering, a few calls but no offers. Granted its a bad time right now to find IT work in general.

There are companies that will even call you in for an interview, but then press you on confidential information you can't disclose from previous employers (I've walked out of several of these, and reported them to my states AG).

Overall, as a job seeker, its impossible to find a job. You have finite time to apply and you no longer know if the job actually exists, and the cost to vet companies is borne solely by you, and you really shouldn't have to have an intimate knowledge of Open Source Intelligence (querying various governmental records) to determine a risk score of the company existing or not.

As an employer, there are a lot of options to find qualified people which simply are not being done because of laziness or unrealistic expectations. It shouldn't take more than three interviews to get an idea of how the candidate is going to work out.

Most employers shoot themselves in the foot by requiring Certifications or Bachelor's Degrees when people have the appropriate experience doing that job. In this respect, it is basically a cult of qualification, where you aren't qualified if you don't have the paper, and that's farcical. Also using that at as a negotiation tactic to lowball suppress wage negotiations, or bait and switch is also a surefire way to weed out anyone that might have the skill. "I see you don't have ..., we can't pay you what we would pay a qualified person but we have another position at (minimum wage, same responsibilities)."

Anyone thinking that's not going to backfire spectacularly is just plain stupid and malevolent.

Personally, I think it should be illegal and self-enforcing to post a job as being available when no job actually exists, and it should be so severe that it puts any company engaged in that activity out of business.

The problem is interference has gotten to the point that no one can find the other party. This effect is known in the scientific community because it happens in a number of other systems, (i.e. RNA interference, USDA agriculture controlling parasites such as the screw-worm etc).

The reason why I say its purposeful is, there isn't much money in this.
When people cannot find jobs, they stop looking in that sector. There is an understanding that you go where the jobs are. Unfortunately, there is now no good way to retool or even know which sector to go into. Vocational training has been gutted over the past 20 years, and anyone over the age of 25 isn't eligible. College now requires Marxist DEI re-education for graduation (Ethnic Studies).

Food stamps currently only provide support for 1 week of food per month at local price levels.

When you cannot find a job at all, because of various interference's outside your control, and social support systems fail to the point where you start starving, that historically inevitably leads to violent unrest and rioting.

It also doesn't help that I can now theoretically go and take entry level work in retail and get paid almost as much per hour as I could make white collar with a boatload of responsibility as a T2 technician (20-25$/hour) at a MSP.

Any solution would require major structural changes, legislation, and regulation of online platforms, and criminal penalties.