>"it's not any kind of paradox"

It is a paradox, because it is a market where people basically only do one salaried job at a time, meaning they have a fixed 40-60 hours to sell and it shouldn't take long to sell it if they want to move on to another job. (Here "selling" means you've been hired for your next job, since you just took the 40 hours you had available every week starting next month and sold it for money.)

Within reason, people can be retrained to adjacent jobs or basically could do exactly what an employer wants within a low number of weeks. People know what kind of jobs they're capable of or it can be tested for quickly.

Instead there are candidates who spend a year both training themselves and applying for jobs unsuccessfully, while employers spend MORE than the same amount of time on that, if you add up the amount of time recruiters are putting in on behalf of employers and HR puts in and employers put into interviews. It is a market failure for people to want to work, for employers to want to hire them, for them to be able to do the work, but for them not to actually be doing the work. It would be kind of like if people were desperate for any of either tomatoes, carrots, wheat, rice, potatoes, or really anything, whatever they get is fine for them since they can look up recipes for that and make it with a tiny investment of time (this is the demand side), so they are putting in ads for "Want any of: rice, carrots, wheat, potatoes, tomatoes" and willing to pay for it! Just put up a hundred ads, a hundred unfilled jobs. On the supply side meanwhile you have a farmer who owns all the necessary land (hours in the day) and has ALL the equipment (a computer, Internet, transportation, clothes, anything anyone needs to start working) and is really willing to produce anything and can do so on that arable land! There are no capital requirements. Great. So we have the demand side taken care of, people want quite a few different types of food and supply side taken care of, the farmer is willing to farm just about anything. But, for some reason, what ends up happening isn't that the fields are filled, it's that there are farmers spending all day every day selling and nobody is buying. And instead of saying, here try this sample, and it's fine, you have a weird request for "What exactly had grown on these fields since the beginning of time" (this is called a resume) and then you have buyers inundated with answers to their bizarre requests for "what has grown on these fields since the beginning of time" but the buyers still aren't getting the food and the fields are empty, the farmers are trying unsuccessfully to sell all day and the buyers are somehow inundated with sales pitches but aren't actually buying anything, while burning time on putting up advertisements of all the food they want to buy.

Why is this happening? How can people not be working but want to work, when they can train into being productive workers within a few weeks and are more than willing to do so?

It would be like if shoppers spent days at a time at farmer's markets going from stand to stand and buying nothing, and farmers spent days at a time standing at the farmer's market with buyer after buyer asking them questions about the history of their land and not buying any damn potatoes. It's a potato lady you want it or not? If not step aside so someone who actually wants it can see it.

p.s. half of the farmers are asking other farmers to endorse them on linkedin. Buyers ignore this noise completely.

The job market is highly dysfunctional.