(2025-01-09) Procopio Hiring Is Broken And Not In The Way You Think

Joe Procopio: Hiring Is Broken. And Not In The Way You Think. As hiring ramps up in 2025, managers and job seekers alike face a hopeless clusterf**k.* (job market)

As someone who has hired all kinds of folks into all kinds of roles across all kinds of companies, I’ve become increasingly aware of the increasingly difficult proposition of connecting the right person to the right role. But recently, I got a totally different view of the problem.

for the first time since the aughts, I found myself in a position to actually think about and look for my next job.

I patched together a resume, fired up LinkedIn, and most importantly, got in touch with a few of my expert friends, including a recruiter I trust implicitly.
Was I right? Is hiring broken? Absolutely.
Is it even worse than you can imagine? Much.

"Rosa"", an internal head of HR and former tech recruiter whom I’ve known for decades.

she helped me construct the “perfect” resume and make it ATS-friendly, then she and a few others gave me a few hours worth of advice, and I went to work.

over 40 days, I read every word of every job requisition. I applied to every position for which I was remotely qualified, as long as I would fit

I hand-wrote (typed) individual cover letters, well over 200.

I didn’t get a job. Not yet. It was November and December

It became the biggest, longest, lowest return-on-investment project in my 25-year career.

The problem is not just the job search.
And the solution, like I said, is bigger than a blog post.

First of all, I was 100% right about the product and technology fields abandoning innovation and becoming assembly lines for new and unwanted features. The jobs that talented people are good at, the ones that end in results that increase bottom lines — those are getting scarce. With every boilerplate job description I read, Jira, Agile, and Scrum were bigger factors than customers and cutting edge.

Next, there are dozens of large companies built around finding and maintaining a job. We’ve put all our eggs into their baskets and they’re all, forgive me, terrible at what they do. LinkedIn is the only job board that matters, don’t bring up Indeed or Glassdoor or anything else, they’re slightly more useless than LinkedIn.

Wait a minute. Maybe it’s all useless.

Combine what I just said with the battle over RTO, and what that is doing to mask a massive lack in productivity on either side of the argument, toss in employers believing in the promise of AI to a far greater degree than they know about what that promise actually holds, and let’s not even talk about the war that’s coming over H1-B visas.

Maybe all of this is actually beyond futile all the way to insanity. Maybe the employers themselves and the recruiters and the heads of HR are just as screwed as the job seekers.

The real jobs. The lists of duties and tasks that people with talent and experience do with purpose for companies with promise. Maybe those jobs have evolved to a point where shoving them into a boilerplate set of paragraphs and bullet points and splashing them across job boards... maybe that no longer works. At all.

I’ve been saying this for a while now. Your job search should be 80% networking and 20% applying. And if my career has taught me anything, it’s that spending time on low-ROI tasks is what kills most companies.
Maybe that 20% should be zero.

And maybe every resume tweak or individually customized cover letter or keyword role search or location/hybrid/remote filter is another five minutes not acting on what you are really good at and how you can get paid to apply those skills to help a team of people succeed at helping customers succeed.

There’s got to be another way. There’s opportunity there.