resume limiting

I think the scheme "prove you're serious by spending one of your 10 limited applications", similar to other schemes like "come to our office to apply in person", is a kind of all-pay auction. People often self-organize into all-pay auctions: "all of you must spend something to compete, then one of you will get the prize". Sports is a big example. The general problem with such auctions is that those who don't win still lose something tangible for trying: time, money, effort, opportunity cost.

One nice thing about market prices is that they allow society to avoid the wastefulness of all-pay auctions. Only the buyer pays, not anyone else. If there are too many buyers, raise the price until there aren't so many. If there are too many sellers, lower the price until there aren't so many. But for that to work, the price must be allowed to truly float.

How does this look in the case of jobs? Offer a lower wage. Or if it's a job where employee value grows with time at the company, like engineering, then offer lower wage at the start and then a gradual ramp: high enough that the employee isn't tempted to leave, and low enough that the company isn't tempted to fire. That's what the market is for, negotiating these kinds of things.

As for what the government should do - how about a safety net? Healthcare not tied to jobs? Allow building more housing? Lots of things. It might end up reducing the resume pressure on companies, too.

[-]Brendan Long2mo53

Lowering the wage is only the right choice if too many qualified candidates are applying. If too many unqualified candidates apply, offering a lower wage is counterproductive, since that will filter out qualified candidates (who have other options and know the market prices).

My understanding is that the problem is unqualified candidate spam, so lowering wage wouldn't help.

[-]cousin_it2mo30

I'm not convinced "unqualified candidate spam" is the right category to draw. Both qualified and unqualified candidates send out lots of resumes today. It seems to me that putting a sacrificial gate will reduce the number of resumes, but the ratio of qualified:unqualified will stay mostly the same, determined by the ratio of qualified:unqualified candidates seeking jobs at any given time.

The real problem is more candidates chasing fewer jobs. The solutions to that are as I described: 1) make wages more floaty, 2) reduce pressure to find jobs. You could say there's also 3) add more credible signals to make job search more informative and efficient. But given what happened with education, I'm skeptical. It turned into this clownshow where you spend years of your life, and go into lifelong debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars, just to send the credible signal. This sours me on the whole signal thing, to be honest.

[-]Brendan Long2mo127

I think the crux here is that I actually do think this is mostly a problem of unqualified candidate spam, not too many qualified candidates.

In the age of zero-cost applications, qualified candidates apply to a targeted set of jobs so they can get the job they want most, then stop applying when they get one; but unqualified candidates apply to every job and keep doing it because they can't pass interviews or quickly get fired. A gate like the one proposed in the post would reduce unqualified candidate spam by orders of magnitude while barely impacting qualified candidates.

Another way of looking at this is that companies aren't stupid. If there actually was an excess of qualified candidates, they would absolutely take advantage of that by lowering wages.

[-]Shankar Sivarajan2mo7-3

Why not the more obvious solution of simply charging an application fee?

[-]JBlack2mo145

I think that would necessarily reduce applications from people with less disposable wealth, unless it was a fee so small as to be useless.

If it became a widespread expectation, it will also be gamed by employers (or "employers") who could advertise positions when they have no intention of accepting any applicants, or firing the successful applicant almost immediately. That seems strictly worse for everyone else.

Even without such expectations, there are some doing this sort of thing right now using any number of whack-a-mole business names. The government here has warnings on their website for job seekers that no legitimate employer should ever ask for any payment prior to employment.

[-]_Steven_2mo10

The fee could be to the government (and this is the way I interpreted Shankar's comment), so a kind of tax on applications. This seems to resolve the issues you mention except for the first one. For that a small monthly subsidy based on some function of income/having a job or not/wealth could be an idea.

Then a similar thing could be done for job openings by companies to avoid fake job listings etc.?

[-]JBlack2mo20

I expect that sort of thing could work in some circumstances. The maxim is "tax what you want to see less of" after all.

The government here currently pays unemployed people a living allowance while they look for work, on the condition that they apply for jobs or similar activities: the default requirement equates to 20 job applications per month^[1]. I suppose the government could both require people to apply for jobs on penalty of losing their living allowance if they don't, and also charge them to apply for jobs, but this seems inefficient.

^{^}
One could argue that this requirement is far too high and I would agree.

[-]Anonymous2mo32

there is a semi-centralized job market for the market for hiring new economics PhD graduates. they allow you to send up to two "signals" to certain job postings. these have no semantic content, but because they are limited, they are taken to indicate serious interest. interesting test case.

[-]Viliam2mo2-2

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.

Generally, a certification code saying: "This is person P's N-th attempt this month/year to do X."

There is no artificial limit for N, you can get as many codes as you want, but only the first one comes with number 1, the second one comes with number 2, etc.

Possible values of X:

apply for a job
propose for marriage
etc.

Those need to be categories listed by the government, otherwise people would hack the system by using synonyms, e.g. "my 1st attempt to apply for a job", "my 1st attempt to seek employment", etc.

[-]bhauth2mo00

No, I think that would be worse, and lead to degenerate equilibria.

[-]Karl Krueger2mo10

These seem like circumstances that support personal introductions, employee-sourced referrals, in-person job fairs — and even nepotism. (Your cousin might not be the best candidate for your friend's company, but if you honestly do not want your friend to fail, you will only refer your cousin if your cousin is actually passably okay for the job. Plus, your cousin is not a spambot, and probably not a North Korean infiltrator either.)

[-]Brendan Long2mo50

I don't think anyone is arguing that personal introductions don't work, just that only hiring through them isn't ideal (since it's bad for applicants who are otherwise good but don't have contacts, and bad for companies because they filter out good candidates).

Moderation Log

18 resume limiting

by bhauth

18th Jul 2025

3 min read

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[-]cousin_it2mo*11-2

[-]Brendan Long2mo53

My understanding is that the problem is unqualified candidate spam, so lowering wage wouldn't help.

[-]cousin_it2mo30

[-]Brendan Long2mo127

I think the crux here is that I actually do think this is mostly a problem of unqualified candidate spam, not too many qualified candidates.

Another way of looking at this is that companies aren't stupid. If there actually was an excess of qualified candidates, they would absolutely take advantage of that by lowering wages.

[-]Shankar Sivarajan2mo7-3

Why not the more obvious solution of simply charging an application fee?

[-]JBlack2mo145

I think that would necessarily reduce applications from people with less disposable wealth, unless it was a fee so small as to be useless.

[-]_Steven_2mo10

Then a similar thing could be done for job openings by companies to avoid fake job listings etc.?

[-]JBlack2mo20

I expect that sort of thing could work in some circumstances. The maxim is "tax what you want to see less of" after all.

^{^}
One could argue that this requirement is far too high and I would agree.

[-]Anonymous2mo32

[-]Viliam2mo2-2

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.

Generally, a certification code saying: "This is person P's N-th attempt this month/year to do X."

There is no artificial limit for N, you can get as many codes as you want, but only the first one comes with number 1, the second one comes with number 2, etc.

Possible values of X:

apply for a job
propose for marriage
etc.

Those need to be categories listed by the government, otherwise people would hack the system by using synonyms, e.g. "my 1st attempt to apply for a job", "my 1st attempt to seek employment", etc.

[-]bhauth2mo00

No, I think that would be worse, and lead to degenerate equilibria.

[-]Karl Krueger2mo10

[-]Brendan Long2mo50

Moderation Log

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 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, 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 a lot of fake job listings.

"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.