This is not limited to Canonical. This is happening across the board because it's a buyer's market for labor. The game is stacked against job applicants. A posting on LinkedIn will attract hundreds of applicants, and as recruiter friends tell me, they'll get dozens of qualified people that can do the job. Blame the internet, blame globalization, blame remote work.

At best companies act in good faith but are dysfunctional/incompetent to make this an efficient process. At worst, employers are exploiting the current labor situation to their advantage.

Will this ever change back? I don't think so unless you can eliminate the internet and AI systems.

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bityard 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Cold-applying to jobs on LinkedIn is a fool's game.

How do I know? I did it. A couple years ago, I wanted to make a move to full-time remote work. I liked the people that I worked with, but I spent over a decade there, management started going downhill, and I could tell the company was on a trajectory of slow death. I spent HOURS almost every day for six months applying to jobs on LinkedIn. I restricted myself to positions that I thought I was actually qualified for without stretching. I avoided consulting/MSP companies. I probably applied to well over a hundred positions.

How many responses did I get? Zero. Not a single one. Occasionally, a recruiter would ping me and say they had a job opening that was a perfect fit. Every single time, it ended up being a contract position.

I DID eventually find my current job on LinkedIn, but only because I recognized the company name as one that a friend of mine moved to 6 months earlier. I called him up, asked him how it was, and he provided a referral. It dawned on me after I accepted the offer that every SINGLE job I have ever had was either through a friend's referral or because I knew the manager beforehand. The old adage, "it's who you know," is still as relevant as ever.

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snapetom 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Only job searching through sites like LinkedIn and Indeed are just a huge waste of time. They're going to get at the very least, hundreds of applicants. Thousands if you're advertising for remote. This is all a numbers game.

People will hate to admit this, but the best ways to counter this game is leveraging your network and ending remote work. The problem is the combination of LinkedIn/Indeed and the internet creates a national, much bigger labor supply than a national labor demand pool.

	▲	lovich 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Everything you said about searching through job sites being a numbers game is true but there’s something else going on. At least anecdotally myself and several others in my social circle have been getting referrals from others in said social circles, and then just not getting contacted. The people making the referrals also can’t get an answer out of their hr departments. It really feels like there’s a silent hiring freeze or companies in general have gotten so excited by the buyers market for labor that they have gotten insanely picky

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at-fates-hands 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>> This is happening across the board because it's a buyer's market for labor.

In my region in the Midwest, we have several well known companies that have been doing this for a very long time. They basically promote the same insane hiring process and then compare their companies hiring process to getting admitted to Harvard - they actually say they're hiring standards are more stringent than Harvard's.

The other funny thing is these same companies who hold themselves out as "elite" pay 30-40% less than market rate. So in essence, you go through some insane hiring process, jumping through all the hoops, and you're still going to end up in a job that pays 30% less than every other company doing two or three interviews before hiring someone.

Will this ever change back? Probably when market dynamics change back in the favor of developers, which could be a very long time. I wholeheartedly believe the "gold rush" of the tech industry has ended. Gone are the days where you had 4-5 different companies vying for your talent year after year after year. The whole industry feels like its contracting.