In my recent experience (20 yrs experience so ymmv)

- basically all jobs you see posted on LinkedIn or on big sites are either fake or might as well be because they are being run through HR

- everything is optimized for engagement, not outcomes, so there are lots or meaningless things to do (basically anything on linkedin). You might as well do some of them to stay sane but they'll never get you a job

- what's valuable is networking and getting the opportunity to speak to a real person who might want to work with you. There are always lots of jobs, even when there are no jobs, but there are trust problems, process and bureaucratic issues, and incompetence (all of HR/talent) that need to be navigated

- sort of redundant, anything that's easy (like Easy Applying to a job) is useless. Hard, uncomfortable prospecting, involving real people, increases your chance of success

> - basically all jobs you see posted on LinkedIn or on big sites are either fake or might as well be because they are being run through HR

When I was looking (a while back), my experience was that the big sites are a dozen or so of consultancies and head hunters reposting all the jobs as "an opportunity for a client."

FooCorp (a real company) would post a position. Then headhunters and contract to perm style consultancies would repost it. This way, you'd get 1 + 12 job postings for the same position (assuming that the company even posted it there in the first place).

Next, applying to a position (other than the real one) on that set would get you ghosted (they're collecting resumes to send on and will pick 100 that they feel have the best chance of getting hired before contacting back). Sometimes, they'd call you back with a different position that "you'd be perfect for". Often, the resume that they send on to the actual position is significantly doctored from the original (to the point where its "this person isn't the one on the resume"). In today's world, the "this is an AI fake" is sometimes the transformation that the head hunter does to your resume.

So its not so much run through the company's HR, but run through the head hunter's filter trying to find the "best" ones to send on and for that filter, even though you applied it might not get to the hiring company to consider.

(Anecdote: when I was unemployed looking for a job a number of years ago, I tried some headhunters. One interview that I got they were asking me really odd questions about technologies that I knew nothing about. When it was pointed out that "I should know about these things, its on your resume" they showed me the one that they got that had my name on it... and it didn't match the copy that I brought with the exception of when I got my degree and what university it was from. They thanked me for my honesty and we both agreed that I was not a good technical fit for the position.)

This disaster is why I've built a whole side project automating the act of doomscrolling through job boards, so I can focus on actually talking to people when I find something that does interest me. (And can track the results in one place without repeatedly running into duplicates.)

People forget that finding a job is a sales problem. All the other stuff - interviews, resumes are just sales tools.

Imagine trying to find customers only by cold emailing.