Finding a job right now feels like a fool’s errand. Tailoring resumes, customizing cover letters, retyping the same work history into an endless stream of application portals, and then, more often than not, hearing nothing back. The problem isn’t that the search takes effort, it’s that the effort so rarely produces anything in return. The sense that a resume goes straight into a black box isn’t imagined – applications per job have more than doubled since 2022, and the average company now has 56% fewer recruiters to review them.
Fifteen plus years ago, job seekers had a different kind of problem. Workers had almost no visibility into what a company was actually like before saying yes to a job: the pay, the culture, how a manager treated people, whether what got promised in an interview held up once someone started. The information ran one way only. Glassdoor entered the picture to level the playing field for employees and job seekers with an infrastructure around workplace transparency. Anonymous employee reviews and ratings that let people see inside a company before applying worked because it gave job seekers something they’d never had: an honest, firsthand account of what they were walking into, from current employees with no reason to lie about it.
That was an important starting place, but it was incomplete. Knowing what a company is like doesn’t tell a job seeker, or an employer, whether a specific person and a specific role are actually right for each other. A resume is a highlight reel and a job description is a wish list; neither says much about whether someone will thrive in the day-to-day reality of a job, or whether a company will deliver on what it promised. Get that match wrong and the costs compound in ways that are easy to miss: people end up in roles that don’t fit, their confidence and engagement erode, which costs the business too, and because leaving means stepping back into the same broken search, many just stay. Over the past two years, our data shows that burned-out workers are less likely to apply for another job compared to workers giving similar ratings.
Employers are feeling that same gap. As part of Indeed, Glassdoor is also working to solve this problem from the other side of the hiring equation. Our CEO, Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba, called the hiring process a “vicious cycle,” and the numbers back him up: 96% of people who changed jobs last year did it without a recruiter ever reaching out. Nobody designed a hiring process this broken on purpose. It’s the result of a decades-old assumption that more is better – apply to more jobs and the odds improve, recruit more candidates and the right one turns up, compare enough resumes to enough job descriptions and a match reveals itself. None of that holds up anymore.
Artificial intelligence is pouring fuel on that fire. When it’s used mainly to generate and process more applications, it doesn’t fix a broken hiring process – it accelerates it, making the experience worse for everyone, on both sides of the desk. Confidence is cratering alongside it: our most recent Employee Confidence Index showed that workers’ outlook on their employer’s next six months just hit a record low. Professionals are feeling it most acutely, and not because there’s a shortage of jobs. Software postings are actually up roughly 20% year over year, even with tech employment still 3.8% below its 2022 peak. The jobs are there – what’s missing is the confidence and right tools to go after them in a targeted way. For someone weighing a move, uncertainty raises the stakes, and a longer list of openings offers little reassurance that the next job will be a better match. What people need is a clearer picture of what they’re actually moving into.
I think what more than a decade of that data points to is a narrower, more useful question than the one hiring has been asking. The question was never really “can this person get this job?” It’s “is this a place where this person is likely to do well?” A resume and a job description alone can’t answer that. Firsthand accounts of what it’s actually like to work somewhere can get much closer, and that’s the real opportunity sitting inside all the information the first wave of transparency generated but never fully put to use.
That’s the idea behind Glassdoor Recruiter, which we launched this month; instead of asking people to sort through thousands of listings and guess which ones might be right, it surfaces a much smaller set of roles most likely to align with their experience, goals and the realities of the workplace, drawing on workplace insights rather than a resume and job description alone. Paired with the reach of Indeed’s hiring marketplace, people also get more say in how visible they are to employers, turning the search into a two-way conversation rather than a one-way application funnel.
The future of hiring is about helping more people find work that fits and more companies find people who can thrive there. It’s a problem worth solving, and fixing it is bigger than any one company or platform and will take more than better technology. It will take an industry willing to admit that giving people information was never going to be enough on its own. Because finding a job that fits shouldn’t feel like winning the lottery.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
The post Glassdoor President: finding the right job shouldn’t feel like winning the lottery appeared first on Fortune.
