More Frustrations on Finding a Job

Today we return to the state of the job market for compliance professionals. Searching for a job these days is typically a long and frustrating experience, and I wanted to pass along another tale from a job-seeker that I think speaks volumes about why that is.

This comes from an accomplished mid-career compliance officer who has had leadership roles at multiple large organizations. They took a career break in the early 2020s for personal reasons, and started looking for new work earlier this year. With the person’s permission, I share their observations: 

I totally affirm everything we hear about how broken the system is. I applied to nearly 80 jobs that were posted directly on company websites, 100 percent of which I met all required qualifications and usually most or all of the preferred ones for. I did not get past [application tracking system] screening on any of them. Literally just silence or auto rejections.

Then I had a recruiter contact me out of the blue for position 1, and my spouse knew a vice president at company 2. I completed several rounds of interviews for both, and in the end got two offers. They actually went back and forth increasing salaries and adding a sign-on bonus to get me.

If that’s not a case study in how messed up the online job application process is, I don’t know what is. There was literally no difference between those two jobs and the 80 others, except that I skipped the whole online process!

I hear stories like this from readers almost every week, and you can find plenty more on LinkedIn and other career development websites. What struck me was that clearly this compliance officer is worth hiring; multiple companies understood that as soon as they considered the person’s credentials and proceeded to an offer. 

But the mechanics that corporations have built to find candidates — the job postings, the applicant tracking systems (ATS), the AI tools summarizing years’ worth of experiences into a few keywords — have become the obstacle. Our talent management systems are choking on their own policies and technology.

How Did We Get Here?

As I pondered my compliance friend’s job search story, a question struck me: Exactly who does benefit from this system? 

Like, those companies advertising 80 compliance jobs — assuming those postings were even real (which is an open question), did those companies end up getting good candidates and hiring someone from the postings? Or did they end up using recruiters and internal referrals too? What’s even the point of online job listings if they don’t deliver results any longer? 

We need to keep a few cynical points in mind here.

First, many job postings you encounter online might not be real. Especially on job market sites (as opposed to a company’s own careers page), a company might buy a group of listings in bulk, and then find that it has more listings to fill than it has actual jobs; so the company posts phantom listings and just collects resumes for future needs that might never arise. Or some fly-by-night tech group posts fake ads to collect resumes to train AI models. Or hackers post fake ads to collect resumes and exploit the personal data. Meanwhile, those job market sites also pepper you with ads and make a few extra dollars that way.

Second, even when you find a job listing on a company’s own career page, there might not be a job behind that listing either. As one HR consultant described it, “These postings often serve as compliance placeholders (to show equal opportunity outreach) or as brand visibility tools … For employers, they’re less about sourcing talent and more about optics, compliance documentation, and maintaining a presence in the labor market.”

Or, as another HR and compliance consultant noted, companies might be required to post a job publicly — say, as part of a federal or state government contract; or to meet a company’s own policy that all jobs will be publicly posted. You can’t fault the intent there, which is to give all potential candidates a fair and equal chance to apply for the role. “The concept is right,” this HR consultant said. “The process is what has become broken.” 

None of that is much solace to the job seeker hitting “Apply” all day long with no results to show for it.

Systemic Failures

Another good point came from a compliance officer who noted that if a candidate meets all the criteria of a listed job and the ATS still ignores that person’s application, “this says a lot about the company and how unprofessional and unethical its hiring practices are.”

That is, the whole point of widely circulated job listings, applicant tracking systems, and AI screening of resumes is to reduce the chances of bias or favoritism creeping into judgments about who to interview and who to hire. But if the system we’ve designed is so unproductive that it clogs the recruitment pipeline rather than streamlines it, and so people rely on referrals anyway — isn’t that a red flag for a larger failure in your corporation, and for corporations as a whole? 

Indeed, just last week we had a post in these pages about a new survey of internal audit teams, and the big risks worrying them as we head into 2026. Workforce transformation and talent risks topped the list, cited by 41 percent of a poll of more than 200 senior internal audit leaders. 

At first I assumed “workforce transformation and talent risks” was just fancy talk for “how AI will eliminate some of our jobs and transform others.” Maybe that’s only part of it. Maybe it’s also fancy talk for “we’re awash in job applicants but still can’t hire the right people fast enough for the roles we need to fill.” 

Maybe corporations should figure that out, rather than spend more money on applicant tracking systems that drive everyone nuts.