Hello, welcome back to Inc.’s 1 Smart Business Story, and I hope you’re enjoying your holiday season. We’re counting down the best stories we produced this year, and first up is this darkly comic look down the hiring process rabbit hole from the point of view of someone actively looking for a job for the first time in two decades. Contributing writer and serial entrepreneur Joe Procopio details:  

Share your most recent hiring nightmare, from either side of the process, by emailing me at [email protected].  

As hiring ramps up in 2025, managers and job seekers alike face a hopeless clusterf**k.

BY JOE PROCOPIO, FOUNDER, JOEPROCOPIO.COM 

As someone who has hired all kinds of folks into all kinds of roles across all kinds of companies, I’ve become increasingly aware of the increasingly difficult proposition of connecting the right person to the right role. 

But recently, I got a totally different view of the problem. And it wasn’t … great.

See, over the past 20 years, I’ve personally lucked into transitioning from one role to the next at just the right time, so I’ve never had the opportunity to experience the modern hiring process from the other side of the recruiting table. 

Until now.

About a month ago, I was separated from my current position after a funding cut left us with a me-or-them situation. Yeah, it sucked. But for the first time since the aughts, I found myself in a position to actually think about and look for my next job. 

And since I’ve been writing about the awful, horrible, broken hiring process over the past year, I was kinda curious to see how it really worked firsthand. 

So I patched together a résumé, fired up LinkedIn, and most important, got in touch with a few of my expert friends, including a recruiter I trust implicitly.

Was I right? Is hiring broken? Absolutely. 

Is it even worse than you can imagine? Much.

Is hiring going to be the biggest and thorniest concern for business in 2025? 

I think so. And I’ll tell you how to get ahead of it. It might sound a little crazy. Because the problem goes beyond just the job search.

About three months ago, in the middle of my deep dive into all the issues with job seeking and hiring, I had an extended and alcohol-fueled honest conversation with “Rosa,” an internal head of HR and former tech recruiter whom I’ve known for decades. 

At the time, I was trying to cajole her into giving me the secrets to making an impossible task—finding a job in a world where LinkedIn is your daddy, AI is your replacement, and we’re all just needles in an ever-growing haystack—less impossible. 

Instead, she gave me tough-love advice that I passed on to all of you—HR departments be damned—and I got tens of thousands of likes for it.

Then the HR gods smote me back to the unemployment line, so I called her again. 

“I’m not hiring you,” she said.

“OK, yeah, that’s not why I’m calling. Can you help me craft, like, the perfect résumé?”

“Sure,” she laughed. “Send me what you’ve got.”

“Uh, yeah. About that … ”

Like I said, I’ve spent the past 20 years doing one thing that led to another, so I didn’t have a résumé. However, this was a golden opportunity to create one from scratch that would be perfectly aligned with what a pro like Rosa was looking for and, more important, what she knew others would be looking for. 

So she helped me construct the “perfect” résumé and make it ATS-friendly. Then she and a few others gave me a few hours’ worth of advice, and I went to work.

Of course, I did it my way. 

I dusted off my 15 years of generative AI and automation skills and worked up some code and some no-code to speed up a lot of the process. I had help—quite a bit of it—and over 40 days, I read every word of hundreds of job requisitions. I applied to every position for which I was remotely qualified, as long as I would fit (I didn’t want to skew the results), I hand-wrote (typed) individual cover letters (well over 200), and I kept a ton of data.

I learned a lot. I learned so much more than I can fit into this column. More is coming, but here’s the headline: 

I didn’t get a job. Not yet. It was November and December and I’m taking that into account. But whether I got a job became immaterial. 

Like I said, I had help, I had coaching, I even had some insiders at the companies I was applying to. Experience affords me these things.

After the 10th time through the process—reading the job post, tying that back to the company’s mission, tailoring the input, and retro analyzing any feedback I got—the whole thing started to feel futile. I expected that. But after about 50 times through, it felt repetitive and demotivational. Then at about 100, all I could see were holes and dead-ends and failure waiting to happen, on both sides of the recruiting table. 

It became the biggest, longest, lowest return-on-investment project in my 25-year career.

That’s the headline. The problem is not just the job search.

And the solution, like I said, is bigger than a blog post. 

I’ve been on this topic for close to a year. This isn’t a tight job market, it’s not your run-of-the-mill pendulum swinging to the employer. You’ve got CEOs out there saying, “I am of the opinion that AI can already do all of the jobs that we as humans do,” without any sense of irony or fear of karma. That is not out of context. That is a cut-and-paste quote.

That is what we’re up against.

Maybe it’s not about “finding” a job. Maybe the problem is finding a “job.”

First of all, I was 100 percent right about the product and technology fields abandoning innovation and becoming assembly lines for new and unwanted features. The jobs that talented people are good at, the ones that end in results that increase bottom lines—those are getting scarce. With every boilerplate job description I read, Jira, Agile, and Scrum were bigger factors than customers and cutting edge.

Next, there are dozens of large companies built around finding and maintaining a job. We’ve put all our eggs into their baskets and they’re all, forgive me, terrible at what they do. 

LinkedIn is the only job board that matters. Don’t bring up Indeed or Glassdoor or anything else, they’re slightly more useless than LinkedIn. Because of that, there is now only one haystack, it’s massive, it’s full of needles, and the more employers insist on throwing job postings into that machine, the more they’ll need to rely on ATS, which is itself slightly more useless than …

Wait. Wait a minute. Maybe it’s all useless. 

Combine what I just said with the battle over RTO, and what that is doing to mask a massive lack in productivity on either side of the argument, toss in employers believing in the promise of AI to a far greater degree than what they know about what that promise actually holds, and let’s not even talk about the war that’s coming over H-1B visas. 

Maybe all of this is actually beyond futile all the way to insanity. Maybe the employers themselves and the recruiters and the heads of HR are just as screwed as the job seekers. 

Maybe we’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic of labor.

But I have a point. 

The jobs. The real jobs. The lists of duties and tasks that people with talent and experience do with purpose for companies with promise. Maybe those jobs have evolved to a point where shoving them into a boilerplate set of paragraphs and bullet points and splashing them across job boards that deep down really want to be social networks doesn’t work. Maybe using god-awful Workday or the like to handle the mindless task of choosing the right bunch of candidates to put in front of a middle manager who is making every move on the basis of whether it looks better than what AI could do. Maybe that no longer works. At all. 

I mean, it’s never worked well.

I’ve been saying this for a while now. Your job search should be 80 percent networking and 20 percent applying. And if my career has taught me anything, it’s that spending time on low-ROI tasks is what kills most companies. 

Maybe that 20 percent should be zero. Or close to it. And what does that mean for companies doing the hiring? 

Maybe, in 2025, the whole job search through a broken apparatus to get to a role that isn’t designed to help anyone—employee, company, or customer—prosper or succeed is … indeed useless. No hyperbole.

And maybe every résumé tweak or individually customized cover letter or keyword role search or location/hybrid/remote filter is another five minutes not acting on what you are really good at and how you can get paid to apply those skills to help a team of people succeed at helping customers succeed. 

I mean, we’re being mass-rejected by computers with just enough personalization and warmth to be extra insulting. There’s got to be another way. There’s opportunity there.

Right? 

Stay with me. Join my email list to get a heads-up as I dig down into this giant and dangerous-looking rabbit hole. Your job might just depend on it.

I’m kidding. Your job won’t depend on it at all.