We talk a lot here about how the Employment System is broken. We talk about how Human Resources isn’t actually looking for resources, and how the “Apply” button on LinkedIn is usually a direct line to a digital trash can.
But sometimes, the absurdity of the process is so high, you just have to laugh so you don’t cry.
A reader wrote to me recently. He’s not a desperate job seeker — he’s a smart professional who got annoyed by the sheer incompetence of LinkedIn’s targeting algorithms. He decided to test the system by doing exactly what I always tell you to do: Do the job to get the job.
The result? A stark demonstration that LinkedIn usually doesn’t work. On the one hand LinkedIn claims its powerful AI matches the best candidate to a job. But on the other hand, LinkedIn clearly lacks the “intelligence” to avoid re-marketing the same job to a person the AI already rejected just a day earlier! How does LinkedIn square this disconnect with its claim that it finds people and jobs?
The embarrassing truth is this dog won’t hunt.
Here’s the reader’s story.
Question
I have been totally annoyed by repeated recruiter advertising on LinkedIn for a VP of Business Development role at Sesame Workshop. I am not qualified for this job. But the algorithm kept serving me the job and insisting I was the one.
So, I decided to apply. But I didn’t just send a resume. I used AI to generate a legitimate, high-level revenue growth strategy for them — basically doing the work of the VP before I even got the interview. I submitted it with a cover letter telling them to stop wasting money on LinkedIn ads targeting the wrong people.
My cover letter to Sesame Workshop’s recruiter started like this:
H-E-L-L-O! This cover letter is brought to you by the letters H, E, L, and O. Given how many times I have seen this ad… there is no doubt you have more than enough people in the applicant pool…
I don’t match the exact required experience, so why the heck are you paying LinkedIn to troll sub-optimal accounts?
What was the result? The Applicant Tracking System (ATS) immediately fired back an e-mail rejecting me and providing a link to apply to other jobs at the company. Clearly, no human ever saw what I submitted.
A couple of days later LinkedIn served the same job to me, encouraging me to apply. For jollies I tried again, but the employers’ algorithm “recognized” me and wouldn’t let me. Just how smart is it, I wondered? And how smart is LinkedIn’s AI? Does LinkedIn’s AI talk to Sesame Workshop’s AI? I altered my name slightly and resubmitted the same materials. This time it let me through. I got the same rejection e-mail the second time from Sesame via its jobscore.com ATS partner. Taken together, LinkedIn’s claims and behavior raise serious questions about its recruiting and marketing prowess.
Nick’s Reply
There are two main lessons here. The LinkedIn hiring funnel is actually a sewer pipe. And, this dog won’t hunt.
You provided a perfect case study of two massive failures in the modern job market: The LinkedIn Spam Machine and the ATS Firewall.
The LinkedIn spam machine
You asked, “Why the heck are you paying LinkedIn to troll sub-optimal accounts?”
The answer is simple: LinkedIn repeatedly spams you because HR departments (and LinkedIn!) measure activity, not results. That’s a critical failure point. The recruiter at Sesame Workshop likely has a metric to hit: “Generate 500 views.” They don’t care that the algorithm is succeeding or failing or spamming the wrong people again and again. They just want the clicks. You are a data point to justify their recruitment advertising budget.
The ATS firewall
I’ve never met a hiring manager that would ignore an applicant who offered a mini-business plan about how they’d do the job. I have preached for years that the best way to get a job is to demonstrate you can do the work. You did exactly that. You outlined a “YouTube-First Pivot” and a “Roblox Economy” strategy. You gave them free consulting. You gave them a roadmap to save their declining revenue.
In a sane world, a hiring manager would read that and say, “This guy might not have the years of experience, but he understands our pain points. Get him on the phone.”
We live in a recruiting world where rejecting a demonstrably good candidate is not counted as a failure of the AI. We live with an ATS firewall that blocks the candidate that shows they think “out of the box” — candidates like you.
The robot gatekeeper
You sent a thoughtful, strategic, and humorous proposal. But you fed it into a machine that only understands binary code and keyword matching.
The ATS scanned your resume. It didn’t find “15 years of Muppet Management.” The robot doesn’t know what “strategy” is. It doesn’t know what “humor” is. It definitely doesn’t know that C is for Cookie and S is for Strategy. It scored you a zero.
So, it sent you the standard “Dear Candidate, please go away” e-mail. Twice.
The Takeaway
If you had sent that same 5-point plan via FedEx directly to the CEO of Sesame Workshop, or if you had found a board member and e-mailed it to them directly, you might have a consulting gig right now — or at least a real shot at it.
But the moment you clicked “Apply” on an automated system, you ceased to be a consultant offering value. You became a row in a database.
The lesson for everyone else: Stop feeding the LinkedIn robots. They have no appetite for your value, your humor, or your solutions. (Some critics go farther and say Job boards like LinkedIn are dead.) Stop waiting for LinkedIn and the HR department to come find you. Because that dog won’t hunt.
LinkedIn: Does this dog hunt? Is it really the leading source of jobs and hires? Does it find the best people and fill the most jobs? How effective is it for job hunters? Is it a job board or a marketing engine that sells little but promises while delivering the bare minimum? What’s LinkedIn to you? Have you ever “done the job to win the job” to impress a hiring manager only to be ignored by a robot?
: :
Years ago, I changed the uPPER cASE with Lower Case letters and now the ATS thinks I am a completely different candidate. I have been getting spam in my in box, Don’t even have to open them, know where they came from.
Evolution will catch up with business in the long run with mounting business failures and low profitability.
The bizarre thing is that HR departments in sufficient numbers have been so gullible as to believe that having scads of applicants from Linked IN is actually adding value. ” Hey..look at us, we’re at the HR forefront, using technology to enable our candidate search”. How in God’s name can you suss out viable candidates from the resulting herd?
@Jim: I want to say it’s sad that LinkedIn isn’t what it could have been. But that dog left the building over 14 years ago: https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/5913/linkedin-just-another-job-board
We’ll be discussing this next week when I present some interesting numbers about “the leading professional network,” AKA, the place professionals that can’t get published anywhere else go to show off.
(Insert photo of Reid Hoffman laughing all the way to the bank.)
@Garp: The only photo of him I’ve got ;-)
https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/6715/linkedin-for-kids-the-biggest-lead-gen-pimp-on-the-internet
I always suspected LI and ATS were bad and not helping HR win the war on talent. But this is utter incompetence.
I’m not a fan of LinkedIn, but the recent experience just proved that LinkedIn’s approach works… at least from LinkedIn’s perspective — a classic ad-management plan.
Think about it: it got not only a member, but a weary member, to click the ad and apply—not once, but twice.
In LinkedIn’s eyes, as a product manager, it works, and it works exceedingly well!
I think this is the issue: job hunters have to realize that LinkedIn is not selling job openings; it’s selling ads—and to that extent, its approach works. So for them, why change it, right?
Job boards, in general, don’t sell guarantees; they sell the illusion of opportunities. Most of those are closed opportunities—jobs listed to secure an internal budget, for attempted empire building, or, most likely, to grow a recruiter’s resume database (so they can advertise that they have X million active job hunters to choose from). Not to mention the more sophisticated cons that prey on job hunters.
This is coming from someone who built a Madgex clone and decided not to release it because the market is simply saturated—there are too many job boards now, and none of them work because the industry doesn’t work.
Job boards are a con to the HR industry—a false promise to make their job easier, but one that only makes everything harder. You cannot automate (until AI came along) the art of relationship-building, which is what job hunting is about at its core. It’s dating, but with companies.
These days, if I wanted to hunt for a job, I’d target specific roles, sending snail mail to the president and upper management with an actual plan for how to make them money (for-profit) or further their cause (non-profit).
@Joseff: That’s an excellent rundown of what is LinkedIn’s business. They try to bury that under AI, intelligent job search agents, the biggest professional network on the planet, etc.
The bottom line is, it’s all about clicks and selling advertising.
Sending snail mail is an interesting approach.
All of us regular readers of the ATH Newsletter are well aware of the evils of LinkedIn and its ilk. I think it’s working well exactly as designed—-treat job-seekers and employers alike as mindless datapoints to be manipulated and profited from.
But my personal story is different.
In the early 2000s I became a 1-man IT department for a commercial real estate firm. (How I got there is another great story but not the point so I’ll skip it.) After a decade of growth there I didn’t have enough life experience to realize the inevitable—there was no career path for me there. I know technology but was working for a company that does not really trust tech so eventually they would reach a cap in what they were willing to pay for my role. When I was laid off because they realized what I did not they provided a generous severance package and I was on my own.
I had not been following Nick’s advice—-make friends in the industry, be helpful and establish strong connections so in your time of need you’ll have friends who might know people they can recommend you to who might be willing to listen to your business plan (my wording—I’m sure Nick states it better) so I didn’t know where to turn. I needed to find employment within 2 months or I was going to be in a world of hurt.
I held my nose and created a LinkedIn profile. I did search and apply to a few jobs there but I was pursuing other paths as well. Suddenly I got a hit from one of the LinkedIn job postings. They scheduled a phone call with their VP of Infrastructure—who never believes anything and has a highly sensitive BS detector. I guess I passed the test because less than two hours later the CEO called me while on an international trip and put me on a speakerphone with his CTO and chief network security guy. Once again I passed muster as evidenced by the job offer I received the next day. Last month was my 13th anniversary and I would 100% recommend this employer to anyone who is qualified.
Why did contact via LinkedIn actually pan out for me? In those days the Founder-President-CEO was *very* hands-on. He’s the one who saw my application and picked it out of the pile and directed his folks to start the conversation rolling. What caught his eye? Simply that my email address has a custom domain that’s a variation of my last name. He figured that anyone technically savvy enough to set that up must understand tech to some degree.
As it turned out the very qualities that made him able to identify a gem (I know I shouldn’t refer to myself as a gem but the analogy fits so I’ll roll with it) and snatch it up made him an extremely hard man to work for. His very nature is micro-manager. I nearly quit a dozen times in the first few years. I wouldn’t have survived in that original role (basically a help desk tech with a fancier title and better pay) but they moved me into a different spot and backfilled that one. Then the CEO began grooming the company for sale (and became much easier to work with along the way as he grew too) and moved on a few years ago.
So did I luck out? Did I win life’s lottery? I believe it was divine providence. In those early days I had conversations with my wife in which she would remind me that the LORD brought about the opportunity and I shouldn’t quit until HE provided clear direction that I was free to move on. I’m glad I listened and stuck it out.
Anyway, that’s my story. I hope you’ll seriously consider the divine providence angle. God loves you and has a plan for your life that is greater than anything you could ask for or even imagine.
I applied to an online job the usual way and included a mini business plan and it went in to a black hole but I also found the hiring manager email and sent him a mini business plan and two days later I got an email inviting me to an interview. I never heard back from my formal application even a year later
I didn’t get the job but it shows how bad the system was.unlike the formal application he never asked for my CV.