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Comment by Ncarpentieri4 | Hacker News Reader

I was laid off in november, in vc. Looking for PM/Ops roles. Applied to a ton of stuff where I was a great fit, no answer or immediate rejection lol. I'm 8 years out of school and am not applying for roles that are unrealistic.

I think the entire hiring/search process is so broken. Different applications, formats. Don't get me started on having to fill out sections in a form that are just resume sections (work experience, schools etc.).

Going across big VC firm portfolio openings also super fragmented. It's opened my eyes to how awful the process of hiring is from both sides.

Doing consulting/contract work, advisory, and side projects as I hang on cofounder matching and apply to jobs on workatastartup, wellfound, and linkedin. Pretty dismal job search process.

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>"Don't get me started on having to fill out sections in a form that are just resume sections"

I haven't been laid off but I've been dipping my toe in the past few months because I'm a bit bored in my current role.

The process is much more fiddly than it needs to be. When I run into those 'fill this out again for our system' forms, often times it's after a long day and I will just save it to come back to it later...and I never do.

I wonder how much talent mobility there'd be if someone really solved the issues of repetative job search data entry and just proving to strangers that you can excel in a role without running through an obstacle course that may or may not represent the actual job.

I've had hot referrals that I haven't followed up on because I couldn't be bothered to put all the sections of my resume into their applicant tracking system...

Yeah, it's crazy that we have the tech but every input is so broken. It's like companies just do the bare minimum to set up applicant inbounds and applicants also want to do the bare minimum outbound.

The problem with "the process" has been exacerbated recently (I'd draw the line at COVID) by the breakdown of public trust in corporations and the media.

If you can't trust that somebody who has 10+ years of experience as an engineer at a FAANG company is competent, then that says something bad about social proof and confidence.

Yep. Completely agree. Submitting resumes to black boxes with minimal responses makes the applicant not trust the system of applying to anything, and companies don't trust waves of applicants who "don't put in enough effort" to apply, and the entire system stays broken.

I bet quantifying the amount of good candidates that walk away because of broken processes would be eye opening enough lol. But agree - the amount of times I keep tabs open for roles I'm genuinely interested in or excited about, and then just bail a few days later when I have to fill things out or cut down a cover letter to a specific character count. Brutal.

Two sided marketplace recruiting company is unfortunately entering such a crowded market. The other thing is so many different roles and industries have nuanced ways of hiring. Finance vs tech/startups is wildly different.

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