Beyond the actual difficulty in doing this without a completely centralized hiring process, this feels incredibly immoral. People have families to feed.
People would submit fewer applications, but each individual application would have a higher chance of success, because everyone else would _also_ be submitting fewer applications. The number of job openings is the same either way, so the same number of people get hired in the end, right?
I think individual companies should do whatever they want (within legal bounds), but such a big overhaul just seems ripe to screw people over.
I sometimes think requiring people to telephone and navigate a voice system to get an application ID before they can apply might help.
Tiny barriers can have disproportionate effects.