Business 4 min read By Arthur Ellington
Glassdoor President Says Job Search Has Become a Lottery
Glassdoor's president argues that the hiring process is broken, with applications per job more than doubling since 2022 and recruiter numbers falling by 56%. The company has launched Glassdoor Recruiter to match candidates with roles using workplace insights rather than resumes alone.
Finding a job has become a demoralising exercise in futility, according to Glassdoor's president, who argues that the current hiring system is failing both job seekers and employers. The problem is not the effort required to tailor resumes and fill out endless application portals, but the fact that this effort so rarely produces a response. Applications per job have more than doubled since 2022, while the average company now has 56% fewer recruiters to review them, creating a bottleneck that leaves candidates in the dark.
This imbalance has been compounded by the rise of artificial intelligence, which is being used primarily to generate and process more applications rather than to improve the quality of matches. Glassdoor's president warns that this approach only accelerates a broken process, making the experience worse for everyone on both sides of the hiring desk. Confidence among workers is cratering as a result. The company's most recent Employee Confidence Index showed that workers' outlook on their employer's next six months has hit a record low, with professionals feeling the strain most acutely.
Yet the issue is not a shortage of jobs. Software postings are up roughly 20% year over year, even as tech employment remains 3.8% below its 2022 peak. What is missing, according to Glassdoor, is the confidence and the right tools to pursue opportunities in a targeted way. For someone considering a move, uncertainty raises the stakes, and a longer list of openings offers little reassurance that the next role will be a better fit. Burned-out workers are less likely to apply for another job compared with those giving similar ratings, trapping them in roles that do not suit them.
Glassdoor entered the scene more than fifteen years ago to address a different problem: workers had almost no visibility into what a company was actually like before accepting a job. Anonymous employee reviews and ratings gave job seekers an honest, firsthand account of pay, culture and management. But knowing what a company is like does not tell a job seeker or an employer whether a specific person and a specific role are right for each other. A resume is a highlight reel and a job description is a wish list; neither reveals whether someone will thrive in the day-to-day reality of a job.
As part of Indeed, Glassdoor is now trying to solve the problem from the employer's side as well. Indeed's CEO, Hisayuki «Deko» Idekoba, has described the hiring process as a «vicious cycle», and the numbers support him: 96% of people who changed jobs last year did so without a recruiter ever reaching out. Nobody designed this system on purpose. It is the result of a decades-old assumption that more is better — apply to more jobs, recruit more candidates, compare more resumes — but that logic no longer holds.
To address this, Glassdoor launched Glassdoor Recruiter this month. Instead of asking people to sort through thousands of listings, it surfaces a much smaller set of roles most likely to align with their experience, goals and the realities of the workplace, drawing on workplace insights rather than a resume and job description alone. Paired with Indeed's hiring marketplace, it also gives people more say in how visible they are to employers, turning the search into a two-way conversation rather than a one-way application funnel.
The future of hiring, Glassdoor argues, is about helping more people find work that fits and more companies find people who can thrive there. Fixing it is bigger than any one company or platform and will take more than better technology. It will require an industry willing to admit that giving people information was never going to be enough on its own. Because finding a job that fits should not feel like winning the lottery.
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