The Main Point

Conversations about whether hiring is broken often turn into a fairly empty argument. Hiring is what it is. If it were truly broken, no one would be able to find a job, no one would be working, and employers would be the first to howl in despair because they could no longer grow.

The situation is genuinely unpleasant right now. The market is heavily tilted in employers’ favor, a single opening can attract hundreds or thousands of candidates, and all of this is happening on top of an economic crisis partly driven by political events. At first glance, hiring should be completely fucked by now.

And yet people continue to find jobs. They continue to earn high salaries, move to good companies, and get on with their lives. That is why I find it difficult to agree that hiring is broken.

I do not want to prove that hiring works by pointing to the number of vacancies on job boards. That number proves nothing on its own. Some of those listings may be dead, some may exist only to collect résumés, some may be there to make a company look like it is growing, and some may advertise positions that no one actually intends to fill. A raw number in a search result does not tell us whether hiring works.

My argument is different. If hiring had genuinely stopped, the consequences would affect everyone. Employers would be unable to hire, employees would be unable to find work, the economy would start grinding to a halt, and companies would try to keep their people by any means available: benefits, retention programs, counteroffers, whatever worked.

But that is not how I see the market behaving. People leave companies without much trouble, companies let people go without much trouble, and somehow new employees are still found.

One important caveat: I am talking specifically about hiring in Russia. I do not have enough experience or a clear enough view of other countries, so I do not want to force my conclusions onto markets I have only observed from the outside.

The Rules Have Changed

I used to say more bluntly that complaints about hiring were mostly coming from people who did not want to adapt to the reality of the market. Now I think that was too much of a simplification.

There are objective reasons to be angry about hiring. There are automated filters, strange ATS platforms, dead vacancies, unreasonable employer expectations, ghosting, endless interview stages, and the general exhaustion caused by the market. A person can reasonably say that hiring has become worse.

But I still cannot agree that it is broken. Some of the frustration seems to persist through inertia: things used to be simpler, clearer, and more familiar, while now the rules have changed. Most people have adapted somehow, but the feeling that everything has become worse has not gone away.

The market has changed. Technical skills used to come first in software development. You had to be good at your job, and that was often enough. You might not even have had a proper résumé, but companies would still find you. Good specialists are still being sought out today; the standards have simply changed.

Being technically strong is no longer enough. Interviewing is a separate skill entirely. It is no longer enough to show up and talk tech with someone you immediately click with, who understands you and hires you because you are one of their own. That still happens, but relying on it alone is strange at this point.

Hiring has become more complicated. Is that a problem? Possibly. But that is a separate discussion. The simpler fact is that hiring has changed, and the people who feel it most painfully are those who are used to relying entirely on technical strength without separately working on interviews, résumés, and communication.

Soft Skills Are No Longer Optional

The market has hit people with no soft skills especially hard, and I understand why. For a long time, you could be a technically flawless candidate and find a job with nearly 100% probability just by breathing in the general direction of a job board.

That market is not coming back. Soft skills have become an important part of the profession, and they will remain important. Self-presentation, communication, interviewing, and the ability to explain your experience properly are not decorative extras layered on top of the real work. They are part of dealing with the job market.

You can be angry about it. You can consider it unfair. You can argue that a good developer should be evaluated by their code rather than by how well they talk about themselves. I can understand that, at least to some extent.

But the real question is: what is a person going to do about it? Anger alone will not change hiring. Hiring has already changed.

Hiring Has Always Been Employer-Driven

Despite all the problems with ATS platforms, automated applications, résumé parsing, AI, and the other things supposedly taking over hiring for good, the underlying logic of the market has not changed. Hiring has always been and will remain employer-driven.

Job boards make money from employers. Employers pay for access, listings, tools, filters, and the rest of the infrastructure. They call the tune and remain the leading side in this process. That is why claims that individual specialists or groups of candidates are breaking hiring sound strange.

Yes, candidates adapt. They apply at scale, use résumé generators, tailor their experience to vacancies, and try to get around filters. But this is more of a reaction than a root cause.

Employers automate selection too. They introduce filters, connect ATS platforms, and raise their requirements. This is not purely the result of someone’s evil intentions. It is a market that keeps tightening the screws.

I am not saying that employers are always right or that candidates should silently adapt to everything. Employers have more influence over the rules, but that does not make all their decisions good, reasonable, or even beneficial to the employers themselves.

The Housing Market Analogy

This reminds me of rising property prices. There is no single secret organization that got together and decided to make housing more expensive so that everyone would have a worse time.

The market reacts to external factors, prices rise, and people who see that growth begin raising the prices of their own properties too. Eventually, the growth starts feeding itself.

Something similar happens in hiring. Conditions change, market participants observe one another, and everyone adapts. Employers introduce stricter filters, candidates learn to bypass them, employers make the process more complicated, and candidates automate their applications. Then everyone looks at the result and says that somebody broke hiring.

I think that is a poor description of what is happening. Hiring is not broken as a mechanism. It has become more unpleasant, more complicated, and less human in places. But it continues to perform its basic function: companies find employees, and employees find jobs.

This Is Not an Excuse to Do Nothing

An important caveat: my point is not that we should fold our arms, hide away, and accept hiring exactly as it is.

Bringing hiring problems into the open is normal and useful. Showing where the pain is, who creates it, and why particular practices make the process worse is valuable work. I am more likely to support that kind of discussion.

What I dislike is arguing for the sake of arguing about whether hiring is broken. We live in the market that exists here and now. The label itself fixes nothing and usually just burns through people’s nerves.

It is much more useful to be specific: this practice damages candidate selection; this filter rejects qualified people; this kind of automation forces people to turn their résumés into collections of keywords; this many interview stages drives strong specialists away.

From there, you can try to bring employers over to your side. I do not mean asking them to become kinder simply because candidates are struggling. I mean showing them a specific problem, a possible solution, and the result that solution could produce.

If a company is looking for the first suitable candidate rather than some mythical perfect one, it is in the company’s own interest not to turn hiring into a meat grinder.

It is also worth remembering that hiring is not a monolith. Not everyone uses an ATS. Not everyone contributes to the decline of hiring through AI, automated parsing, and endless filters.

There are still recruiters who review résumés manually, stop when they find the first suitable person, and do not try to discover perfection among ordinary candidates. That means the dynamic can be pushed in the opposite direction. I am sure of that.

It will simply be difficult. Unfortunately, current market trends do not favor candidates. If the crisis ends and the imbalance weakens, we will need to look at the situation again. The market may stabilize: candidates may search for jobs more calmly, and employers may hire more calmly.

Some will have to lower their inflated expectations. Others will have to wait until the market stops applying so much pressure. But even then, employers will continue to set at least some of the rules because they retain one simple right: the right to hire someone or not.

What Candidates Can Do Right Now

It is important not to mix up two different scales.

At the market level, discussing hiring problems is useful. We can and should talk about dead vacancies, bad filters, strange ATS platforms, endless stages, poor feedback, and everything else. Over time, this may move hiring practices in a healthier direction.

But for an individual candidate who needs a job now, arguing with the market is pointless.

You can spend as much time as you want proving that things used to be better, interviews have become stranger, filters are stupid, and recruiters cannot read résumés. Some of that may be true. But none of it helps you find a job by itself.

If the market requires you to know how to interview, that is a skill you need to practice. If the market requires you to present your experience properly, your résumé cannot be something you throw together just to have one. If soft skills matter, you need to learn at least enough communication not to sabotage your own chances.

I do not particularly like turning this into a moral judgment that says everything is your own fault. The market really has become harsher, and people have reasons to be angry. But anger alone changes nothing.

Adaptation does: learning from mistakes, preparing properly, rebuilding your résumé, practicing interviews, and understanding that technical strength is no longer the only criterion.

Conclusion

My point is simple: hiring is not broken. Hiring has changed.

For many people, it has become worse because their old habits no longer work. This is especially true for those who are used to thinking that technical competence should be enough for everything.

We can argue about whether this is fair and whether it is good for the industry. But as long as employers remain the dominant side in hiring, the rules will primarily change according to their interests.

Candidates have to learn how to play the current version of the game. And if we want to change something, we should stop talking abstractly about broken hiring and start talking about the specific practices that can actually be fixed.