The Broken Fruit Machine: “Why am I not getting job interviews after applying online?”

 Online job application odds are worse than gambling.

Getting a job has always been tricky, unfair and counterintuitive.

Still, it’s hard sometimes not to look back rather wistfully at bygone days where the job search consisted of shining your shoes and mailing a letter of interest. In the rose-tinted job market of yesteryear, empowered job seekers chose where they wanted to work.

Nowadays, not so much.

I speak to a lot of job seekers. Nearly universally I hear the same journey.

“I started my job search X months ago. I made a lot of job applications at the beginning for the roles that made sense.”

Crickets.

“OK, well look, how about I aim a little bit lower? They’d be lucky to have someone with my experience, I’m sure they’d be grateful even?”

Crickets.

“Fine. I mean I was a private banker so I’m going to head towards that insurance role.”

Tumbleweed.

“OK, look I’m going to try and network now and keep on with the easy applies, because you never know right?”

Oh but I do know.

What Your Competition Are Doing

Before we get into the weeds on how the Networking Funnel approach works. Let’s take a look at how your competition actually handle their job search. According to The Muse, about 65% of their time is spent:

• Tailoring resumes and writing cover letters (20%)

• Submitting applications (15%)

• Searching job postings (30%)

The remaining 35% breaks down as:

• Networking (20%)

• Interview preparation (10%)

• Learning new skills (5%)

According to Novoresume, most job seekers (82%) spend 0–4 hours a day, making between 1–3 applications per day (60%).

Online Abundance

A big, fat lie of the modern job market is the “abundance” of jobs just waiting for adventurous innovators like you to change up their lives for an exciting new geography / industry / function.

The odds on your application through the job boards transforming into a job, across all channels including applying through the company websites, are around about 0.3%

• 2–3% of online applications get interviews

• 10% of those interviews result in hires

• That gives you a 0.3% hit rate

That’s 333.33 applications you’d need to make.

Also worth noting: The vast majority of successful online applications are for blue-collar jobs. The more senior the role, the exponentially slimmer your chances.

Why is this so dismally low?

Consider this: in the EU, the law requires that all internal postings be advertised externally. So even if the position is already filled, HR needs to tick the compliance box.

Here's how it plays out:

• HR pays Indeed or another board for a stack of CVs

• Maybe they interview one or two people

• Now they have a paper trail

• Boom, compliant

If they’re feeling especially cruel, they might invite you to a video deposition.

So, having wasted a morning of your unpaid life iterating a CV, you now get to: waste another morning preparing to speak into a machine. Make selfie videos no one will ever watch. And wait for the inevitable automated rejection email

Please believe that many of the roles you see advertised online are not real, but simple market testing or ghost roles where there is already an internal candidate.

What’s really going on.

We put our trust in online applications at our peril if we forget, Big Tech are not in it to get you a job.

Nearly all these tools at our “freeloading” disposal, positioned as “leveling the job market” and “providing access to all,” are designed with one thing in mind:

Digital tools turn you into the product to drive revenue for their providers, and make shareholders richer.

Big Tech is happy to lay on any number of different avenues for job seekers to distract themselves from the activities that are most likely to add value to their job search. They keep you online and clicking, to convert you, at the very least, into a statistic for the web analytics used to sell services to the 87% of recruiters, who pay 12K a month for one seat.

And that, my friends, is why you are experiencing the pain points of:

• Getting ghosted after you apply

• Video interview depositions where you never hear back

• Job ads that aren’t real jobs

• AI screening résumés

It’s Not Broken. It’s Working.

The tools aren’t broken, they’re working exactly as intended.

But they weren’t built to get you hired.

They were built to keep you applying.

The more you engage, the more valuable you are to them, not as a candidate, but as a data point.

If you’re feeling discouraged, burned out or stuck, it’s not because you’re doing it wrong. It’s because the game is rigged, and you’re not supposed to win that way.

Key Takeaways

1. Online job application odds are worse than gambling

2. Tech platforms exist to serve recruiters, not candidates. You are the product

3. Most “free” tools monetize your behavior, not your success

This concept is explored in more detail in my book, "How Big Tech Broke the Job Search (And What to Do About Yours)" - which you can check out here.