Indeed CEO Idekoba Diagnoses a Hiring Vicious Cycle

If a thousand applications arrive and none of them seem usable, the strange thing is not the applicants but the process. Hisayuki Idekoba, CEO of Indeed, one of the largest job-search platforms in the world, has diagnosed today's hiring process as a vicious cycle. Coming from the side that sells the platform, that carries a different weight.

According to reports, he asked, "you got 1,000 applications, and you think all 1,000 people are not qualified?" and then said, "something's wrong." Instead of explaining it as a flood of unqualified people, he picked the reading in which the filtering apparatus has broken.

Both sides are blocked at once. Job openings have slowed while the number of applicants competing for each position has climbed, and qualified workers are applying to dozens and sometimes hundreds of roles without hearing back. Employers are no better off. Applicant pools are flooded with AI-generated applications, and scams involving fake candidates, including North Korean IT workers, have made identifying legitimate applicants a task in itself.

The numbers confirm the feeling. According to reports, the number of applications per job is up 111% between 2022 and 2025, while the number of recruiters has fallen 56%. Daniel Chait, CEO of the hiring software firm Greenhouse, also confirmed that the perceived black hole of job applications is real. The volume to be read doubled while the people reading it halved, so that sensation is arithmetic rather than imagination.

Chait summed up the state this way. "This is the first time when really both sides have been unhappy," he said, adding that "the market just isn't working for either side." Hiring droughts and job droughts usually alternate, but right now they overlap.

The device that created the overlap is AI. Recruiters including Indeed have turned to AI tools to manage the growing workload and better match candidates with jobs. Applicants use the same tools to tailor resumes and write cover letters and improve their odds of being noticed. Chait calls the result the AI doom loop, saying "everyone's using their own AI to solve their own problem, but it's making the whole system worse."

METAL reported on a job seeker who sent ChatGPT to sit an interview in front of an AI recruiter. That was one odd scene at the time, but on the application side it has already become the default.

In sociological terms this is a signal collapsing. A resume and a cover letter were originally evidence of effort. The fact that someone spent hours reshaping them for one company spoke for that person's seriousness, and that cost did the work of selection. Once the cost approaches zero, the paper no longer distinguishes anything. What is left is volume, and the more volume there is, the more crudely the reading side cuts.

So the nature of the problem the platform has to solve has changed. Idekoba asked "how can we make sure job seekers are a real person, and it's not an AI application, and they're serious, and they're qualified," and placed alongside it the question of "how can we have real employers who are really trying to fill positions." These ask about authenticity rather than matching, and the same suspicion now falls on both sides.

Advice about detours converges on one direction. Chait said not to pile into the biggest names. "Don't just apply to, you know, OpenAI, because they're in the news every day," he said, adding that deciding what work you want first and then finding lesser-known companies doing that work yields far more success.

Scott Galloway, a business professor and entrepreneur, put the odds of the public route in numbers. On a podcast last year he said that when Google posts a single opening it receives 200 CVs within roughly eight minutes, narrows that to the 20 most qualified, and that 70% of the time the person chosen is someone with an internal advocate.

The way Galloway describes networking targets those same odds. He said that having an advocate brings offers even when you are not actively looking, and that "you want to be placed in rooms of opportunities when you're not physically there." That much of the outcome is decided outside the act of applying.

Sanjay Beri, CEO of the $7 billion software firm Netskope, pointed at the same spot. He said that who you know, how you come to know them and building that network pays off over time, adding that "sometimes those jobs you want, they're never published."

What METAL confirmed is that these pieces of advice all point outside the public hiring route. The weaker the apply button becomes, the more the private route of referral and introduction is worth, and that route opens first to people who already hold connections. METAL reported that AI skills entered the hiring requirements for junior bankers, and while the bar rises, the path over it is narrowing.

The technology that drove the cost of applying to zero pushed the cost of selection onto employers, and employers are paying that cost back through private networks. That is why Idekoba's question is sharp. If a thousand people cannot all be unqualified, then what is being filtered out right now is something other than qualification.