An Old Insight About Coal Explains Why You Can’t Find a Job
Online Labor Market Economics for the Layperson
Academic Version of this Economic Thesis Located on SSRN
Imagine This:
In the 1800s, engineers made coal-burning machines more efficient. Sounds great, right?
But instead of using less coal, people used more. Because it was cheaper and easier, everyone ramped up consumption. That unexpected twist became known as Jevons’ Paradox—a famous economic principle where making something more efficient doesn’t always reduce its use. Sometimes, it backfires. It ended up happening again with electricity, oil, internet, and wifi.
Now take that same logic—and apply it to online hiring (and dating tbh).
What Went Wrong in Online Hiring?
Over the past 20 years, job platforms like Indeed, LinkedIn, and ZipRecruiter promised to make hiring faster, smarter, and more efficient for employers. And in many ways, they did.
Companies could post jobs instantly.
Resumes poured in with a click.
Algorithms filtered candidates like never before.
But here’s the catch: job seekers were never included as true users of these systems. Their needs—clarity, trust, feedback—weren’t built into the design. They became data inputs, not real participants.
And just like with coal… more efficiency on one side (employers) led to worse outcomes for the system as a whole.
Enter: The Two-Sided Jevons Paradox
When only one side of a two-sided market gets efficiency upgrades, the whole thing starts to break.
Employers get faster tools.
Job seekers get ghosted.
Scam posts go unchecked.
Platforms make money off time spent, not successful hires.
That’s what I call the Two-Sided Jevons Paradox—(A Micah Paradox after my son) and it’s why we’re stuck in an endless job-hunting loop where everyone loses.
What We Lost: Trust
Back when job ads were in newspapers, if someone posting a role ghosted everyone or lied in an ad, the paper risked its reputation. The paper LOST money by mistreating job seekers.
Now? There’s no accountability.
No way to flag scams.
No way to warn others.
No way to review an employer’s actual hiring behavior.
The result? A market with no feedback loops, flooded with noise, and bleeding time from both sides.
The Fix: Learn from Other Markets
Think about every online system you trust:
Airbnb: You read reviews before booking.
Uber: Drivers and riders rate each other.
Amazon: Products live or die by user feedback.
But online hiring? Nothing.
It’s one of the only digital marketplaces where the most vulnerable users—job seekers—can’t give feedback, can’t verify quality, and can’t tell others what they went through.
That’s not a tech failure. That’s a design failure.
So What Now?
We need to rebuild hiring platforms with mutual accountability—where both employers and job seekers shape the system.
That means:
Verified reviews of job ads.
Transparency about hiring timelines.
Metrics that prioritize outcomes, not just clicks.
In short: we fix this when job seekers stop being invisible.
It’s what we’ve been doing at The Job Applicant Perspective. I am one of those horribly passionate people who could write on these topics for ages and bore the crap out of everyone but lets just say its an anonymous “Google Reviews” of the online job markets.
In general I think economic gravity is as wish-away-able as physical gravity. All platforms profit from engagement not solutions, but all users profit from solutions not engagement. That the only way to stop an industry from profiting from pain not solutions is for the users to require it.
However I honor that not everyone is there yet and these things take time and part of these types of blog posts is to start bringing attention and education and others to the same spaces.
Want the Full Research?
This post is a summary of my full paper on SSRN:
📄 "The Two-Sided Jevons Paradox of Digital Labor Markets"
I wrote it not just as a critique—but as a blueprint. For policymakers, platform designers, economists, and anyone trying to fix the talent crisis.