Job Ads vs Job Posts: How the Internet Broke Hiring (and How to Fix It)
Online Labor Market Economics for the Lay Person
You’re not crazy. The job market is broken.
You click apply. You write your cover letter. You send your resume.
And then… nothing.
It’s not you. It’s the system.
The internet turned job boards into marketing machines, not hiring tools — and the difference is costing all of us time, money, and trust.
The Problem in Plain English:
Not every job ad is meant to fill a job.
Some are designed to:
Saving on an advertising/marketing budget by drawing folks to your business with a “job post”
Investor traction schemes
Collect resumes “just in case”
Scare existing employees into working harder for less
Demonstrate a bad faith effort to backfill roles you don’t intend to ever backfill.
Show off growth that isn’t happening to competitors.
Or worse — steal your data
These aren’t job posts. They’re job ads—and they’ve flooded the internet.
Now let’s be clear there are PLENTY of bad actors on existing job boards and they have nothing to do with actual employers behaving poorly - BUT this post speaks to employers behaving poorly.
Also worth noting several layers of the inefficiency here are just straight related to scraped dead roles and more, no one out to get anyone. That’s the subject of another paper and another post. This one references an SSRN article and I seek to keep the topic contained to one specific general area of dysfunction.
Platforms Reward the Wrong Things
Online hiring platforms make money through:
Sponsored posts
Clicks and views
Resume database access
Whether a job is real doesn't affect revenue.
In fact, more fake jobs can mean more engagement.
It's like if Amazon made money every time someone looked at a product page — even if the product was fake.
My Test: A Parody Job Listing That Got Approved
I created a fake job titled:
“Assistant to the Regional Manager (Not to Be Confused with Assistant Manager)”
It required:
Beet farming
Karate
Unlimited time off “you’ll never take”
And included: “Ghost us before we ghost you.”
Most platforms approved it instantly.
No human flagged the satire.
If that gets through… imagine what else does. I am visibly a solo entrepreneur LLC startup on all recorded directories. No one should be actively approving 14 different roles that are easily trackable with basic existing tech.
I have since been using Indeed and a “researcher” post to send people to my anonymous crowdsourced reputation system. I make multiple posts with the exact same wording changing it some. All admit within the post what it IS in plain English for a human reader. But as the format via Chat GPT look like a job post, it gets through within minutes each time.
Side note: Are we so sure employers aren’t experiencing “ghost candidates” the same way that job seekers experience ghost roles? Because I noticed the job boards that I remember I put my job into received regular “notifications” of candidates applying - almost like notifications from LinkedIn. That’s an area to tease out another day.
This Isn’t Just Annoying—It’s Economically Damaging
When fake or misleading ads clog the market:
Job seekers waste time and hope
Small businesses get drowned out
Real positions take longer to fill
Entire sectors (like childcare or trades) suffer.
A daycare I talked with sponsors on Indeed to the tune of $50 a day for a $12 an hour role because free job boards don’t keep job seeker eyeballs. Their posts get buried within 2 days and they have no time to keep posting because they are usually frantically trying to cover when someone dips out without notice for the role that doesn’t cover rent. The act of needing to post for $50 a day means the job stays at $12 an hour while they barely stay open and the cycle continues.
We’re watching a collapse in trust infrastructure — the kind of collapse that wrecks economies and markets everywhere.
The Economics Behind It: The Micah Paradox
Economist William Jevons once explained that more efficiency in coal use led to more coal consumption — not less.
Hiring is facing a similar problem:
The more “efficient” hiring becomes for employers alone, the worse it becomes for everyone else.
Platforms serve employers, but ignore job seekers — and as a result, the whole system gets less effective.
I call this the Two-Sided Jevons Paradox — or the Micah Paradox for short.
The Fix: Add Accountability
Imagine Amazon without product reviews.
Uber without driver ratings.
Airbnb without host feedback.
You wouldn’t trust it. You wouldn’t use it.
Yet that’s exactly how job boards function today.
What We’re Building Instead
At The Job Applicant Perspective, we’re introducing crowdsourced job post reviews.
Not about the employer.
Not about the interview.
Just: Was the job ad real, respectful, and worth applying to?
That simple layer of accountability can:
Cut scam posts
Boost small business visibility
Help job seekers focus their energy
And rebuild trust in the job market
Final Thought:
Hiring platforms broke when they stopped treating job seekers as participants. The professional silence of job seekers was only ever an entitlement to comfort for employers - not the market itself - in the newspaper era. It was only when hiring went online that this shifted.
The old adage to “stop complaining about your hiring process” which may have been good advice in the newspaper era has become a level of open extortion and profoundly dangerous business advice in an internet era.
All online platforms profit from engagement not solutions. But all users profit from solutions not engagement. Its economic gravity in an online era.
The pettiness of users upset at having spent their resources on a flawed product is what creates trust, accountability and a functioning market not the quality of the tech itself. When the profit is in the pain there is only ever profit in a solution when the users require it.
You are not a broken worker.
You’re an unprotected consumer in a failed market.
And it’s time we gave you the tools to fight back.
If you’d like to read a much more academic oriented version of this topic, check it out at SSRN here. Also if you’d like to learn more about Jevon’s paradoxes in two stakeholder format check out here
It is wild out there and you need not trust my website, that is ok. But I am here to add clarity to any who should find it. Reddit also has some honest spaces to get insight too. Facebook is far more ethical and business savvy than LinkedIn. Finding a good solution starts with understanding the problem and finding clarity. The gaslighting is STRONG out there and I would Jedi mind wipe it away for you if I could. The best I can do is my words to help promote clarity. We can’t solve a problem that we can’t admit even exists.