Why Job Boards Are Broken—and What No One’s Talking About
Labor market economics for the lay person
Most people think job boards are just…there. Part of how hiring works now.
But what if I told you they’re not just flawed—they’re fundamentally broken?
Not because of what they do, but what they’re missing.
The professional silence of job seekers used to only ever be for employers, not the market.
The professional silence of job seekers during a job search has always been a job market norm — right? Wrong. In reality, the professional silence of job seekers was only ever an entitlement to comfort for employers. It never used to extend to the market itself. Think about it.
Employers may have always seen job seekers as a data point, but newspapers saw them as stakeholders. When job seekers saw misinformation in the newspaper — the old-school job platform — they pointed it out, and the newspaper fixed it or lost money. That changed when hiring moved online. Employers moved the market online as they had seen it, but not as it had been. They created the platforms that suddenly excluded job seekers from feedback. And chaos ensued.
Suddenly, misinformation for job seekers went from losing a job platform money (the newspaper) to gaining it money (online hiring). And chaos ensued.
Online job boards are missing the most important thing every other online marketplace had to do when it went online: user feedback.
Think about it:
Uber has driver reviews.
eBay has host ratings.
Apartments.com has buyer feedback.
But when you look for a job? You’re flying blind. There’s no way to know if the job is real, if the company ghosts, if the pay is fair, or if anyone’s actually reading your resume.
That’s not a glitch. That’s how the system is designed. That’s what happens when you move a market online, scale it, drop all trust mechanisms for one half of the market, and never replace them — like all other markets did.
Why does this matter?
Because job boards today look more like ad platforms than real hiring systems.
Employers are treated like the customers.
Job seekers have moved from a stakeholder in the market, to a product of the market. This also makes them unofficially an unpaid human revenue generator for the market.
It’s rent-seeking in disguise. A profit as pain model. Because there’s no requirement to make it a profit as solution model when employers don’t see job seekers as human users in a market for reasons all their own.
The market doesn’t solve hiring, it optimizes the illusion of solving hiring to profit from the chaos while avoiding accountability.
This creates a perfect storm of dysfunction:
Fake jobs (ghost posts) to collect resumes
Scam recruiters and identity theft
Hundreds of unqualified applicants per job because no one has context
Growing unemployment duration, especially for people with skills
You’re not failing the system.
The system is failing you.
You aren’t a failed employee, you are an unprotected consumer in a financial marketplace as important to your wellbeing as the stock market is to the investor class - but without all regulation or reputation.
Imagine if job boards worked like other platforms.
If you could rate job ads.
Warn others about scams.
Track which companies actually respond.
Crowdsource what’s worth your time.
That would change everything.
It wouldn’t just help job seekers — it would help employers stop drowning in bad matches and missed hires.
It would build trust instead of just…more noise.
So why hasn’t this happened?
Because of tradition, conditioning, ignorance, and a general lack of structural understanding. There are many reasons, which I’m unpacking across several papers on Substack and elsewhere. Broadly speaking: for humans, conditional acceptance into a desirable group tends to breed unconditional devotion to its principles — both explicit and unspoken.
Anyone struggling with the unemployment can feel justifiably furious but let’s be real here - this is a problem ALL of us had until we really looked at it. Its’ not about villainy it’s about the reality of humans as they human everywhere. Not a one of us has not wished to be a part of the cool clique in any situation, high school, college, sports, work, family, etc. It’s not an excuse, its insight. This hasn’t ever been an evidence problem, its a narrative one. And narratives around conditional acceptance to a desirable place break harrrrd.
But transactionally - it’s quite simple. The longer you stay unemployed, the more platforms earn — through ad revenue, resume services, and re-engagement. It’s the world’s most expensive, high tech magic claw economic trap. Scammers thrive in this space. Ghost jobs are easy to let slide because if no one is forcing you to clean up the house, you don’t always if you can avoid it. And employers, not thinking of the job market as two-sided, not really, are very incline to use free job posts as saving on marketing budgets.
AI accelerates the dysfunction (another paper on SSRN here, or a lighter version here on substack here) but trust rebuilds it.
What I’m building
I’ve created a platform that lets job seekers anonymously review job ads — like Yelp, but for hiring.
It’s a trust system, built to fix the structural flaw in online labor markets.
If you’ve ever felt crushed by the job search or ignored after applying:
This is for you.
And again if you’d like to stop by The Job Applicant Perspective, the first anonymous “Google Reviews” for job ads across the U.S. check out The Job Applicant Perspective
We don’t aim to tell anyone what it’s like to work anywhere. We aim to let you know if that job ad is even worth spending your valuable time on.
Want the deeper dive?
This Substack post is based on my research paper now available on SSRN, read by economists from Harvard, Berkeley, Georgetown, and more.
📄 Read the full paper here: Reinventing the Digital Labor Market: How Job Boards Without Trust Mechanisms Fuel Inefficiency