One small critique:

>Of course, everyone spending a few extra hours on applications is not so bad. Except that the same incentive structure iterates. Everyone has reason to spend ten hours polishing, now fifteen hours polishing. Everyone has reason to ask friends to look over their materials, now everyone has reason to hire a job application consultant. Every applicant is stuck in an arms race with every other, but this arms race does not create any new jobs. So, in the end, no one is better off than if everyone could have just agreed to an armistice at the beginning.

Except everyone has a threshold for accepting diminishing returns. The incentive structure doesn't result in everyone escalating the amount of time and effort that goes into an application, because at some point, each individual is going to stop. I'm only going to put in so many hours on my application for any given job, because I recognize the difference between one and three hours is significant, whereas the difference between 15 and 20 hours is not (or at least, it's less significant as I add hours; hence, diminishing returns).

Beyond this (admittedly nit-picky) observation, I find the rest of the article to be rather refreshing and insightful. I think there's good opportunity to use a lottery system as part of a selection/hiring process and if it results in employers dropping all these stupid hoops form their applications, that's a net win for everyone.

One thing they kinda touch on and move past is that the "hoop jumping" doesn't necessarily find the best candidate, only the one that really wants the job, which could be a relatively poor candidate but just one willing to put in the work.

That is to say, you could have a candidate, who simply doesn't have a job and is throwing applications out there to see what traction they can get. That candidate might actually be the optimal candidate, smart, fast learner, great at adaptation, and very charming. But since they might not have put as much effort I to your application you miss out on the opportunity for that person because some other person, who is less qualified spent more time padding their resume.

From an outside perspective an employer selecting for an applicant that that puts more work into the application produces very little in terms of desirable qualities, you don't know if they are a fast worker only that their resume is marginally better than someone who may have put half as much work into their resume. You only know that they are capable of producing quality material without any reference to how much time or effort it took them, which is something you need to know if you're looking for a worker who needs to produce things on a timetable.

Consider an applicant to some colleges. You have a really smart kid, whip smart, ability to make interdisciplinary connections that would be an absolute boon for your any school, great social ability and passion for multiple subjects. They decide to apply to a lot of schools, from the very top to the very bottom. The amount of work they put into their application is relative to how much they want to attend that school.

The top schools pass on them, they put maximum effort into their application but other just put more. Maybe they had the resources to hire a consultant to do their application, they padded it with things they knew the college was looking for, maybe they are a legacy. At any rate the excellent applicant just didn't make the threshold. This could chain all the way down to the lower end schools. Constantly putting in not enough effort to make it into any school even though they are a perfect applicant for all schools and too good of an applicant for the mid and lower end schools.

The best applicant gets no offers and the lowest and mid range schools lose our on an applicant that is probably one of the better applicants they could have hoped for.

Probably the truest thing he says is basically because the employer is lazy, they are offloading the effort to find an employee to a system they can tell their boss has some relevance to quality but once you unpack the system it doesn't do anything but find the person most desperate for this particular job, which could in some cases be someone under qualified, and it could pass on people who are more than qualified and probably rarely finds the most optimal employee.

> The source of the experience is that the incentives of search committees and the incentives job applicants don’t align. As an employer, my goal is to select the best candidate for the job. While as an applicant, my goal is that I get a job, whether I’m the best candidate or not.

The article already starts off with a common misconception. There are no conflicts of interest among rational men. Just because an applicant may want a job doesn't automatically mean that achieving it is good. By the same respect a robber may achieve ownership of a Ferrari as opposed to identifying that they deserve it. Likewise the employer has the right to be irrational and to suffer the consequences of choosing poorly. And as an applicant you're better off not associating with them based on poor judgement.

> As an employer, my goal is to select the best candidate for the job. While as an applicant, my goal is that I get a job, whether I’m the best candidate or not.

With goals so ill-defined, this whole article is an exercise in going downhill as fast as possible.

Honestly I am pretty disappointed with this sub so far. I was hoping for a higher calibre of content than what I have seen.

Same can be said for /r/science

More than half of the articles are some shitty poll they call study confirming the most non-sensical claims imagined.