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Posted on 10/07/2025 4:01:36 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Observations by 30+ hiring managers and tech recruiters about what’s happening: a flood of inbound applications means more selective hiring, there’s increased demand for product engineers, and more
Last month, we published a deepdive on the tech jobs market based on data that revealed a slow, steady rise in recruitment across Big Tech and startups. There’s also predictably massive AI engineering demand, fewer remote roles, and the growing significance of location, among other things.
The job market feels pretty weird right now: hiring managers say it’s hard to fill positions, but software engineers also get fewer responses to their applications. Also at the same time, news articles go viral with headlines like The Job Market Is Hell in The Atlantic:
“Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired”.
The Atlantic’s article isn’t about tech positions, and blames the current conditions on AI. But is this what’s really going on? Based on my research: not really.
For today’s issue, I spoke with 30 tech hiring managers and 3 recruiters about what they are seeing, and just as importantly, why they think it’s happening.
One reality that’s different from the headlines is that I haven’t found AI to be the main thing to blame for the strange market. Today, we cover:
Flood of applications. 1,000+ candidates for a single role is not uncommon, and LinkedIn Jobs is the home of low-quality inbound applications, and is being abandoned by some companies.
Few hires via inbound. Despite so many inbound applications, many companies hire most engineers via reachouts and referrals.
‘Top’ candidates are hard to find. While the market has not seen so many applicants, standout engineers are hard to find and often can choose from several offers.
Remote jobs: more competition for less comp? Businesses hiring remotely can hire better engineers for 10-15% less than before.
Fake applicants + AI: a growing problem. Full remote and crypto startups are plagued by fake applicants who spoof their locations and play “switcharoo” to deceive recruiters. Cheating on interviews using AI tools is pretty rife.
Higher demand for founding engineers and product engineers. In the UK, founding engineers can be offered up to £200K ($270K) in salary, plus equity. AI startups seem to be pulling up compensation for product engineers across the market.
Early-stage startups have their own hiring problems. Attracting senior engineers from reputable companies is still a challenge, and standout ones often have competing offers.
A few of the trends happening in today’s tech jobs market
1. Flood of applications
The biggest trend that nearly all hiring managers and recruiters at startups and large tech companies told me about is how much bigger the volume of applications is. A few cases:
James McWalter, founder and CEO of Y Combinator, startup, Paces:
“23,000 applications in the last 30 days for 8 open, in-person, New York-based roles”.
That’s nearly 3,000 applications per job! Here is one of the 8: fullstack software engineer in New York. It pays $150-190K, plus equity.
An engineering manager at Spotify, based in New York:
“We got 1,700 applicants in 15 hours for a role I recently released. I understand Spotify is popular, but we usually don’t see this many applications!“
A digital agency owner in the US, based in New York, who’s hiring nationwide:
“We went from 1-5 resumes a week, to about 300 or more a week. It feels insane how easy it has gotten to hire in the agency space.
“Never seen anything like this market in my 25+ years working in the industry. Our turnaround for new hires was averaging about 6 months or more of lead time, with fairly midrange engineers in terms of skill set. That’s fairly normal in the Digital Agency space. Now, we basically have our pick of any skill set, and can convert within weeks if we need to move quickly on new projects.
A CTO at a 20-person, UK-based media agency:
“More than 100 applications in 2 hours for a fullstack engineer role I posted the other day. For the Lead Engineer role, we got 60 in the same time period after posting”.
A hiring manager at a startup in Switzerland:
“We got 600 applications in 2 days for a senior frontend position. In the first few hours alone after posting, we got 150 applications. When we got to 600, we stopped accepting new ones.
Around 50% of the applicants were immediately rejected because we do not sponsor Swiss visas. Another 30% were rejected due to non-tech reasons like poor spoken English, or no desire to move to Switzerland. We moved forward with about 20% of applicants in the end”.
It sounds like hiring managers are flooded with resumes, so are not responding to recruiters pitching more applicants. Liz Fong-Jones, field CTO at Honeycomb, posted on LinkedIn:
“It’s so weird watching third-party recruiters pitch their candidates to us. Literally everyone with an open req is drowning in applicants right now. We don’t need more applications which we don’t control the quality of!
“The problem is no longer trying to attract enough applicants to roles, it’s sifting through the noise!”
LinkedIn: home of low-quality inbound applications A hiring manager at a startup paying top-tier compensation in India, didn’t mince his words:
“LinkedIn is an irrecoverable hellscape for inbound applications. It is only useful for outbound via the recruiter product. At my company, we turned off the job postings for inbound because of the high volume of low-quality applicants, or AI-enhanced inbounds that tailor applications to our listing, when the person doesn’t have the claimed qualifications”.
I’ve heard the complaint by several hiring managers that LinkedIn applications are noticeably low quality. As a result, lots of startups are trying out smaller, more focused job boards like Wellfound and JustJoin.it, although the quality is reportedly patchy on those as well.
And it’s not just hiring managers: here’s an early engineer at a startup describing his LinkedIn inbox being clogged with applications, even though he’s not in recruitment:
“We have a few open postings at my startup and students are adding me as a contact en masse. Some add an intro asking if they can learn more about the position, and some are just straight up without any intro.
I get 5-10 LinkedIn requests per day. I try to filter through and respond to the ones who give good intro messages, but it’s a lot!”
My suspicion is that new grads are following advice from online courses and influencers to reach out directly to employees because inbound applications don’t work (there is some truth in this for entry-level positions). Non-stop LinkedIn contact requests and direct messages are the consequence.
2. Few hires via inbound
Despite an overwhelming volume of inbound applications, recruiters and hiring managers whom I talked with said they make few hires this way.
More via sourcing Sourcing is when a recruiter proactively reaches out to candidates on social platforms – usually LinkedIn. One recruiter at a publicly-traded Fintech, who has hired more than 30 engineers this year in the US, told me:
“Inbound candidates make up the smallest portion of hires, at around 10%. Inbound candidates refer to people who apply directly online.
They are rejected a lot more frequently for one of these reasons:
Not fitting the criteria of the role
Being overly “job-hoppy” in the past
Failing the interview loop: even when inbound applicants get here, they fail loops a lot more frequently than candidates we source.
The majority of my hires are ‘sourced’, meaning the recruiter reaches out to candidates via LinkedIn as the first contact”.
A tech recruiter at a publicly-traded company is hiring software engineers across Europe. They told me:
“I posted that we’re hiring on LinkedIn and X. Afterwards, my DMs were flooded.
Out of 150+ inbound messages, only one person was genuinely excellent technically, and is currently in our final stage. The candidate quality from inbound messages on social media isn’t the best, but perhaps those with more specialized audiences would see better results.
My best results come from directly poking people at AI startups. But it’s challenging to recruit the people we’re looking for”.
An engineering manager at a large tech company in New York said:
“We get tons of applicants who match almost NONE of the requirements. For example, for a tenured frontend role, many people who applied had zero frontend experience – many were backend engineers!
Inbound application quality has never been this bad. I can’t tell if so many unfit applications are because people are “spraying and praying”, or it’s using some kind of automated system that just adds their resume to roles”.
Several engineering managers had similar observations:
Inbound quality is low. The majority of applications come in from people who don’t have basic qualifications; for example, for a frontend or mobile engineer, a lot of applicants will have no such experience. Visa requirements are ignored, and many resumes are clearly tailored by AI to mirror the application.
10% or less of inbound is “qualified.” A qualified candidate is one who meets the barebones expectations of the job ad, with whom it’s worth doing at least one recruiter call.
A swarm of inbound applications. Some engineering managers say they saw volumes as big in 2021, during the most-heated jobs market. Others say it’s never been so intense.
3. ‘Top’ candidates are hard to find Amid conditions where inbound applications don’t work like they used to, recruiters find it harder to recruit, and so use other ways. At present, a significant proportion of hires come via:
Referrals. A current employee refers an engineer whom they know and for whose work they can vouch. These are generally of much higher quality than inbound applications.
Direct outreach. A hiring manager sends targeted messages on sites and social networks to professionals open to approaches.
Hiring a recruiter to source candidates. Hiring a dedicated recruiter to do direct outreaches, or doing it in-house.
Filling open positions is hard Engineering managers kept telling me the same thing: recruitment takes a lot of effort today! An engineering manager at a large, US-based tech company:
“It’s tons of interviewing to find a worthy candidate. One would think with so many applicants, there’d be several gems in there, but that has not been my experience this last year. Many people who look good on paper won’t pass the screening call. I’m not sure if the applicant noise is just making it hard to find the gems, or if the applications are just lower quality. Many badass engineers I know are sitting tight unless a very very specific role comes their way. I’ve talked to other engineering managers and they’ve noticed the same issues”.
An engineering manager in India:
“The amount of work to just source applicants is very high. Honestly, references are still the best channel to hire from, in terms of quality. This is because the people who are referring know the context of the company and how we operate”.
Closing senior candidates is competitive Despite everything mentioned about jobseeker demand, it can actually be tough to get people to accept offers. The Head of Development at a fintech scaleup in London, said:
“We’ve noticed some candidates accept offers and then withdraw after finding better roles; we saw this in London, specifically. So, it feels like the market this year is improving for experienced engineers, as in they are getting more options to choose from.
Overall, I’d say that roles are now easier to fill than before Covid-19. So far, we’ve found highly experienced candidates for each of our postings, but it just took some time. Probably not surprising, but we tend to fill junior and graduate positions more easily than experienced ones”.
Also, an engineering manager in India told me:
“The conversion from offer to acceptance is still the same for us as in 2021. The market recognizes talent pretty well, and we have to fight hard for every offer we make”.
As a reminder, 2021 was the hottest-ever tech jobs market.
Good engineers avoid the job market A major trend right now is that hiring managers can’t seem to get good inbound applications from experienced engineers without opening their proverbial contact books. Here’s an engineering manager, based in New York, at a publicly traded company:
“The only way I’ve gotten truly amazing people to apply is through reaching out to my network. People seem hesitant to leave a stable situation for an uncertain one”.
But why are good engineers reluctant to apply for jobs? To be fair, we don’t have to look far for answers: between 2022 and 2024, there was almost weekly news about tech companies doing mass layoffs. Aside from Apple and NVIDIA, it’s hard to name a large business that was the exception to this. In this environment, switching jobs can feel pretty risky because recent hires are at higher risk than tenured colleagues during layoffs.
So, if you’re in a decent job and feel comfortable and valued with good compensation, then the safe bet is to stick around until conditions improve. An exception would be if someone you really trust reaches out and says you’d love it at their company, that they can personally vouch for you, and could help make the interview process less painful. This is what I’m hearing several hiring managers are doing in direct reachouts: trying to bring former colleagues to their current team.
Pickier employers
Another visible trend is that hiring managers are taking their time to find the “right” person, and don’t settle for candidates who don’t check all the boxes. An engineering manager based in Atlanta:
“It’s almost like companies everywhere are “playing it safe”, and only hiring those who fit their mental model of who they want to hire.
In all fairness, we’re also playing it safe in our own interviews. We are trying to find a senior engineer who has a breadth of experience, and it’s been hard to find someone! I guess larger companies are holding out for that candidate with the right narrow focus”.
When employers post a job, they get a metaphorical thundering herd of inbound applications, so rightfully assume the market is “hot.” And in a hot market, it’s easier to justify holding out for the “perfect” candidate.
4. Remote jobs: more competition for less comp? One group that’s apparently pretty content with the state of things is employers that hire full-remote engineers. A CTO at a full-remote scaleup recruiting across the US and Europe:
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the majority can easily be tested and punted
Matches my experience posting a job for full stack developer. 600 applications, most of whom weren’t qualified. 2/3 of the remainder lied on their resumes.
I’ve never seen this in 40 years of hiring and building dev teams.
I feel very thankful to have caught the IT wave back in the late 80s. I took it for granted back then and now realize how fortunate I was.
A bunch of gobbledygook .
You could hire someone who knows how to learn. You could mentor. You could groom. You could train. Find someone who is 80% of what you are looking for and then get them up to 100%. No? That's not in the budget? You require absolute perfection right out of the gate? Well, it might be hard to find that person. And it's only going to get harder.
I checked out when 3 or 4 guys asked me how I could produce a query, based upon part no. that had 2 tables which had, a master file table mind you, which had different attributes of the same component. Is that an inner our outer table join?
oh hai there, Little Bobby Tables :)
You have touched a very important topic. Computer companies did train employees in the 60s and 70s; and, their internal schools were top notch. The semiconductor industry also trained engineers in the use of their products, particularly for the more esoteric devices like bit-slice elements and register files and such.
Companies would be surprised at how effective those programs would be.
I forgot to include in my last post that I had magnificent mentors. One used to work at Bell Labs. One was from Lockheed Aerospace. I even had very quality mentoring from one of “Grace’s Girls”. The best tutor during my undergraduate studies was an IBM CE; and, he was trained at a number of IBM schools.
I am duly imporessed.
Hiring managers and companies have been total asshoes for going on 20 years.
It’s no wonder developers are grasping at straws.
Grace herself once handed my father a length of wire (about 10 inches long) saying that it represented a billionth of a second of electronic transmission.
A dueling game of bots talking to bots.
Please mail in your resume using $10 in postage.
Watch the problem of too many obviously unqualified applicants disappear.
>> “Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired”.
LOL
The referred and recruited have long been preferred over unsolicited and ad-responding applicants.
But an increasingly national or even international job market, with tech making ever more applications possible, makes the raw numbers climb. Reminds me of applications to college. The easier it became to submit many applications, the more applicants per slot were reported. Still the same number of total applicants and slots, but the numbers got juiced all around.
Yes, it’s insane. I’ve seen listings demanding people have 10 years experience with a technology that’s only 5 years old. It COULD be a trick to make sure you KNOW that it’s only 5 years old, but these “I demand everything” listings are quite popular.
I believe this ties into something important. If all these people are looking for work, WHY DO WE NEED H1-Bs? *SURELY* there’s SOMEONE qualified for each of these positions in the flood of candidates.
-PJ
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