Work is a Verb
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The jobs exist. The candidates exist. The match is failing.
Heat Geek installs heat pumps. This summer it opened eight roles, enough to grow its headcount by more than a quarter, and its chief operating officer told the Financial Times the entry-level jobs needed to be “filled yesterday.” The graduates she wanted were, in the FT’s words, nowhere to be seen. “We know exactly what we want,” Holly Foster said. “The struggle is communicating that … what we’re looking for is difficult to spot on paper.”
I hear both sides of this, sometimes in the same week. The searcher is usually someone I would hire: ten or fifteen years in, a strong resume, a remote-only constraint they are not going to drop, and somewhere between three and six months of applications behind them, sometimes more. These well qualified jobseekers and the hiring managers desperate for talent are two ships passing in the night.
The pattern is not confined to graduates. Greenhouse’s North America benchmarks put applications per job at 116 in 2022 and 244 in 2025, and over the same years the time to fill a role went from about 44 days to nearly 60. Ashby, whose applicant tracking system many startups use, counts 291 applications per hire in early 2026, up from roughly 100 in early 2021. The pile doubled and the search lengthened.
The usual explanations are shortage stories: not enough jobs, or not enough skilled people. Hiring is down, and that is real; the NFIB’s small business owners reported the fewest unfilled openings since 2020 this May. But a shortage does not produce hundreds of applications for a role that then takes two months to fill. What is failing is the match, at two separate points: getting the right people to apply, and recognising them once they have.
The first failure is a distribution problem with candidates tending to crowd the already crowded channels. This is how the FT can describe multinational employers drowning in applications in the same article as an Essex medical device manufacturer with more than 100 staff that had to reach out to students directly. Smaller companies carry this handicap hardest. Nobody has heard of them, so nobody can check them, so the people who would suit them apply to the names they know instead.
The second failure is recognition, and it belongs to everyone. The multinational sorting hundreds of applications per vacancy has Heat Geek’s problem at scale: the qualities it actually wants are difficult to spot on paper. A resume is a poor instrument for initiative or judgment, and a pile of hundreds of them is a worse one, especially now that Ashby reports rising fraudulent volume and the teams it talks to are seeing more AI-generated applications. On Ashby’s platform, the share of applications that reach an interview has fallen from 7 or 8 percent in 2021 to under 5. So the screening leans on what a pile can be sorted by: an exact title match, a brand-name former employer, the right keywords, no gap in the dates. Those are the proxies, and in my experience they are exactly what the right person often fails. The strong candidate with an odd title, or a year out, or a last employer of forty people, drops out at the first filter.
The two failures feed each other. A candidate cannot check an unfamiliar employer, so applies to the famous one. The famous one’s pile grows and its filters get blunter, while the unfamiliar employer, the one that might have suited that candidate, is still waiting on a pile that never arrives.
One way out: Grainger & Worrall, a castings maker in Shropshire, had been told graduates would not stay. Its head of HR took the real trade-off of the job, a life in Shropshire, and pointed it at the people for whom that was a feature: local graduates who would see living near home as an advantage. This year it went to market for three, offered five, and took on four. It did not wait to be discovered. It knew who it wanted and got in front of them.
If you are hiring, that is the job at any size. Publish what a stranger would need in order to trust you: the real remote model, the hiring zones, the pay, what the first year looks like. Then describe the person you want specifically enough that the right ones recognise themselves, and screen for that instead of for the proxies, even though the pile gets smaller.
If you are searching, the same list works in reverse. When you find a company you have never heard of, look for those four things on its careers page. My bet is that a company that states all four has told you how it thinks, and one that states none has told you something too. If your last employer folded under you, the same four things are also the closest thing to a stability read a posting can give you. Finding those companies is the part Remotivated exists for: we check remote models and hiring zones ourselves, so a company nobody has heard of can be checked. Then apply there, on its own site, rather than in the board queue. Greenhouse’s 2026 benchmarks show company career sites produced 34 percent of hires from 24 percent of applications, more hires than any other source. The unfamiliar company with a clear posting is a far thinner pile than the board queue. A thinner pile is the one a person actually reads.
