Nobody Can Stop Playing

Job hunting is a roulette table where the chips just became free. The rational move is to cover every square. Everybody does. And somehow, everyone still loses.

For every person hired, dozens get rejected in interviews. Hundreds more before a human ever reads their resume. Hiring was always low-signal. AI drove the signal-to-noise ratio into the floor, without a single person making a bad decision.

Applying used to cost something. Tailoring a cover letter for each position, filling forms one at a time. LinkedIn Easy Apply killed the friction on-platform. Bots killed it everywhere else. Now candidates fire off hundreds of applications a day without thinking.

Recruiters drown. They reach for filters to scan for keywords and auto-reject everything else. The victim is judgment. If the posting says “Groovy” and your resume says “8 years of Java” — you’re out. A human recruiter would’ve known you’d pick up Groovy in a day. The filter matches strings. Zero matches on “Groovy.” Rejected. Or an AI does what AI does — passes you today, rejects the same resume tomorrow. The croupier doesn’t judge. The wheel decides. Nobody decided you weren’t qualified. Nothing decided anything at all.

So candidates have to adjust. They run their resumes through AI to hit the keyword quota, because without the magic words, even a genuinely great resume never reaches a human. This isn’t cheating. It’s the entry fee to the roulette table.

Resumes stopped meaning anything. Once every resume is optimized to pass the filter, the filter becomes useless. The document that used to be evidence of experience is now evidence of prompt engineering. The burden shifts to the interview. Interviewers now have to verify everything the resume claims, because the resume can’t be trusted. More rounds, more take-home assignments, more verification theater. Interviews get longer and more expensive for everyone.

When each interview costs more, companies want to let fewer candidates through, which means tighter filters, harder auto-rejects, more keywords. Which forces more resume gaming. Which destroys more trust. Which shifts more burden to interviews.

Around and around. Every turn of the wheel burns a little more signal.

The uncomfortable part is that everyone in this loop is acting rationally. The recruiter genuinely cannot read ten thousand resumes. The candidate genuinely cannot get past the filter without keyword-stuffing. The interviewer genuinely cannot trust what’s on paper. Each player is making the correct move, and the correct moves, combined, produce a system where good candidates get filtered out by string matching and companies spend more time than ever to find the right candidate.

Can anyone break the cycle? A single recruiter who turns off the filter gets buried. A single candidate who refuses to keyword-optimize gets auto-rejected. A single company that shortens interviews takes on more bad hires than its competitors. Defecting alone means losing alone.

It’s a trap where every individual exit is blocked, everyone plays a game they know is broken, and each round of perfectly rational moves makes the whole thing worse. Nobody can stop playing. Nobody can leave the casino.