You're not competing with other workers for jobs, you're competing with nation states and organized crime.
You are competing for the attention of hiring managers with people who can apply to 73.000 jobs in one go. Without fundamental change in hiring practices, this will end up like the ad economy where you're competing with scammers for the same attention, paying the platforms a fortune.
The attention economy is fundamentally broken because automated behavior is shifting value to platforms with zero incentive to fix it, because they are profiting at scale.
How much profit? As much as 10% of Metas global turnover, conservatively, for a single company 1.
The same for every other platform. As long as consumers have little choice, as long as network effects and a stranglehold on attention maintain a monopoly or duopoly, Amazon benefits from slop books competing with real authors on the same platform because the sale isn't made with quality and authenticity but by paying for featuring ... and no incentive to fix it.
The author self financing for 2 years to create that book is at a disadvantage to the AI book scraping and regurgitating company because they have zero expenses for creation and can therefore spend their budget on ads.
Platforms connect two sided marketplaces: Advertisers and Consumers. Hiring Managers and Job Seeker, monetizing access. Any imbalance in demand or supply creates power for the platform.
The more product is created, be it movies, games, or resumes, the more the platform gets to charged for delivery. AI enabling more video games to be made faster? Any savings by studios and publisher will end up paying to overcome the increased competition for eyeballs in the market.
Likeways, Job queues being flooded with automated resumes means companies selling background checks, filtering, etc not only become mandatory (usually owned or invested in by the platforms), they also become platforms, extracting money from both job seekers and companies trapped in their web.
AI does not fix this. On the contrary, it makes it worse because production of resumes becomes essentially free and defensive AI is unable to distinguish good from bad tokens.
While breaking up and regulating monopolies and platforms is the real solution here, the sheer weight of their value extraction and rent seeking smothering innovation and businesses far more than any "EU over regulation" does, there's things individuals and businesses can do:
Throw Out The Playbook. Stop Hiring globally. Stop Hiring on Large Platforms. Go Local. Go Regional. Attend Events. Run Events. Partner in your community. Strike School Partnerships. Host Events, Advertise on subway, bus station, campus. Build your own pipeline, move up the funnel. Build startups that do this for others.
And do it now because things are going to become immeasurably worse with AI. Cost of user acquisition and hiring for real businesses competing in verticals like longevity or weight loss for example has gone exponential due to Meta's refusal to ban scammers, pill mill competing for the same eyeballs.
1 https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/
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You are competing for the attention of hiring managers with people who can apply to 73.000 jobs in one go. Without fundamental change in hiring practices, this will end up like the ad economy where you're competing with scammers for the same attention, paying the platforms a fortune. The attention economy is fundamentally broken because automated behavior is shifting value to platforms with zero incentive to fix it, because they are profiting at scale. How much profit? As much as 10% of Metas global turnover, conservatively, for a single company [^1]. The same for every other platform. As long as consumers have little choice, as long as network effects and a stranglehold on attention maintain a monopoly or duopoly, Amazon benefits from slop books competing with real authors on the same platform because the sale isn't made with quality and authenticity but by paying for featuring ... and no incentive to fix it. The author self financing for 2 years to create that book is at a disadvantage to the AI book scraping and regurgitating company because they have zero expenses for creation and can therefore spend their budget on ads. Platforms connect two sided marketplaces: Advertisers and Consumers. Hiring Managers and Job Seeker, monetizing access. Any imbalance in demand or supply creates power for the platform. The more product is created, be it movies, games, or resumes, the more the platform gets to charged for delivery. AI enabling more video games to be made faster? Any savings by studios and publisher will end up paying to overcome the increased competition for eyeballs in the market. Likeways, Job queues being flooded with automated resumes means companies selling background checks, filtering, etc not only become mandatory (usually owned or invested in by the platforms), they also become platforms, extracting money from both job seekers and companies trapped in their web. AI does not fix this. On the contrary, it makes it worse because production of resumes becomes essentially free and defensive AI is unable to distinguish good from bad tokens. While breaking up and regulating monopolies and platforms is the real solution here, the sheer weight of their value extraction and rent seeking smothering innovation and businesses far more than any "EU over regulation" does, there's things individuals and businesses can do: Throw Out The Playbook. Stop Hiring globally. Stop Hiring on Large Platforms. Go Local. Go Regional. Attend Events. Run Events. Partner in your community. Strike School Partnerships. Host Events, Advertise on subway, bus station, campus. Build your own pipeline, move up the funnel. Build startups that do this for others. And do it now because things are going to become immeasurably worse with AI. Cost of user acquisition and hiring for real businesses competing in verticals like longevity or weight loss for example has gone exponential due to Meta's refusal to ban scammers, pill mill competing for the same eyeballs. [^1] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/
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