Why is hiring so broken right now?
A hiring manager posted recently that he received 84 applications in four days for one customer support role. There was no realistic way to phone screen them all, so he bought an AI tool that made every applicant record a one-minute video, scored the videos automatically, and surfaced six people worth calling. Eighty-four humans, graded by software, on a sixty-second performance.
Almost everyone involved in hiring right now, on both sides of the table, will tell you some version of the same thing: this is not working. Candidates apply into silence a hundred times. Employers drown in applications that all sound identical. Interviews stretch to six rounds and still produce bad hires. Everyone is working harder at a process everyone trusts less.
Here is the direct answer to why. Hiring is broken because the signal is broken. Every piece of evidence a candidate produces about themselves can now be manufactured cheaply. The CV is written by AI, so everyone reads like employee of the decade. The cover letter is generated. LinkedIn endorsements come from friends returning a favor. Even the interview, the one moment that felt human, measures preparation more than ability: there is an entire coaching industry, worth hundreds of millions a year, dedicated to making people perform well in interviews. Think about what that industry proves. If the signal being measured can be coached, it is measuring the coaching.
Employers know all this. That is precisely why they keep adding process. More rounds, more assessments, more AI screening, more take-home projects. None of it is malice and most of it is not even incompetence. It is what rational people do when they cannot trust any of the inputs: they pile on filters and hope the noise cancels out. It does not. It just makes the funnel longer for everyone, and it selects for the people best at surviving funnels.
The signal that never makes it out of the building
The strange part is that the information employers are desperate for already exists. It just dies inside your last workplace.
One manager put it bluntly in a thread about what impresses him in candidates: he learns more by actually working with someone for a week than from anything a resume says. Every experienced manager knows this. How you handle pressure, whether you make the people around you better, whether your work can be trusted without checking, whether you quietly fix broken things or quietly create them. Your colleagues know all of it, in detail, because they lived it next to you for years.
And then you change jobs, and none of it travels. The next employer starts from zero, holding a self-written document and a thirty-minute performance. The people who actually watched you work have scattered to other companies, and there is no instrument that carries what they know. The one reference call that does happen gets routed through a single hand-picked person, or worse, through the one manager who may be the reason you left.
Why is hiring so broken?
Because the market runs on testimony it cannot access and documents it cannot trust. That is the whole diagnosis. Hiring is not suffering from a shortage of talent. It is suffering from a shortage of trusted signals.
This gap gets worse the further you are into your career. At 22, the system has substitutes for signal: grades, internships, assessment centers, group exercises. Employers invest in evaluating juniors precisely because no record exists yet. At 35, all of that has expired. Nobody runs an assessment center for a senior analyst. The interview measures interview skill. Everything real you did over a decade is locked inside former employers. Maximum accumulated proof of work, minimum transferable evidence of it. At 22 you have grades. At 35 you have a CV, and the people who could vouch for how you actually work are spread across three companies and fading memories.
What you can actually do about it
You cannot fix hiring. You can make yourself the candidate whose claims are verifiable, which is quickly becoming the only differentiation left.
Keep receipts while things happen. A running note of what you shipped, fixed, and carried, updated monthly, turns your next CV and review cycle from memory work into copying. When feedback about you is vague, ask in writing for the specific example or metric. Either you get something concrete you can act on, or you build a record showing the specifics never existed. Both outcomes protect you.
Most important: collect testimony while your witnesses are still reachable. The colleagues who know your work are one desk away today and three companies away in two years. Written feedback from them, gathered now, is the one form of evidence that cannot be generated by a model or coached by an interview prep service. You cannot cram for your reputation. That is exactly what makes it the last trustworthy signal.
This is the gap I am building VOILA for: verified colleagues review how you actually work, anonymously so they are honest, moderated so it is safe, accumulated quarter by quarter into a record that belongs to you and travels with you. Not a score assigned about you for recruiters to filter with, a record owned by you to show when it matters. The honest limit: no recruiter asks for a VOILA profile in 2026. Acceptance gets earned one hiring manager at a time, the way every new proof of anything earned it. But the direction of travel is not subtle. When everything self-authored can be faked, the testimony of people who were actually there becomes the only signal left standing. The people who start collecting it early will be the ones holding it when someone finally asks.