Easy Apply Broke Hiring for Everyone
The feature we built to help candidates made it harder for good ones to get noticed.
Here’s something that should be controversial but isn’t talked about enough:
Easy Apply was a mistake.
Not for LinkedIn, it was great for them. More applications means more engagement means more ad revenue. The feature worked exactly as designed.
But for everyone actually trying to hire or get hired? It broke the system.
The Promise
Easy Apply was supposed to reduce friction for candidates. One click and you’ve applied. No more filling out the same form seventeen times. No more uploading your resume and then manually typing everything that’s already on your resume into little boxes.
It sounded like progress. Make it easier for people to apply, and you’ll get more applications from great candidates who would have otherwise dropped off.
That’s not what happened.
What Actually Happened
What happened is that you made it so easy to apply that people stopped thinking about whether they should.
Candidates started spraying applications everywhere. Apply to 50 jobs before lunch. Apply to anything that looks vaguely relevant. Why not? It takes three seconds.
The result: employers went from getting dozens of applications to getting thousands. And the ratio of signal to noise collapsed.
When it takes real effort to apply for a job, candidates self-select. They read the description. They think about whether they’re actually a fit. They apply to roles they genuinely want.
When it takes three seconds, none of that happens. You get a flood of people who clicked a button without reading the job description and buried somewhere underneath them are the candidates who actually want the role and might be great at it.
Everyone Lost
The irony is that Easy Apply made things worse for the people it was supposed to help.
Good candidates now compete against hundreds of spray-and-pray applicants. Their carefully considered application lands in the same pile as someone who clicked a button on their phone while waiting in line at a Starbucks. They hear nothing back, because employers can’t possibly respond to a thousand applicants.
Employers drown in volume and can’t find signal. They skim. They keyword search. They miss the diamond in the rough because they’re buried under rocks. They default to pattern matching on credentials because they don’t have time for anything else.
Recruiters spend their days processing applications instead of actually recruiting. The job becomes administrative, not strategic.
Everyone is doing more work and getting worse outcomes. That’s a system-wide failure.
Friction Isn’t Always the Enemy
This goes against everything we’re taught about product design. Reduce friction. Remove barriers. Make it easy.
But hiring isn’t a conversion funnel you’re trying to maximize. It’s a filter you’re trying to get right.
When you remove all friction from applications, you don’t get more great candidates. You get more candidates, period. And the great ones get harder to find, not easier.
A little bit of friction is a feature. It filters for intent.
If you ask candidates to answer a few questions—real questions, not just “upload your resume”—you find out very quickly who actually wants this job. The spray-and-pray applicants disappear. They’re not willing to spend five minutes on an application, which tells you everything you need to know.
The candidates who remain are higher intent, more engaged, and more likely to be worth your time. You’re not screening more people. You’re screening better people.
The Right Kind of Friction
I’m not arguing for making candidates jump through hoops. Nobody should have to fill out a 45-minute application for an entry-level role.
But there’s a middle ground between “click one button” and “complete this two-hour assessment.”
Ask candidates to answer two or three questions about why they want this role. Let them record a short asynchronous interview. Give them a chance to show you something a resume can’t.
The candidates who aren’t serious will drop off. Good. That’s the point.
The candidates who are serious will appreciate the chance to stand out. They know their application isn’t landing in a pile with 2,000 others. They know someone might actually see them.
That’s better for everyone. Employers get fewer, higher-quality applications. Candidates get a real shot at being noticed. The system starts working again.
The Lesson
Easy Apply is a case study in how optimizing for the wrong metric breaks everything.
LinkedIn optimized for application volume. They got it. And they created a hiring environment where volume is the problem, not the solution.
Sometimes the right product decision is to add friction, not remove it. To filter for intent and not maximize throughput. To make things slightly harder in ways that make them dramatically better.
Hiring is too important to optimize for clicks.
This post was inspired by a conversation on the Product-Led Growth Leaders podcast. You can listen to the full episode below.