When 1,746 Applications Means Nothing (and Everything)
Four months ago, someone lost their job. Now they’re staring at job listings showing 1,746 applications and wondering if they’ll ever hear back. Meanwhile, their mortgage repayments are about to get squeezed by another interest rate rise. It’s a scenario that’s playing out across Australia right now, and honestly, it’s both more complicated and less dire than those numbers suggest.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, partly because I work in IT and DevOps where the job market has become particularly weird, and partly because those application numbers are genuinely bonkers. But here’s the thing that emerged from a discussion I saw recently: those numbers are essentially meaningless.
According to people who actually do the hiring, a huge chunk of those applications—maybe 40% or more—are bots, overseas applicants fishing for sponsorship, or people who are so wildly unqualified it’s almost comical. Then there are the JobSeeker recipients who need to prove they’re applying for jobs to satisfy their mutual obligations, so they’re just spray-and-praying applications without even reading the job description. Someone mentioned that government organisations get absolutely flooded with these pointless applications, and when you consider that people might need to apply for dozens of jobs per fortnight just to keep their payments, you start to see how the system is creating its own mess.
What really caught my attention was hearing from hiring managers who say they’ll post a junior position, get 2,000 applications, but only find about 10 worth a phone interview and maybe 3 worth bringing in. One person pointed out that if you apply within the first 50 applications, you’re actually in with a chance. After that? Your perfectly crafted resume might as well be dropped into a black hole. Hiring staff aren’t paid enough to sift through thousands of applications, so they grab the first decent-looking batch and stop looking.
This creates a perverse incentive: you need to apply fast, not necessarily well. The person who spends two hours crafting a thoughtful cover letter three days after the job is posted has probably already lost to someone who applied a generic resume in the first hour.
And then there’s AI, which has made everything simultaneously better and worse. People are using AI to analyse job descriptions and stuff their resumes with keywords to get past automated screening systems. Others are having AI write their cover letters, which means cover letters are becoming increasingly worthless as a signal of genuine interest or capability. Some hiring platforms don’t even ask for them anymore because, let’s face it, anyone can generate a perfect one in about thirty seconds.
But here’s where it gets really interesting—and frustrating. One recruiter said they’ve never been busier because AI has made traditional job platforms so full of garbage that companies are reverting to human relationships and recruitment agencies. We’ve created so much automation that we’re going back to old-school networking. It’s like we’ve gone full circle.
The other day I was looking at my own LinkedIn, thinking about whether I should be doing more to maintain those professional connections, not because I’m job hunting right now, but because if I ever needed to be, those relationships might be the only thing that actually matters. That’s a depressing thought in 2025—that all our technology has just made it harder to find work through legitimate channels.
From a progressive standpoint, this whole system is fundamentally broken and unfair. We’ve got people desperately seeking work, employers desperately seeking workers, and somehow AI and platform economics have created this massive inefficiency between them. The environmental footprint of all these bots and automated systems churning through millions of fake applications isn’t insignificant either—data centres running algorithms to match AI-written applications to AI-screened job descriptions, while actual humans sit on both sides feeling increasingly disconnected from the process.
The advice that came through was actually pretty practical though: use Seek’s credential verification (it pushes your application to the top), tailor your resume with keywords from the job description, apply early, and consider reaching out to recruitment agencies. One person even suggested that if there’s no cover letter option, just stick it on the first page of your resume PDF. These are workarounds, band-aids on a system that’s fundamentally struggling with the scale and automation we’ve thrown at it.
For the person who posted about being made redundant four months ago—I genuinely hope they’re in that small percentage of real, qualified applicants who actually get seen. The fact that their mortgage is about to get more expensive while they’re job hunting is a particularly brutal aspect of our current economic moment. The RBA keeps raising rates to “cool the economy,” but what that really means is making life harder for people who are already struggling.
If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that those terrifying application numbers are inflated. You’re probably not competing with 1,746 people. You might be competing with 50, or 20, or even less. But that still doesn’t make it easy, and it doesn’t make the system any less broken.
Maybe the real solution is what that recruiter suggested—we need to remember that employment is fundamentally about human relationships, not algorithms. Until we fix the system (and I’m not holding my breath), the best advice might be the oldest: network, reach out to people directly, and try to get your application in front of an actual human being who can see you’re not a bot or an AI-generated mirage.
It shouldn’t be this hard. But at least understanding why those numbers are so inflated might make the process feel a bit less soul-crushing.