Invest1 publisher3 min readPublished
Applications per job more than doubled while the number of recruiters fell 56%
Indeed's chief executive says the hiring process has become a vicious cycle. The figures his rival at Greenhouse cites put the missing capacity somewhere specific: the people paid to read what arrives.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Indeed's chief executive, Hisayuki Idekoba, told Business Insider the hiring process has become a vicious cycle, and asked whether 1,000 applications for one role can really contain nobody qualified.
- Fortune, citing data alongside Greenhouse chief executive Daniel Chait's account, reports that applications per job rose 111% between 2022 and 2025.
- Over the same stretch the number of recruiters fell 56%, according to the figures Fortune sets beside Chait's description of the application black hole.
- Employers are screening pools flooded with AI-generated applications and fake-candidate scams, including North Korean IT workers posing as applicants.
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Why it matters
- constraint Hires are limited by review hours, so any channel that raises applicant volume is pushing against a queue with fewer than half the readers it had in 2022.
- contradiction Indeed's chief executive locates the failure in authenticity; the Greenhouse figures locate it in recruiter headcount, and the two diagnoses send money to different budget lines.
- exposure An employer's application inbox is now a fraud surface, so screening spend defends against hiring an impostor as much as it sorts the qualified.
- decision Employers choose between buying screening software, as Indeed has, and paying back the recruiter capacity they removed.
Put the two figures Fortune cites side by side. Applications per job rose 111% between 2022 and 2025, so 2.11 applications now arrive where one did [6]. The number of recruiters fell 56%, leaving 0.44 people to read them [7]. If the count of open roles held flat, each remaining recruiter carries 4.8 times the reading of 2022 [1]. Openings did not hold flat, and Fortune does not quantify the slowdown [4], so 4.8 is a ceiling: halve the number of jobs and the load per recruiter is still 2.4 times what it was [5].
Daniel Chait, chief executive of the hiring software firm Greenhouse [8], told Fortune: "This is the first time when really both sides have been unhappy," adding, "The market just isn't working for either side" [9]. He also named the loop. "Everyone's using their own AI to solve their own problem, but it's making the whole system worse," Chait said of what he calls the AI doom loop [10].
Idekoba puts the problem in authenticity. "How can we make sure job seekers are a real person, and it's not an AI application, and they're serious, and they're qualified," he said [11]. Fraud in the funnel is real, with applicant pools carrying AI-generated applications and fake candidates including North Korean IT workers [5], but verification does not shorten the queue. A thousand applications that all clear an identity check still need reading, and Indeed is among the firms that have turned to AI tools for the workload [13]. Fortune said it reached out to Indeed for further comment [18].
Scott Galloway, the business professor and entrepreneur, gave the volume from inside on a Vice News podcast last year [15]: "Google puts out a job opening, they get 200 CVs within like eight minutes. They limit it down to the 20 most qualified. Seventy percent of the time, the person they pick is someone who has an internal advocate" [14]. At that rate Google is taking 25 CVs a minute [2], shortlisting 10% of them [3], and leaving three hires in ten to candidates with nobody inside [4]. Sanjay Beri, chief executive of Netskope, told Fortune: "Sometimes those jobs you want, they're never published" [16].
The scarce input in this market is review hours, and the 56% was a decision employers made. Openings could recover, and the ratio normalises without anyone repairing the matching. If identity checks clear the fake applicants, the volume may prove manageable at current staffing. Or screening software really does substitute for the headcount that went, and time-to-hire falls while recruiter numbers stay down. That result would sink the capacity argument. For an employer, money spent widening reach on a job board is money not spent on the review hours that turn applications into hires.
What to watch
- A 2026 Greenhouse update on applications per job and recruiter headcount: if both move in the same direction, the screening-capacity account changes.
- Whether identity verification shows up at Indeed's application step, and who pays for it, the employer or the applicant.
- Indeed's reply to Fortune's request for further comment on Idekoba's remarks.