Nobody's Incentivized to Fully Fix This

There's Real Money In This

There's a lot of money moving through the space between job seekers and hiring teams, and I think it's worth naming plainly before going further.

Headhunters and recruiters get paid well to find what everyone calls the "purple squirrel," the rare candidate nobody else could find. A typical contingency fee runs fifteen to twenty-five percent of a candidate's first-year salary, and for retained executive search it can run twenty-five to thirty-five percent (recruiting-industry fee benchmarks, Pin and Floodgate Medical, 2026). Do the math and that's roughly two to four months of someone's annual pay, paid by the company, for one successful match. On top of that sits a whole layer of career coaches, mentors, workshops, and webinars. The career coaching industry alone is now valued at roughly $1.4 to $2.5 billion globally, and demand for it has grown more than twenty percent in just the last two years (coaching-industry market research compiled by Luisa Zhou, 2026). And beneath all of that sits an entire category of resume software and job search tools, each one selling a piece of the same problem.

Nobody Has To Be The Villain

I don't think most of these people are cynical. I've run workshops myself. I believe almost everyone in this space wants to see the person in front of them get a job. That part is genuine.

But step back and look at the system, not the individuals in it, and something uncomfortable becomes obvious. If every job seeker actually knew how to get hired quickly and reliably, on their own, a huge amount of this industry would have far less to do.

Worth being precise about which part of the ecosystem that hits hardest, because it isn't evenly distributed. A recruiter is paid by the company, on placement, so a recruiter has every reason to want any single search to close fast, not drag on, faster placement is a better outcome for them too. What a recruiter needs isn't slow searches. It's a continuing supply of companies who'd rather pay someone else to find people than do it themselves, which has little to do with whether job seekers could present themselves well on their own. Coaches and workshops sit closer to the sharper version of this claim: their customer is the job seeker directly, so if the skill they teach ever became common knowledge, demand for the teaching itself would shrink. The problem being "hard" isn't just a shame. For the part of this ecosystem paid directly by the person trying to get hired, it's closer to the business model.

And it's not only that any one search taking longer helps. It's that the population of people who don't know how to do this has to keep refilling itself for any of it to keep working as a business. If everyone who ever learned this skill kept it permanently, the pool of people who need a coach would eventually run dry. It never does, because people change jobs every few years on average, and the job market itself moves in the gap between searches, so what worked last time is already a little out of date the next time someone needs it. Nobody has to manufacture that. It just keeps happening on its own, and the ecosystem doesn't need anyone to keep it that way on purpose.

I keep coming back to a comparison that isn't flattering, but I think it's accurate. Dating apps like Tinder do produce real relationships. People do find love there, at real volume, because enough people are on it that some matches work out. But the way the product itself is built doesn't optimize for you finding one lasting relationship and leaving. It optimizes for engagement, for you coming back, for volume. This isn't just my read of it, either; Match Group, Tinder and Hinge's parent company, is currently facing a class-action lawsuit alleging its apps use "dopamine-manipulating" features specifically designed to keep people using and paying, in the plaintiffs' words, to erode users' ability to disengage. Match Group denies it, and says its business model isn't built on engagement metrics. Whichever side of that lawsuit turns out to be right, the underlying tension is real and it isn't unique to dating: a version of Tinder engineered purely to get you into a great long-term relationship as fast as possible would, by design, need fewer and fewer users over time. That's not really what the product is for, even if real love is a real outcome for real people who use it. Nobody designed it maliciously that way. It's just what the business model rewards, and business models are patient. They don't need anyone to be a villain. They just need the incentive to quietly point in one direction long enough, and eventually almost everyone in the system, without meaning to, starts pointing that way too.

The job search ecosystem has the same shape. Enough people do get placed, do get coached into a better outcome, do land the role, that the whole system looks like it's working. And for those individuals, it genuinely did work. But the system as a whole isn't built to run out of business by solving the underlying problem for everyone. A headhunter doesn't want zero purple squirrels left to find. A coaching industry doesn't want a world where nobody needs coaching anymore.

How Good Candidates Actually Get Lost

There's a sharper version of this worth naming directly. Headhunters get paid well specifically to find the purple squirrel, the rare candidate matching every requirement on the list, a term the recruiting industry has used since at least the early 2000s, real enough to have its own book written about it. That phrase used to mean something real. A good sourcer with real craft and a real network could actually find one, buried somewhere nobody else had access to. I don't think that's true as often anymore, not the way requirements actually get written in 2026.

I went through a version of this myself. A headhunter reached out about a Global Partnerships Leader role, US market, healthcare industry specifically. I have real, provable US partnerships experience, built at scale, but zero healthcare-vertical experience, and said so upfront. Her answer was warm and direct: healthcare-domain knowledge wasn't negotiable. Fair enough, that's her client's call to make. But it raised a question I couldn't shake. How many people alive actually have deep US partnerships fluency, a healthcare-specific track record, and happen to be based where I am, all three at once? My honest guess is not a lot.

And even among that small number, how many can she actually find, and how many are even available, not already happy somewhere else? I don't know whether that exact person exists right now, findable and gettable, but I'd bet it's going to be brutally hard for her to land on one.

And here's the part that actually matters. Searches like this rarely just fail and stay open forever. My calculated guess, and this is how good candidates actually get lost, is that with enough time, one of those "must haves" quietly comes off the list. Eventually, almost always, somebody compromises on one of the axes, quietly, without ever admitting the original spec was unfindable. The headhunter still gets paid for the placement. The client still believes they got exactly what they asked for. Nobody goes back and asks whether the purple squirrel was ever really findable, or whether the job description should have described the actual underlying problem from the start instead.

Nobody's Stalling On Purpose, Either

Everything above is about people who benefit, gently and without meaning to, from a search staying slow. There's a second half to this that has nothing to do with anyone benefiting. Inside the company doing the hiring, nobody wants a search to drag on. It drags on anyway.

It drags on for reasons that have nothing to do with the candidate on the other end of it: budget approvals, a request that clears months late, a need that's quietly moved on by the time the posting finally goes out. None of that is anyone's fault in particular.

What matters more is what that looks like from your side of the wait, since none of it is visible to you. You applied. You heard nothing. The silence feels like a verdict on you specifically. It almost never is. It's a company working through its own machinery, machinery you were never shown and have no reason to know exists, and by the time it might explain itself, most companies have already moved on to the next request instead of circling back to this one.

I'm not saying stop using recruiters, coaches, or workshops. Some of them do excellent, honest work. What I am saying is that this is one more reason the resume, and the whole system built around it, is slow to actually improve. It isn't just inertia. It isn't just old infrastructure. Part of it is that plenty of well-meaning, profitable businesses, inside hiring companies and outside them, are built on the problem staying exactly hard enough to keep needing them.

Where I Stand In This

I should say directly where I stand in this, because a sharp reader will ask. I'm building Reelu, in this same space. I don't think one company changes any of this overnight, and I'm not claiming Reelu does. A lot of what's in this chapter won't bend just because one product exists. But there's a real difference in who a system is built for. A headhunter gets paid a fee when a company hires someone. Their incentive runs through the employer, on that one placement. Reelu is built the other way around. The profile, what we call a Storyboard, belongs to the person and travels with them, whether or not any specific hire ever happens through it. Nobody rebuilds it from the company's side. Almost every other platform in hiring is built to serve the employer who pays. This one is built to serve the job seeker first. That doesn't make me exempt from the pressures in this chapter. It's just why I think this is worth building anyway.