A Breakdown in Trust: Why the Job Market Isn't Broken, But Its Currency Is

Connecting job seekers to employers is a marketplace. Like any marketplace, it should run on supply and demand. If there isn't enough talent, employers raise wages. If there's too much talent, candidates adjust their expectations or reskill. Simple mechanics, in theory.

Except the job market isn't working that way right now. Employers can't find the right people. Candidates apply to hundreds of jobs and hear nothing back. And the tools built to fix this problem are adding more noise while raking in the cash along the way.

I'd argue the breakdown isn't really about supply and demand at all. It's about currency. Every marketplace needs one, and the currency of a job marketplace is trust. Employers need to trust that candidates are representing themselves accurately and will follow through on what they agreed to. Candidates need to trust they'll get a fair shot, that their time won't be wasted, and that the employer will hold up their end too. Right now, neither side has much of that currency left to spend.

Cause one: candidates can't move as fast as the market

Markets only self-correct if both sides can adjust quickly. Employer needs shift fast. Three years of automation, changing skill requirements, and economic whiplash can reshape what a company is hiring for almost overnight. Candidates don't move at that speed. Adjusting a wage expectation, or accepting a lower one, usually means rebuilding a life, not just updating a resume.

I see this constantly with former tech peers. For years, it seemed like there was an endless supply of six-figure remote jobs. Then there wasn't. Good, qualified people had already built a life, a mortgage, a school district, a routine, around an expectation that no longer holds. Meanwhile, other sectors stay chronically understaffed, unable to find anyone willing or able to take the roles available. The result is a market that looks balanced in aggregate and is wildly imbalanced in practice.

Cause two: we built the market on a lie

The second cause is more structural. We've convinced ourselves that volume and ease can solve a fundamentally human, structural mismatch. Any candidate today has access to thousands of jobs around the world. Any employer has access to millions of candidates. That sounds like progress. It isn't.

To handle that volume, employers built screening tools. Those tools are genuinely excellent at one thing: screening people out. What they're not good at is identifying who's actually qualified. A small percentage of candidates get very good at mastering the screening layer: the right keywords, the right formatting, the right resume tricks, and that skill has almost nothing to do with whether they can do the job. The candidates getting through the funnel and the candidates who'd actually succeed in the role are often two different groups entirely.

The sectors that resisted the volume game aren't immune either

It would be easy to conclude that the fix is simple: stop playing the volume game, go back to hiring on relationships. Some sectors never stopped. They still hire the way hiring used to work: building real relationships, expecting candidates to invest real effort, taking the time to get to know someone before extending an offer.

They struggle too, just for the opposite reason. Candidates trained by one-click applications and instant feedback everywhere else experience that relationship-based process as friction, not care. A multi-step, human process designed to build trust instead reads as slow, demanding, or simply confusing to someone used to applying from their phone in thirty seconds. These employers do the hard, right thing and get crickets.

This is the part of the picture I see most directly. I spend my days helping schools hire the staff that keep them running day to day: nutrition workers, transportation staff, classroom aides—roles where relationships and local trust have always mattered more than algorithmic matching. We’ve combined a friction-free application process with an immediate connection to a human. It’s the best of both worlds. 

What erodes when trust runs out

When the basic trust between employer and candidate erodes, the symptoms show up in behavior that looks irrational from the outside. No-shows for scheduled interviews. Candidates who accept an offer and ghost before day one. New hires who insist they understood the role, then leave within weeks because it "wasn't what they signed up for." We tend to label these as candidate problems—flaky people, bad work ethic, a generational shift in commitment.

I think that's the wrong diagnosis. These are symptoms of a system where neither side believes the other is fully invested. Employers have learned to treat new hires as replaceable, so they invest less in onboarding and relationship-building. Candidates have learned that employers will move on without notice, so they keep one foot out the door from day one. Once that becomes the baseline assumption on both sides, the behavior that looks like a breakdown is actually the system working exactly as designed.

Rebuilding trust is hard, but the actual mechanics are simple

There's no clever fix for a structural, two-sided trust problem. But the path back isn't complicated, even if it's slow:

• Know exactly what you're looking for before you post a job or start a search. Vague requirements on either side are where trust starts leaking immediately.

  
  

• Start local, where possible. Trust compounds faster in person and within a community than it does across an anonymous, global applicant pool.

  
  

• Talk to people, even when there's no immediate ROI in it. The conversations that don't lead anywhere this quarter are often what make the next one possible.

  
  

None of this scales the way a screening algorithm does. That's the point. The marketplace got broken by the assumption that scale could substitute for trust. It can't. Rebuilding it means doing the slower, harder thing on purpose and trusting that it still works.