My guess is that this is market failure. Employers make job hunting so unpleasant and expensive that potential candidates are strongly deterred from seeking po

My guess is that this is market failure. Employers make job hunting so unpleasant and expensive that potential candidates are strongly deterred from seeking positions. For background, I'm an experienced generalist Linux programmer. I could explain strace output to you in detail, parallelize your software, etc. I did a lengthy job search last year, after having taken a few months off due to life circumstances. I did maybe 20 phone screens, 10 tech screens, 5-6 on-site interviews. Even passed an on-site at Google. As you might imagine, this takes a ferocious amount of time and energy. The result? No offers. Hard to say why. My skills are pretty solid. There's nothing about me or in my background that'd be a plausible red flag, aside from my age (50s). My interpretation is that there's simply too much supply. Employers will regularly interview dozens of people for positions. (One job I was previously hired for bragged that they had a 1200-to-1 ratio of inquiries to hires.) Why do this? Because you can. Imagine interviewing 20 plumbers to redo your drain lines. Would they think you were being a jerk? (Would they be wrong?) Looking back over my career, the best jobs I've had had remarkably non-selective hiring processes. They'd post a listing, collect resumes, choose three to interview, and hire one. The interviews weren't quiz-like--they were just conversations. It might seem like a recipe for mediocrity, but somehow it just worked. I did my best work for them, and they were very happy indeed. My advice, spread your req far and wide, with as much honesty about what the job entails as you can muster. Wait for 20 resumes or a month. Pick two or three to interview in person. Hire one.