I've seen the world of freelance hiring from both sides, which gave me an interesting perspective. As a freelancer myself, I know how annoying it is when your

I've seen the world of freelance hiring from both sides, which gave me an interesting perspective. As a freelancer myself, I know how annoying it is when your bank account is dwindling, you need work, but people take so long to get back to you, or don't get back to you at all. It also hurts that it is still a sellers market and you know if you hold out you'll find someone willing to pay a decent rate, but you spend all your meetings talking to people who want you to work for bargain basement prices. On the other side - at one point I was working on a hand-curated freelancer marketplace. We posted jobs on other freelance sites to recruit the first few users for our platform. I got tons of responses, usually at least 50 for each posting. Some were clearly copy pasted, some had actually taken time to write out detailed responses. I did try and reply to everyone to tell if we wanted them on board or not, but it took a lot of time (the interface makes messaging lots of people slow). Morally I should have just spent an hour or two writing one liner replies to everyone, but the bigger issue was just the thought of all these desperate people looking for work was too depressing. So I preferred not to think about it and simply not reply to the people we weren't going to bring on board. Was it acceptable? No, of course not. But I just wanted to show how the world looks when you're faced with a resume deluge.