Indeed's CEO Says Hiring Is Stuck in a Vicious Cycle. Here's the Part Employers Control.

Fortune recently ran a piece on something most hiring teams have been living with for a while: Indeed CEO Hisayuki Idekoba describing the job market as stuck in a "vicious cycle." His framing is blunt. Talking to Business Insider, he put it this way: "You got 1,000 applications, and you think all 1,000 people are not qualified? Something's wrong."

He's right that something's wrong. The more useful question for an employer is where, exactly — and which part of it you can actually do something about this quarter.

How the cycle works

The numbers in the Fortune piece come from Greenhouse's recruiting benchmarks: between 2022 and 2025, applications per job rose 111%, while the number of recruiters fell 56%. Read those two numbers together and the cycle mostly explains itself:

• Candidates hear nothing back, so they apply to more jobs — increasingly with AI tools that make each application nearly free to send.
• Employers get buried, so they lean harder on keyword filters and fast resume skims to get through the pile.
• Filters and skims reject qualified people along with unqualified ones, so those candidates hear nothing back either — and apply to even more jobs.
• Every turn of the loop adds volume and removes signal.

Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait, quoted in the same piece, has a name for it: the "AI doom loop." In his words: "Everyone's using their own AI to solve their own problem, but it's making the whole system worse."

The part you don't control — and the part you do

No single employer can change how many applications the market produces, or stop candidates from using AI to write cover letters. That half of the cycle belongs to the whole market, and job boards like Indeed are working on it from their end — verifying employers, adding phone verification for job seekers, and rethinking one-click AI applying.

What you do control is the step where the cycle tightens: how you decide who's qualified. If that step is a resume skim, you're making the decision on the one document that AI has made cheapest to fake and most uniform to read. That's the step where a qualified applicant becomes one of Idekoba's 1,000 rejections.

Breaking it at the screening step

The fix isn't reading resumes faster. It's giving the applicants you're seriously considering a better way to show you what they can do than a formatted page of keywords — and doing it in a way that doesn't add hours back to a team that already lost half its recruiters.

That's how TrueScreenHR works on the employer side. You invite applicants by email. Each one takes the same 17-question, text-based structured interview, on their own time. You get back an overall score and five sub-scores (Technical Knowledge, Communication, Problem Solving, Composure & Self-Awareness, and Experience Alignment), an AI summary, the full transcript, and an integrity read built from paste detection, response timing, and consistency between the answers and the resume.

• Every invited applicant is read against the same rubric, so a strong candidate with a plain resume isn't filtered out before anyone sees how they think.
• Your team reviews scores and transcripts instead of doing a first round of phone screens, which is where recruiter hours disappear fastest.
• Applicants you invite stay private to your company unless they choose to join the wider marketplace.

You can't fix application volume on your own. You can stop making the qualified-or-not call on the document the cycle has made least reliable.

Your first five candidate invites are free, which is enough to run a real req through it and compare the result against how you'd have ranked the same people from their resumes.