Our Research: Unpacking the Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Labor Markets

Every time someone tells me, "I applied to 300 jobs and never heard back," I feel the same thing: a jolt of recognition—and quiet rage.

Not just because I’ve been there. But because I now know that experience isn’t a fluke, or a personal failing. It's the undeniable outcome of a flawed system's design.

Over the past year, I’ve been actively creating a complete research framework explaining what’s structurally going wrong in online hiring. This isn't just behavioral—it's foundational. And my goal is for you to finally have clarity.

🔍 What Our Research Uncovered

Platforms like Indeed and LinkedIn aren’t broken by accident. They’re optimized for the wrong things — ad clicks, resume churn, and paid posts. They're not optimized for actual hiring success for job seekers.

This academic framework, detailed in papers published and under peer review, introduces five key principles that explain the alarming 'why' and 'how' digital labor markets often collapse:

• Principle 1: Markets optimize what they measure. This principle demonstrates how platforms' reliance on metrics such as "application volume" or "time-to-fill" leads to perverse outcomes like ghost jobs, prioritizing quantity over genuine connection.

• Principle 2: Markets collapse when there's no true tension between sides. A healthy market requires dynamic tension where both sides hold each other accountable. When one side, like the platform, dominates, or when the market is designed without this essential tension, its internal structure breaks down, leading to dysfunction.

• Principle 3: Two-sided platforms need two-sided trust. We demonstrate how unequal feedback (where only one side can truly signal or verify) erodes trust, leading to things like resume inflation and employer ghosting.

• Principle 4: More isn't always better. Unchecked visibility without accountability floods the system. This explains why platforms, by optimizing for engagement over genuine matching, can create a paradox where apparent "efficiency" leads to systemic fragility and a flood of meaningless interactions.

• Principle 5: Conditional Belonging breeds to unconditional devotion This principal illustrates how people on all sides of the equation often actively support a broken system. That there is a human nature to self-police to join a group that is idealized, whether or not that group actually brings value to the community.

📘 Access Our Groundbreaking Research

You can read everything we’ve published academically in the background here:

• SSRN Research Archive →

• Academia.edu Profile →

• OSF Open Archive →

Every paper is publicly accessible, rooted in rigorous systems theory, and informed by genuine lived experience. No credentials are required to read—just a desire to understand what's truly happening.

🤝 Why This Matters to You:

It's Not You, It's the System If you’ve felt like online job applications are a black hole, you’re not imagining it. If you’ve questioned whether it’s you, it’s definitively not.

And if you’ve wondered why no one’s fixing it — I'm buit a new lens to understand it so that others can join me in the economics and entrepreneurial space, investors can fund them, and I myself am driving toward solutions.

In fact, my landmark creation, The Job Applicant Perspective, is akin to the first "Yelp" in a world of professionally required fine dining with no health department and no FDA oversight.

It's a foundational step, but we understand that doing nothing is not an option. If you'd like to share your experiences in the current market, please visit Hiring Feedback.

I deeply understand this struggle, having lived through the breakdown of the modern job search myself. This personal experience—combined with an intensive dive into the economic models and systems governing these markets—is what fuels my work.

As a natural systems thinker, I’ve dedicated myself to creating a language that bridges the gap between current labor market economics, the lived reality of job seekers, and the future state we need to achieve.

I founded The Job Applicant Perspective because everyone deserves a market that works for them, not just those who can pay to navigate or game the system. We’re actively building:

• Anonymous, verified reviews of job ads.

• Tools to flag ghost jobs and fake listings.

• A platform that treats job seeker experience as real market data.

✨ Why You Can Trust This

Lived Experience: I’ve been where you are; I’ve personally lived the breakdown of the modern job search.

Academic Rigor: This work is published on platforms used by leading researchers, economists, and policy experts globally.

Transparency & Accountability: I speak openly on LinkedIn daily, addressing business leaders and staking my professional reputation on these insights. My name is on the line, and I embrace that responsibility.

Resonance with Experts: Our insights are already resonating with prominent labor economists and journalists, including those from NBER and Radio Freakonomics, who recognize the critical signals embedded in this research.

Building in the Open: We operate with full transparency, understanding that imperfections are part of the process of building reliability and trust.

People-Centered Design: Most importantly, my core belief is in building systems that prioritize the people most affected by them—that’s you.

But most importantly, I believe in building systems that center the people most affected by them—that's you.

🛉 Want to Follow This Work and Join the Conversation? This website is my home base. It’s a place to explore research, ideas, and systemic insight—with no tracking, no email capture, and no pressure. But if you want to follow the unfolding work—get updates, new insights, and early tools—I share those over on Substack:

📢 Follow on Substack → That’s where I think out loud, share behind-the-scenes updates, and write directly to the people who want to help redesign the system—including economists from institutions like Harvard, Berkeley, UChicago, and Northeastern, along with influential journalists.

📝 Final Thought If you’ve ever felt like the job market was haunted—by ghost jobs, invisible decisions, or the crushing silence after you hit "submit"—you weren’t wrong. But there’s power in naming what haunts us. And even more in building something better.