Glassdoor President: finding the right job shouldn’t feel like winning the lottery

Finding a job right now feels like a fool’s errand.

Tailoring resumes, customizing cover letters, retyping the same work history into an endless stream of application portals, and then, more often than not, hearing nothing back.

The problem isn’t that the search takes effort, it’s that the effort so rarely produces anything in return.

The sense that a resume goes straight into a black box isn’t imagined – applications per job have more than doubled since 2022, and the average company now has 56% fewer recruiters to review them.

Fifteen plus years ago, job seekers had a different kind of problem.

Workers had almost no visibility into what a company was actually like before saying yes to a job: the pay, the culture, how a manager treated people, whether what got promised in an interview held up once someone started.

The information ran one way only.

Glassdoor entered the picture to level the playing field for employees and job seekers with an infrastructure around workplace transparency.

Anonymous employee reviews and ratings that let people see inside a company before applying worked because it gave job seekers something they’d never had: an honest, firsthand account of what they were walking into, from current employees with no reason to lie about it.

That was an important starting place, but it was incomplete.

Knowing what a company is like doesn’t tell a job seeker, or an employer, whether a specific person and a specific role are actually right for each other.

A resume is a highlight reel and a job description is a wish list; neither says much about whether someone will thrive in the day-to-day reality of a job, or whether a company will deliver on what it promised.

Get that match wrong and the costs compound in ways that are easy to miss: people end up in roles that don’t fit, their confidence and engagement erode, which costs the business too, and because leaving means stepping back into the same broken search, many just stay.

Over the past two years, our data shows that burned-out workers are less likely to apply for another job compared to workers giving similar ratings.