The case against mass applying

My company is a bet against mass applying, so when LinkedIn’s chief executive and an Indeed career coach described the same problem six days apart in late September, I read both pieces twice.

What the recruiter side sees

Fortune reported on September 30, 2026 that LinkedIn CEO Dan Shapero, onstage at the company’s Talent Connect conference, described “a sea of applicants coming in our direction that look pretty similar.” Candidates, he said, are shaping what they send around what they believe employers want to see. In the same Fortune report, Shapero said job seekers have sent out 30 percent more applications than they did before the pandemic. More applications, and they look alike.

What the candidate side hears

Six days earlier, Indeed published its own coverage of its State of the Job Seeker research. In it, Jennifer Herrity, a career coach at Indeed, draws a clear line: sending an application to every open role seldom pays off. It becomes wasted effort twice over, she says, stalling the search’s progress and draining the applicant emotionally at the same time. The surprise for most candidates, in her telling, is simply how long the search now runs.

When both ends of the pipe agree

These are the two largest job platforms, watching opposite ends of the same pipeline. One sees what recruiters receive. The other hears what candidates live through. When one side describes the flood and the other advises against adding to it, the practical takeaway writes itself: the marginal identical application buys nothing. It joins the sea Shapero described.

Fewer, and specific

The alternative is not caring less. It is sending fewer applications, each one you can make a specific case for, and spending the recovered hours where sameness cannot follow: researching this company, preparing for this conversation, the human follow-up no template produces. That is the idea CoBlack is built around, targeting rather than volume, with automation that exists so the hours a search burns on mechanical work can go to the parts only a person can do.

I will not pretend this fixes the hardest part. Herrity is right that landing a job takes longer than people expect, and choosing targeting over volume will not shorten your search by itself. It changes what each application is for, not how many weeks the market takes. A targeted search is still a long search. It is just no longer an identical one.