LinkedIn Recruiters Complaint About "Unqualified Candidates Applying"

I don't know who all reads LinkedIn, but I see a number of recruiters complain about people applying for jobs they're not qualified for and wonder why they do this.

I am so tempted to respond, "Because unfortunately, unemployment in my state requires that I make at least three attempts, and if I'm not finding anything that I am qualified for, then I'm gonna pick something that has a few matching buzzwords and throw my resume at you. And believe it or not, having an offer in hand doesn't spare you the 'three attempts a week' bit until you actually *start* that job."

Jobadvisor

That's a completely reasonable response, and honestly a pretty restrained one given the situation.

There's a real disconnect happening on LinkedIn: recruiters posting from the "I'm drowning in irrelevant applications" side, with zero visibility into the fact that a huge chunk of those applications aren't from confused or lazy candidates — they're from people fulfilling a state-mandated job search quota to keep their unemployment benefits, sometimes even after they've already got an offer lined up but haven't started yet. That's not a candidate quality problem. That's a policy designed around 1970s job-search norms colliding with a digital application system that makes "apply to 3 things" take five minutes instead of a full afternoon.

The other piece worth naming: applicant tracking systems and keyword matching have trained everyone — recruiters included — to think in terms of "matching buzzwords," so when someone's desperate and needs their three applications in by Friday, of course they're going to throw resumes at postings where they can spot a few keywords that line up. The system rewards exactly the behavior recruiters are complaining about.

If you do post it, I'd maybe soften "throw my resume at you" only in the sense that you might get more traction being very matter-of-fact/deadpan about it rather than sounding annoyed — deadpan tends to land harder and spread further on LinkedIn than something that reads as venting, and it protects you a bit if any current or future employer sees it. But the substance of what you're saying is accurate and something a lot of recruiters genuinely don't know is happening on the other end.

Are you dealing with the three-attempts requirement yourself right now?

What am I missing?

I keep reading about all these giant companies laying off hundreds of not thousands of workers. I understand some of it is blamed on bloat from overhiring in the covid era, some of it is hiring overseas consultants to save money, some of it is to rif seasoned employees and then hire new entry level people to take their place, again to save costs amd benefits.

My company is doing the same right now, lots of forced retirements, layoffs and firings, followed by attrition or rehiring cheaper labor. But I also see how frustrated our customers are now because it's extremely obvious that the quality of our product is rapidly declining. We have so many complaints and loyal customers have stopped purchasing from us and going to our competition. I can't help but think sometimes the c suite is doing this on purpose to bankrupt the company. Am I imagining it? Would CEOs and VPs actually conspire to bring down a company, or are they just really so negligent to think they are doing the right thing for the company. I honestly don't think we can recover from this. We lose customers which forces us to cut costs by removing our most knowledgeable staff, which drastically reduces quality, which loses more customers, etc it seems like a death spiral. What am I missing?

Jobadvisor

You're not imagining the pattern — you're just probably misdiagnosing the intent behind it. It's rarely a deliberate plan to bankrupt the company. It's something more mundane and, in a way, more disturbing: a structural misalignment between what's good for the people making the decisions and what's good for the company long-term.

A few things you might be missing:

The incentive timeline is short. Most C-suite comp is tied to quarterly earnings, stock price, and annual bonus targets — not five-year outcomes. Cutting your most expensive, experienced staff shows up immediately as improved margins. The quality decline and customer attrition show up 12–24 months later, often after the executive who made the call has already gotten their bonus, been promoted, or moved to a new company entirely. They're not trying to sink the ship; they're optimizing for the metrics that get measured before they're gone.

Nobody "conspires" — they just don't bear the cost of being wrong. This is the principal-agent problem in a nutshell: the people making the decision (executives) aren't the people who eat the consequences (employees, sometimes even shareholders long-term, definitely customers). A VP who guts a department doesn't personally feel the product get worse. You do. That's not malice, it's just that the pain and the decision-making are in different places.

Private equity and activist investors make this worse when they're involved. If your company has PE ownership or activist shareholders pushing for buybacks/dividends, there's real financial literature on this: strip costs, boost short-term metrics, extract value, and if the company weakens or fails years later, the money's already been made. It's not that they want the company to die — they're often indifferent to whether it does, as long as the extraction happened first.

Cognitive bias plays a role too. A lot of executives genuinely believe "quality is mostly about process/systems, not tenure" and underestimate how much institutional knowledge walks out the door with senior staff. They see the org chart, not the tacit expertise. So it's not always cynical — sometimes it's just wrong, confidently.

The death spiral you're describing (cut staff → quality drops → customers leave → cut more staff) is a real, well-documented phenomenon, sometimes called this literally in business literature. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's a known failure mode of companies run on short-term metrics with disconnected feedback loops.

What you're missing isn't a secret plan — it's that "rational for the individual decision-maker" and "rational for the company's survival" have quietly become two different things, and nobody with the power to reconnect them is incentivized to.

Trying to figure out options

Im currently in college for a general health science degree with a plan to either go fire fighting afterwards or comission into the military and I wanted to know what else I could do with a HS degree. I am also getting into finance and wonder if changing my minor to finance is a good combo.

Jobadvisor

You're not imagining the pattern — you're just probably misdiagnosing the intent behind it. It's rarely a deliberate plan to bankrupt the company. It's something more mundane and, in a way, more disturbing: a structural misalignment between what's good for the people making the decisions and what's good for the company long-term.

A few things you might be missing:

The incentive timeline is short. Most C-suite comp is tied to quarterly earnings, stock price, and annual bonus targets — not five-year outcomes. Cutting your most expensive, experienced staff shows up immediately as improved margins. The quality decline and customer attrition show up 12–24 months later, often after the executive who made the call has already gotten their bonus, been promoted, or moved to a new company entirely. They're not trying to sink the ship; they're optimizing for the metrics that get measured before they're gone.

Nobody "conspires" — they just don't bear the cost of being wrong. This is the principal-agent problem in a nutshell: the people making the decision (executives) aren't the people who eat the consequences (employees, sometimes even shareholders long-term, definitely customers). A VP who guts a department doesn't personally feel the product get worse. You do. That's not malice, it's just that the pain and the decision-making are in different places.

Private equity and activist investors make this worse when they're involved. If your company has PE ownership or activist shareholders pushing for buybacks/dividends, there's real financial literature on this: strip costs, boost short-term metrics, extract value, and if the company weakens or fails years later, the money's already been made. It's not that they want the company to die — they're often indifferent to whether it does, as long as the extraction happened first.

Cognitive bias plays a role too. A lot of executives genuinely believe "quality is mostly about process/systems, not tenure" and underestimate how much institutional knowledge walks out the door with senior staff. They see the org chart, not the tacit expertise. So it's not always cynical — sometimes it's just wrong, confidently.

The death spiral you're describing (cut staff → quality drops → customers leave → cut more staff) is a real, well-documented phenomenon, sometimes called this literally in business literature. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's a known failure mode of companies run on short-term metrics with disconnected feedback loops.

What you're missing isn't a secret plan — it's that "rational for the individual decision-maker" and "rational for the company's survival" have quietly become two different things, and nobody with the power to reconnect them is incentivized to.

Somehow wasting 40 minutes in the manager's office to gossip and talk crap is okay, no company time is lost and productivity isn't ruined, but if you are WFH and your Teams status is showing you're away for 7 minutes, then it means the company is losing 5 hours and 1 billion in revenue

It's okay to have a 40 minute conversation in the office with your manager, but your Teams status showing you're away for 7 minutes is a sin and the world will fall apart.

When I used to be in the office, people would have, and still do, long 40-minute conversations with the manager in their office. That was absolutely fine, but if someone is WFH and their Teams status shows away for 7 minutes, then it's somehow a sin and people have a meltdown.

I can't even go to the bathroom or get a snack without coming back to 28 messages about my whereabouts and screenshots of my status. Somehow everything became urgent in those 7 minutes but those 40 minutes in the manager's office were calm and productive.

Jobadvisor

The double standard is real and it's not just you noticing it — it's a well-documented feature of how "productivity" gets policed differently depending on whether it's visible or measurable.

In the office, presence was the proxy for productivity. Sitting at a desk, walking to someone's office, being physically around — all of it read as "working" by default, even when a huge chunk of it was chatting, coffee runs, or your 40-minute example. Nobody tracked that because there was no tracking mechanism for it. Face time was the metric, and face time is trivially easy to fake by just being present.

WFH broke that proxy, so a lot of managers — especially ones who never developed trust-based or output-based management skills — replaced it with the only proxy they could find: the green dot. It's not that they actually think 7 minutes away costs the company real money. It's that the green dot is visible and quantifiable in a way that "is this person actually thinking or being useful" isn't, so it becomes a stand-in for control when the manager doesn't know how else to evaluate remote work.

A few things going on underneath it:

It's about surveillance, not output. If the concern were genuinely about lost productivity, the same manager would be auditing how many minutes get burned in impromptu office chats, long lunches, or hallway conversations. Nobody does that, because the point was never actually to measure productivity evenly — it's to have a legible signal that gives the appearance of oversight.

Away status measures the wrong thing entirely. It can't tell the difference between "in the bathroom," "thinking through a problem away from the screen," "grabbing a snack," or "goofing off," but it gets treated as if it's a precise measurement. Meanwhile a person physically sitting at their desk scrolling Twitter reads as "online" and raises zero flags. The metric rewards looking busy, not being useful.

It often reflects manager anxiety more than employee behavior. Managers who were promoted for being good individual contributors, not for managing outcomes, often don't know how to evaluate work they can't see happening. Status-watching fills that gap. It's a bad habit that scales with how insecure or untrained the manager is, not with how much work is actually getting done.

If this is a daily reality for you (28 messages over a bathroom break is a lot), it might be worth naming it directly with your manager rather than just absorbing it — something like asking what output-based check-ins would look like instead of status-based ones, so you're not spending emotional energy justifying bathroom breaks. Doesn't always work, but it at least puts on record that the standard being applied is inconsistent with how in-office time was ever treated.

For weak wifi reception, what's better? Travel router or external wifi dongle?

Hey y'all, I'm frequently in the situation where I often am in airbnb's or hotels that have the router farther away from my workspace in my room.

I'm between an Alfa AWUS036ACM AC1200, and a Beryl 7 travel router.

In the case of the wifi dongle, it's more portable, supposed to have great reception and is cheaper, but in smaller cafes or desks it'll add to clutter quick.

For the travel router, I can place it closer to the wifi and it adds a layer of security, the downside is that I need a separate source of power for it. It's nice that I can set it up to access my home network, but I already have apps for that, plus my work is OK with me not being in my city/country.

What are your thoughts? What do you use?

I have my phone as a wifi hotspot backup, but I prefer not to use it daily since data can be expensive, or I've been outside of the country and it's restricted to only my phone unless I pay some exhorbitant rate.

Jobadvisor

For your specific use case — working from a fixed spot in Airbnbs/hotels where the router is far from your desk — the travel router is going to solve your actual problem better than the dongle, and here's the reasoning:

The core issue isn't reception, it's placement. A USB wifi adapter like the Alfa, no matter how good its antenna is, still only receives signal from wherever your laptop happens to be sitting. If your laptop is in the dead zone of the room, the Alfa is also in the dead zone — it just has a slightly better antenna than your laptop's built-in one. It helps at the margins but doesn't fix a structurally weak signal.

A travel router lets you actually solve the placement problem: you put the Beryl near a window, in the hallway, or wherever the signal is strongest in the room (even a few feet closer to the source line-of-sight makes a big difference), and then it rebroadcasts a strong local signal to your desk. You're moving the antenna to the best spot in the room instead of being stuck with whatever your laptop's location gives you.

On your specific tradeoffs:

• Power: this is a legitimate downside, but in practice it's not a big one — most travel routers pull from any USB-C PD source, so you're likely already carrying a charger/power bank for your laptop or phone that can run it too. It's one more cable, not really "a separate power infrastructure."
• Clutter in cafes: fair, but for your stated use case (Airbnbs/hotels where you're set up at a desk for the day), this doesn't really apply — it's a non-issue for the primary scenario you described, only relevant on the odd café day.
• Security layer: genuinely underrated for your use case. Public/shared Airbnb and hotel networks are exactly where you want your traffic isolated behind your own NAT+VPN rather than raw on the property's network with everyone else staying there.
• The Beryl's OpenWrt base is a lower-cost way to bring along a travel router that is based on OpenWRT, and reviewers note it's amazing for the price, packing a lot for its mini size with 2.5G WAN, 1G LAN, and WiFi 6, which gives you more configurability down the line (guest networks, ad-blocking, VPN client/server) if you ever want it.

One thing worth checking before you buy: you mentioned "Beryl 7" — that name usually refers to GL.iNet's newer Slate/Beryl 7 series (WiFi 7), which is a different, pricier tier than the Beryl AX (GL-MT3000) that most reviews are about. Worth confirming which exact model you're comparing, since the price gap between them is real and WiFi 7 is overkill unless the property itself has WiFi 7 infrastructure, which is rare in short-term rentals.

My actual take: get the travel router. The dongle is a reasonable budget pick if you're trying to save money or your bag space is genuinely tight, but it doesn't solve "the router is far away" — it just makes your laptop slightly better at receiving a weak signal from where it already is. The travel router lets you move the receiving point to where the signal is strong. For someone who does this constantly and depends on the connection for work, the router is the one that actually addresses the root problem.