It's pretty amazing how inefficient trying to get a job is.
@tekk I took a business law class, and my professor all but told us that each job posting is all but an invitation for infinite liability for an org, as the legal system is setup such that any applicant may accuse the employer of discriminating against them and the employer has to prove that they didn't. Accordingly, I wonder why we have job postings at all, and so to connect it back to your point: it could be worse, it's weird that it isn't, and the way it is is likely due to design.
@bthall My main frustration (aside from the fact that I've been fruitlessly searching for ages and literally none of my explicit applications have gotten any interest in months) is just the redundant data entry. Even when I'm applying to the same company I have to resubmit my resume, correct the data it wrongly scraped from my resume, affirm that I've never been in the military, am white, am not disabled, provide in my own words the list of skills listed in my resume etc etc.
If I could be so bold as to make a claim: humans and push based systems are shitty for this. I should be able to define a machine readable resume, even if it means I have to deal with xml, upload it, and then companies can just do queries on that big database of people who want jobs to pull candidates. That'd just work out better for everyone.
Linkedin does this *to an extent* but the damn companies pull the information from linkedin then just make you fill it all in again as you double check for errors!