Because only one in a hundred postings is real, we have to send out hundreds of applications before even getting a rejection. There's no way to tell if a posting is real or if anyone will ever read your application, so the only option available is to apply to everything.
A lot of people pose this as a prisoner's dilemma, but it really is not. This problem is not mutual, it's entirely one sided. If companies would only post jobs they intended to hire for, there would be exponentially fewer spam applications. They've fucked around by posting spam and now they're finding out by receiving even more spam.
When the average applicant has to send literally hundreds of applications to get any response at all, absolutely nobody is going to handcraft a thought out application to any one posting. There's literally not enough hours in the day. Because we don't even get rejection letters back, the only way forward is to firehose as many applications as possible and just hope you win the lottery by getting your resume in front of a human.
It's absolutely terrible for everyone involved and the only ones who can stop it want to act victimized by the problem they created
I disagree with this; in fact, I think there would be more application spam with fewer postings. Most of the application spam is from people who are either completely unqualified and just pressing the 'apply' button (which is made easy by websites which get paid per application), or people looking to move to a wealthier country (without any pre-qualification). I think both of these groups would actually be more aggressive about applying if they were more likely to be reviewed by a hiring manager.
So you'd win out that way. But I also don't sympathize too much as the "unqualifies just pressing apply" was a natural endstate of years of bad job requirement postings.
