How to Navigate the Jungle of Online Job Postings

Companies are rethinking the online job-application game, seeking quality over quantity.

You probably haven’t looked for a job in a newspaper’s classified pages since the Bush administration—possibly the first one. It could be worth reviving this old-school strategy because many of the listings offer a way to bypass those dreaded online application portals.

How to Navigate the Jungle of Online Job Postings

Clicking “apply” for an online job posting can feel like tossing your résumé into a digital abyss. A lot of employers disdain also the process because so many job seekers use artificial intelligence to apply en masse.

Companies fed up with the low-quality, sometimes fraudulent submissions that flood applicant-tracking systems are reaching back in time for hard-to-hack recruiting methods. Classified ads are just one tack.

Others include: leaning harder on references; making application forms so cumbersome that only serious candidates will complete them; and posting openings on niche job boards instead of the most popular ones.

The bottom line is many businesses don’t want an AI-powered fire hose of applications, especially as hiring slows across much of the U.S. economy. The jobs report out last week featured worse-than-expected figures for July and reduced tallies for May and June.

For job seekers, the bad news is that the application environment is likely to get more difficult. The good news is that qualified applicants may have a better chance of being seen, possibly breaking today’s spray-and-pray application cycle.

Finding a human

I recently leafed through the Sunday print edition of my local broadsheet, wondering who still advertises open roles this way. Turns out companies in tech, finance and life sciences sometimes post six-figure jobs there.

While some instruct candidates to apply online, others include the name of a recruiter or hiring manager—a human!—and invite applicants to email résumés directly to this person.

“It can make a big difference if you can get the name of the hiring manager and their email address,” says Anita Jenke, executive director of the Career Transitions Center in Chicago. “You are less likely to be eliminated.”

David Head co-founded an AI recruiting company, Endorsed, and even he suggests contacting a hiring manager directly if you can. He recommends applying online and following up with an email.

“A lot of the job-seeking process comes down to ensuring your application simply gets a thorough look,” Head says.

In addition to pulling you out of the online black hole, a personal email shows you made the effort to find out who is screening applications. That’s the kind of initiative that makes a good first impression.

I should note some companies’ primary reason for posting classified ads is to meet legal or collective-bargaining requirements.

Harder on purpose

After years of smoothing the application process, certain businesses are adding speed bumps.

At Digitalis Education, a Bremerton, Wash., company that makes portable planetariums, the online-application portal is a decoy. To get in the running for an open role, you have to read the job description, which contains a link to the real application form.

Only about 10% of people who start the application follow the directions.

Digitalis President Rob Spearman says he put up this barrier in response to “a tsunami of auto applications.” Seemingly promising candidates were routinely bombing their interviews, which suggested to Spearman that they had relied on AI to throw their résumés in the candidate pool and make them sound more qualified than they really were.

“All these tools for applicants to get seen are backfiring, forcing me to go to longer and longer lengths to filter out the noise and AI fraud,” he says.

Businesses are often too embarrassed to talk openly about being duped by bad actors. But at industry events, human-resources professionals swap stories about hiring remote workers who faked their identities or oversold their abilities, says Rod McDermott, chief executive of McDermott + Bull Executive Search.

Bad experiences like these show a frictionless application process can be risky, says Vinda Souza, chief marketing officer of RefAssured. Her company performs uncommonly thorough reference checks on job applicants. These include verifying people’s identities and asking former co-workers to grade candidates’ soft skills.

Collecting others’ views of an applicant’s curiosity, empathy and ability to handle uncertainty is an extra step. But “those are the things that will age gracefully in this new world of AI,” Souza says.

Too many options

Application spam may be particularly annoying, but a glut of strong candidates can be its own kind of problem. Applicant-tracking systems are supposed to get the kinks out of recruiting and, in a way, they work too well.

While they help companies cast wider nets, the challenge is sorting all the additional fish.

Users of Huntr, a popular tool for job seekers to manage their searches, typically wait 68.5 days to receive an offer. That’s 22% longer than in April.

“You have employers now sifting through not just hundreds of applicants but hundreds of good applicants,” says Sam Wright, Huntr’s head of operations and partnerships. “They’re splitting hairs, and it’s taking longer.”

Huntr guards against candidate surplus in its own hiring process by posting openings on smaller job boards. Wright says the company found a listing on LinkedIn might attract 700 applications of wide-ranging quality in a couple of days. But a role posted on the lesser-known Wellfound would generate 100 mostly good ones.

It isn’t quite a classified ad, but the idea is similar: Tuck a job opportunity where fewer people and bots will look. Job seekers may need to turn over different rocks and focus on personal touches as companies reintroduce hurdles in recruiting.

Write to Callum Borchers at callum.borchers@wsj.com