Employers, please use postmarked letters for job applications (2025)

2026-01-2922:4998103soapstone.mradford.com

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January 29, 2025

Employers, please consider removing digital job application submissions and instead require job applications to be postmarked using a physical letter.

Requiring the cover letter to be handwritten may also be prudent.

Yes, hiring can get worse

I'm happily employed, but it's always smart to keep tabs on the present hiring climate.

Job searching has always been Kafkaesque... but each of my forays in job exploration over the past 10 years have been progressively more Kafkaesque than the last.

Note that you could use LLMs to automate job applications ever since LLMs broke ground, but the barrier-to-entry was fairly high. Now it's trivially low.

I predict a coming barfstorm of job applications, a freefall in hiring success in an already impossible market.

Physicality can help

On paper (🥁), letters check a lot of boxes to address the problems of LLMs:

Raises the cost of an application from $0.00 to ~$0.80, reducing junk applications
Physicality increases the difficultly of using LLMs to automate submissions
Requiring a handwritten cover-letter greatly raises cost for poor/fraudulent submissions, imposes a comparitively smaller cost for genuine ones
- Require a Carbonless Imprint of the letter, if you don't want to guess if it was printer-printed handwriting in disguise
Handwriting is unique- if you're skeptical that an applicant wrote/sent the original letter, witness them write something else and compare
Increases the "interest required" in the position, vs spamming application portals
No (financial) cost to the employer- update the website text and outline the new requirements

You're dreaming, dude

I'm not harboring any illusions companies will use letters, but I want to throw it out there at least.

What I suspect will happen instead is that companies will further burrow into third-party application systems that offer "AI protection" (which will be a lie, though a comforting one). In the meantime, despair.

Aha! But you see...

Yeah, it's not perfect:

people can transcribe LLM text
people will just outsource their letters
LA-TEN-CY 👏👏👏
meatspace and non-digital documents scare me
my handwriting is terrible
I can't affort stamps
nobody is going to do this
LLMs have been applying to jobs for 2 years now, nothing has changed
LLMs are already going to destroy the world so why does it matter

Fine sure, none of these are incorrect I guess. But the race-to-the-bottom of online applications will only accelerate as the barrier-to-entry of browser/email/desktop-integrated YOLOed LLMs decreases. Something has got to give.

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Comments

By lanthade 2026-01-306:58

Site appears to have been hugged to death. Here's a link to an archived version:

https://archive.ph/iTJTI

By staticshock 2026-01-301:262 reply

Instead, the approach that will continue increasing in dominance is hiring referrals and finding jobs through personal networks.

In a world that increasingly resembles The Library of Babel,

- the main way to know what's true is to tune into news sources you trust (monolithic old school media, or personality driven new-school media, social media, etc.),

- the main way to learn what to watch/listen/read is to take recommendations from people you trust, or received through channels you trust,

- the main way to hire or get hired is, increasingly, by exploiting a network of people you trust.

All of this compensates for ambient oversaturation by using the best available (and tunable!) desaturation filter: your trust network.

By the_snooze 2026-01-303:372 reply

Social affinity and reputation represent winning strategies that have served humans very well since the dawn of time. It shouldn't be surprising that they continue to be extremely effective even (or perhaps especially) in the age of AI.

By TeMPOraL 2026-01-308:331 reply

That's why "nepotism" still thrives, in spite of (at least here in the West) several generations being taught that it's bad, evil and unfair.

By lazide 2026-01-309:491 reply

That isn’t why nepotism exists.

Nepotism is because ‘what is the point of doing all this’ - aka passing things on to family.

It also enables a degree of aligned interests between what could otherwise be hard to align parties (trust, like you mention), but that not why someone gets a big name acting slot, or gets put on the board of a friends company.

By TeMPOraL 2026-01-3010:14

It's part of it.

Nepotism entangles organizational interests with personal interests, in both good and bad ways. It means that someone may hire a friend or family member because they know they're a) competent enough for the job, and b) they actually, personally know them, which significantly reduces a risk of the hire turning out bad, relative to a stranger with equal or better credentials. But it also means that someone may hire a friend or family member because they're trading favors, which is bad for the organization[0].

I suppose in practice the latter might be more common - I'd guess it could be the whole idea has structural dynamics similar to "the market for lemons". I haven't spent much time thinking about it and researching the problem in depth, so I can't say.

[0] - And may or may not be bad for the local community. I suppose the larger problem for organizations is simply that they're designed to be focused, and need to maintain alignment of incentives across the org chart. Nepotism is a threat because it attaches new edges to the org chart - edges that lead to much more complex and fuzzy graphs of family and community relationships, breaking the narrow focus that makes organizations work.

By joe_mamba 2026-01-308:29

>that have served humans very well since the dawn of time.

Except none of this scales in the modern world beyond flat small orgs in homogenous high trust cultures, basically modern tribes.

If you're a large org with diverse people from everywhere and you empower everyone down the ladder to hire the people they trust, they'll just end up gaming the system or hiring their friends and family and the org fails from nepotism, corruption and cronyism.

It's not like we don't have enough examples of this happening everywhere in the world, and why most places have official hiring policies against this behavior, or policies to obfuscate connections from the hiring pipeline to make sure people get in exclusively on merit.

It's also why socialism is only financially viable in small homogeneous communities (like the Amish for example) where everyone adheres to the social contract of contributing to society more than they take out, and is kept accountable by the ingroup to be honest, but fails at a nation level where everyone including the government in charge of managing it tries to defraud it or game the system in their favor taking out more than they contribute, leading to constant budget deficit and ultimately collapse (see EU state pension systems)

But yes, fully eliminating nepotism and cronyism via rules and laws is nearly impossible due to human own-group bias, so networking will always be a huge asset.

Although I might know a solution, hear me out. I have fond memories of being part of this amazing private torrent tracker back in the day, that was 100% invite only, and the way the community was kept honest and accountable to the spirit and the rules, was that every person was responsible for the people they invite, so if their invites would commit a bannable offense, their parent who invited them would also got banned, meaning people would be very selective with their invites, biasing more towards meritocracy rather than nepotism or selling their invites online for cash which was common back then. Feels like something that could scale IRL as well. You hire your friend that turns out to be a shit employee, you're out the door along with him.

By pixl97 2026-01-3017:561 reply

>monolithic old school media,

Unfortunately these have been bought up by billionaires that use them as play things to get richer.

>from people you trust,

In one particular area where they understand what is going on. I have lawyers I would trust with my life on legal matters, but should not be trusted around any digital device.

>y exploiting a network of people you trust.

agreed, but sucks for people that don't have that.

By staticshock 2026-01-3023:47

"wildly misplaced trust" is a subcategory of "trust", which is exactly how i meant it

By softgrow 2026-01-301:143 reply

I'd really like a rejection physical letter back saying thankyou for application but no thanks signed by a human. I put some effort in to applying, they could at least exert some effort coming back, rather than simply ghosting. A reasonable barrier to bots collecting CV's.

By joe_mamba 2026-01-309:55

>I'd really like a rejection physical letter back saying thankyou for application but no thanks signed by a human

If you want personalized human rejection letters to come back to you, then the hiring process would have to be equally friction based: i.e. mailing in notarized copies of documents and interviewing in person, for it to scale and not overwhelm a company's resources.

>I put some effort in to applying

Yeah but so did hundreds of other people. This worked in the world of 20+ years ago, but it doesn't scale anymore in the era of online applications where every job posting gets hundreds of applications within a week.

It doesn't matter if you put in more work in your application than the other 200 candidates who are doing "spray and pray", it's too much noise for humans to swift through with without some automated screening that might just as well drop you through the net because it can't tell the amount of work you put in, you're just a number in a queue.

By eslaught 2026-01-301:37

Not the same industry but at least one literary agent does this: if you physically print and mail your book proposal, they will respond with a short but polite, physical rejection letter if they reject you.

But I think it's a generational thing. The younger agents I know of just shut down all their submissions when they get overwhelmed, or they start requiring everyone to physically meet them at a conference first.

By pjmlp 2026-01-309:52

In Germany it used to be that in some places, not only you were expected to have a proper application folder with various sections for the various kinds of material (CV, application letter, recomendantions, certificates, photo), they would post it back if refused.

This stopped being a thing about 15 years ago though.

I still have some of those applications in a box somewhere.

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