We really try to spend the time to answer every application, but since AI generated applications have become a thing, we have decided to not answer those. Why should I spent time if you haven’t spent the time?
Unless, you are actually hoping to find a full stack developer that can also serve as the principal engineer for your entire network, storage, VMware infra, plus support basically anything with cord all for ~$80-100k.
Normally when you get to the point of discussing things with a human, you find out what the actual job is. The job ad is almost always completely irrelevant to the actual job.
And we need to sort out needs vs wants. Job postings should include the required skills (do not submit if you don't meet them) and a separate listing for additional skills that would be desirable. Don't waste everyone's time with a guessing game where people need to decide if they are close enough to the wish list.
Making it difficult to apply reduces the number of legitimate applications, however.
Either way, you need an automated first screen.
I feel the biggest blunder would be when applicant gets a take-home, spends some time on it and then there is no answer. Though I never experienced that myself. I never ghosted a candidate when I was on the other side of hiring table, but I was always finding it draining my energy to write the 'no' responses
The need for a referral to get human eyes on your resume is a different problem that isn't made better by making every application expensive for the applicant. Poor quality applicants have more time, you might say.
What if we imagined that companies charged a fee to apply instead of charging candidate time? Then these ghost positions would be obviously considered fraud. We don't normally pay applicants for their time, but isn't a ghost position requiring substantial time to apply also a fraud on the applicant?
All I'm saying is, by removing the payment in time, you remove the fraud.
Applicant spam is an orthogonal problem that has other solutions. Linked-in could limit applicants to one application every 30 minutes, max 16 per day. Employers can use keyword filtering as they already do.
No more requiring the candidate to do 30 minutes of data entry to encode their resumé into your HR system.
Then a ghost job wouldn't really waste much time, since uploading a JSON should take 30 seconds.