Recruiters are adapting to a labor market that looks nothing like it did five years ago.
In our ongoing interview series with HR and talent leaders, we spoke with Serge Boudreau, a Calgary-based executive at Resume Wallet who has spent over two decades in the trenches of recruiting and HR tech. Boudreau has seen every side of the modern hiring equation, and regularly shares his perspective as co-host of The HR Morning Show, a widely followed podcast where he discusses labor-related challenges as “the HR weatherman.” He also helps employers cut through the noise of a job market overwhelmed by spam applications, mismatched expectations, and, you guessed it, AI.
He recently spoke with Basic Capital about where the system went wrong, and why applicants and employers are both frustrated. Now, recruiters are adapting to a labor market that looks nothing like it did five years ago.
The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Basic Capital (BC): These conversations around HR and growth might’ve felt more urgent a few years ago. During COVID, companies were struggling to hire, but in today’s market, where it seems like employers are flooded with candidates, why should they even care?
Serge Boudreau (SB): I completely agree. Things have changed dramatically. A lot of people entering the workforce now have never experienced an employer-led market. Since around 2012, it’s mostly been employee-driven. But that’s shifting, and it really depends on the kind of work we’re talking about.
BC: You mean, in terms of different labor markets?
SB: Yeah. There are what I call “stand-up jobs,” like blue-collar, nursing, hospitality, retail — and “sit-down jobs,” the traditional white-collar roles. The challenges are totally different. Unfortunately, we pushed an entire generation toward university degrees in things like business or communications that just aren’t as useful in today’s market. Meanwhile, the kids who went into trades are in demand everywhere. The gap is huge, and it’s a mess, frankly.
BC: What kind of problems are you seeing from the employer side?
SB: It’s bad. I just heard from a business owner who posted a job and got 2,500 applicants. But 30 to 40 percent of those were not real. They came from mass-apply tools: you click once, and it applies you to a thousand jobs! It’s made the signal-to-noise ratio in hiring worse than ever. And youth unemployment here in Canada is close to 15 percent. The U.S. is right behind us.
BC: That’s incredibly high, which, again, makes you wonder why growth conversations like these even matter to employers right now. In other words, why would an employer or a people manager be interested in learning more about recruitment when they’re holding all the cards?
SB: The situation is actually the opposite. It’s a massive problem. It’s a way bigger problem than not receiving enough resumes, and I’ll tell you why. Think about it: As soon as the economy goes down a little bit, the first to get laid off is usually HR and talent acquisition. So recruiters are kind of the canary in the coal mine.
BC: So you’ve got a massive amount of unemployed recruiters, and even more white-collar workers trying to get hired.
SB: There are so many unemployed recruiters out there. They've been laid off in numbers that I’ve never seen, and you’re receiving more resumes than ever. So what's happening is all these applicants are getting ghosted. Even though employers are getting 2,500 resumes, they’re not able to find any quality candidates in those resumes at all.
BC: That creates a massive disconnect.
SB: It’s actually worse than it's ever been. Yes, employers have the power, but they still can’t find quality people because either they're not real, or there’s very little intent from the applicants. Or it’s so noisy that they can’t find that person. No one’s going to look through 2,500 resumes.
BC: There’s one more point you made that feels worth exploring. We’re in a time right now where the white-collar workforce is being trimmed down. And you’re saying the HR world gets hit too. Obviously, if you’re downsizing, you might keep some HR representation around for day-to-day operations, but otherwise you just don’t need as many people.
SB: Exactly. A lot of the recruiting functions get cut, and this is where some interesting lawsuits are starting to pop up. A lot of companies started building AI tools to scan resumes and surface better quality candidates. But now you’ve got candidates using AI too. And I don’t blame them. So now we have AI talking to AI.
BC: That’s darkly hilarious but has to be creating all kinds of issues.
SB: There’s a big lawsuit happening right now against Workday. That’s the system most enterprise companies use to manage their HR functions, including recruitment. What came out is that people over the age of 40 were allegedly being filtered out. And that’s going to court. All these screening tools were designed to streamline hiring and surface better candidates, but they might not hold up legally for much longer if they’re found to be discriminatory.
BC: So the applicant tracking system is allegedly weeding out older applicants. You’d have to imagine the same legal complaint is applying to other demographics.
SB: The biggest issue so far has been ageism, but yes, there’s a book that gets into this called The Algorithm. It looks at how companies were using AI to screen and match candidates, and all these subtle things would come up. One example: in the U.S., men generally play baseball; women play softball. So if you had “played baseball at LSU” on your resume, that might get treated as a positive signal. But if you played softball at LSU, it could knock you out. That’s a clear gender bias, and the system isn’t always transparent about it.
BC: Right, and the candidate would never know.
SB: Exactly. They don’t see what’s happening behind the scenes. They’re just applying and hearing nothing back.
BC: So while the white-collar workforce is shrinking, the demand for skilled trades is booming. That part of the labor market looks completely different.
SB: Totally. Trades are in huge demand right now, and that’s not changing anytime soon. These are people who can work anywhere. They’re getting paid extremely well, often better than new grads in office jobs, and there’s not enough of them. Meanwhile, you’ve got a huge wave of graduates with general business degrees who are stuck. It’s two separate labor markets.
BC: It’s wild that we’re still pushing college as the default path, when a lot of those jobs either don’t exist or don’t pay what people expect.
SB: That’s the hard truth, and it’s not just about pay. For actual job openings, we created this “easy apply” system, and now are watching it break in real time. You’ve got people applying to jobs they’re not qualified for — because that’s what they were told to do. You’ve got employers overwhelmed and unable to spot the ones who are qualified. And the people who could be a perfect fit are buried under 2,000 resumes.
BC: There’s one hiring recruiter who keeps saying, “We built a haunted house, and we got mad that Ghost Hunters showed up.”
SB: We need to rethink how we screen for quality. Right now everything is optimized for volume, and volume is the problem. We need better tools to evaluate real intent and real fit. That might mean adding friction back into the process and making applicants show a bit more effort. That could be a short cover letter, a skill test, anything that signals they actually want the job.
BC: And you think that would actually improve things?
SB: It's not perfect, but it helps. If someone's willing to go one extra step, it tells you something. And it helps cut through the noise. Otherwise, we're just spinning our wheels. Employers are frustrated. Job seekers are burnt out. And nothing's getting better.