Finding a job used to have friction.
You had to know that a company was hiring. Maybe you saw an advert in a newspaper, heard about the position from someone you knew, contacted the company directly or visited a local employment office.
Then came the internet.
Job boards collected thousands of vacancies in one place. Search engines made them discoverable. Platforms let candidates search across companies, cities and eventually countries from a laptop.
That was a massive improvement.
It also changed the economics of applying.
Economists have described online job boards as tools that reduce search friction: they make information about jobs dramatically easier and cheaper to find. Research on internet job search has also found that it expanded the ways people search for work and made job search more extensive.1 2
That means a company no longer competes for candidates only within its immediate network or local area.
And candidates no longer compete only with people who happened to discover the same vacancy nearby.
A software job in Sydney can be discovered by someone in Berlin, Santiago or Kuala Lumpur within minutes of being published.
Then the friction dropped again.
Profiles became reusable. Forms became pre-filled. One-click applications appeared. Saved CVs and answers meant that applying could take minutes instead of an hour.
Reducing friction changes behaviour.
One 2024 field experiment on a job platform in Lahore found that making it easier to initiate applications increased applications substantially. The result comes from one specific labour market and should not be generalized to every platform, but the mechanism is important: when applying becomes cheaper, people apply more.3
And now we have AI.
AI didn’t create this system. It accelerated it.
Writing a cover letter, adapting a CV or answering application questions can now take seconds instead of half an hour.
Meanwhile, the amount of human attention on the other side has not increased at the same rate.
Data from recruiting platform Ashby illustrates the scale of the shift: across more than 109 million applications, applications per hire roughly tripled between 2021 and 2024 and remained above 300 throughout 2025.4
Applying gets easier → application volume rises → getting noticed gets harder → candidates apply to more jobs → volume rises again.
This is why the answer isn’t simply to apply to everything.
If everyone has access to the same application button — and increasingly the same AI tools — your advantage comes from making better decisions about where, when and how you apply.
That’s the philosophy behind Applai: find opportunities worth pursuing early, make your relevant experience obvious, then remove as much unnecessary administrative work as possible.
The scarce resource in modern hiring isn’t the ability to submit an application. It’s attention.