Only Apple Can Abolish the Job Application
Matt Channon
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Only Apple Can Abolish the Job Application<br>Apple HR sucks. Not because it’s exceptionally bad, but because it’s exceptionally ordinary.
Matt Channon<br>Aug 23, 2026
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Apple isn’t the only company with the technical chops to abolish the job application.
It’s probably the only one with the balls to.<br>Apple doesn’t appear to have an unusually bad hiring system. I’m singling Apple out because it’s one of the very few companies on Earth with the brand, capital, engineering talent, recruiting scale, and gravitational pull to simply stop doing this stupid thing everybody does.<br>Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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And yet Apple still mostly does what everybody else does.<br>Say a manager needs an engineer. A requisition gets opened. A job gets posted. Engineers are expected to find the right listing, decide it describes them, raise their hands, feed themselves into the machine, and wait to see if the machine likes them.<br>Apple’s own careers site currently returns 600+ results in just one Software and Services subcategory . Individual jobs still terminate in that familiar command:<br>Submit Resume.<br>Why?<br>For a company like Apple, the job application is obsolete technology.<br>An Apple experience, except where it matters
The one thing you could usually count on Apple for was getting an Apple experience out of an Apple product. Sometimes that meant a beautiful interface. Sometimes it meant a shitty laptop keyboard. But it was recognizably Apple.<br>Seeking employment with Apple is weirdly un-Apple-like.<br>Apple obsesses over the experience of touching almost everything it makes, then hands prospective employees over to the same generic rituals everybody else uses.<br>I use the word rituals purposefully. At least a séance or a rain dance gives you a reason to keep cool clothes in your wardrobe. A job application is a sad yank by comparison.<br>Humans instinctively fear and hate Human Resources.<br>Rather ironic, really.<br>“We hire only the best”
Every prestige employer says some version of this.<br>We hire the best. We’ve got an incredibly high bar. Our people are exceptional.<br>Great.<br>Best at what?<br>Best at LeetCode?<br>Best at writing software?<br>Best at making Apple money?<br>Best at solving the problem the team actually has?<br>Best at having exactly the right sequence of job titles?<br>Best at triggering the interviewer’s “this person reminds me of me” reflex?<br>Best at having nothing better to do that afternoon than fill out another application?<br>These aren’t the same thing.<br>If the status quo is “hiring only the best,” then I submit that a lot of very expensive companies are measuring the wrong things, optimizing the wrong things, and doing so hilariously badly.<br>Here’s the question I’d like to hear asked in the boardroom:<br>How do you know your selection process ranks the thing you actually care about?<br>(!(how selective it is))<br>(!(whether your interview loop is "rigorous"))<br>Does the thing actually predict who’ll create the most value after you hire them?<br>If you can’t answer that, “we have a high bar” just means you reject a lot of people. It doesn’t mean you reject the right ones.<br>Steve Jobs used to say:<br>A players hire A players. B players hire C players.
I’d update it for the ATS era:<br>A players hire A players. B players hire C players. F players feed A through C into an ATS and report a talent shortage.
The best candidate is almost certainly the one who never applies
Suppose the best person for an Apple role already has a good job. They’ve got kids. They’ve got a side project. They maintain an open-source library. They’re doing research. They’re generally busy being the sort of person Apple supposedly wants.<br>They see the job, see the ritual, and think:<br>Nope. Not doing this again.
Nothing bad happens in Apple’s metrics. There’s no rejected candidate, no recruiter loss, no dashboard flashing red. That person simply never appears.<br>And the more valuable someone’s alternatives are, the more rational that decision becomes.<br>The process may not just shrink the applicant pool. It may shrink it in the wrong direction. The people with the least tolerance for wasted time are often the people with the most valuable time.<br>Then HR looks at what’s left and adds another filter. Another assessment. Another interview. Another little proof-of-seriousness ritual.<br>Congratulations. You’ve created adverse selection and named it rigor.<br>You want rock stars? Rock stars don’t wait in line.
Every technology company says it wants “rock stars.”<br>Fine.<br>Imagine a nightclub that wants the best rock band in town and tells the bouncer to pick the best musicians from whoever gets in line.<br>The bouncer can be spectacular at his job. He can reject 99% of the line. None of that answers the obvious question:<br>Why do you think the best musicians are standing in your line?<br>Mötley Crüe doesn’t wait in line.<br>If you actually want Mötley Crüe, somebody from the club goes...