I like spray and pray, personally, at least on a theoretical level. I've never had to do it myself. But applying to hundreds or thousands of places with more or less the same (honest) resume and letting the employer filter you out seems way more economically efficient than eating the linearly scaling cost of customizing for each position heavily. There's likely all kinds of hidden information the employer has that you don't even after reviewing the position as written, and this puts the Hayekian ball in their court.
An applicant could probably get the best of both worlds by creating a preferred and a fallback tier; fallbacks get the spray and pray, and the preferreds get a customized resume.
In this model, job seekers should simply post their resume and let the employers find it.
Spray and pray overwhelms the employers with low quality applicants, which leads to a lot of broad generalizations and generic qualifications being used to weed things down to something manageable.
For those who don’t want to put effort into applying, they should just be throwing their resume into a pool, imo.
I say this as someone who just posted his resume on a job site and waited until I got a call. It took about 8-12 months, but have been working at that job for almost 20 years now.
When interviewing people, a big pet peeve of mine is when the person seems to have no clue what job or company they are talking to. It implies spray and pray, and even when they got a bite, they couldn’t be bothered to look us up and see what we’re about.
Perhaps the future will be people of various talents and ability levels first applying to various resume pools, which job offerers then use as a first pass filter for high quality candidates. Then down the line these same candidates, if they do apply for a new job directly, might list "I belong to So-and-so Pool" as a line item to separate themselves from the pack even among job offerers who don't actually dip into that pool. Not entirely unlike working at FAANG today, to open up interesting new positions tomorrow.
> When interviewing people, a big pet peeve of mine is when the person seems to have no clue what job or company they are talking to. It implies spray and pray, and even when they got a bite, they couldn’t be bothered to look us up and see what we’re about.
I mean yeah that just demonstrates poor judgement. The hitrate from interview is enough higher than from application that "spray-and-pray" should no longer apply, the whole point is to save effort for jobs that are worth taking seriously and bothering to interview you is a strong signal of that.
An applicant could probably get the best of both worlds by creating a preferred and a fallback tier; fallbacks get the spray and pray, and the preferreds get a customized resume.