The Job Search Is Broken. What If We Changed How Hiring Begins?

What if hiring began with mutual interest, not another application? Sunday Morning is reimagining how candidates and companies find each other through better matches, richer professional context, and a more human approach to recruitment.

If we do say so ourselves, something is deeply broken about the modern job search. The problem is not simply that there are too few jobs. It is that the process of finding and filling them often makes it harder for the right people to find each other.

In the US, for example, job openings fell to 6.54 million in December 2025, while the number of unemployed people exceeded available openings by nearly a million. The numbers tell a difficult story: competition for available roles is intense, and there is little reason to expect the pressure on individuals seeking opportunities to ease overnight.

For job seekers or aspirants, finding work increasingly resembles a numbers game. Apply more. Tailor more. Optimise more. Follow up more. Hope more. When opportunities are scarce, every little detail that is not optimised feels like a missed opportunity.

Recruiters face a different version of the same problem. Faced with large volumes of applications, they need ways to narrow the field, often relying on applicant tracking systems, screening criteria and other filters to identify the people worth considering. These tools can make recruitment more manageable, but they cannot, on their own, guarantee that the best candidate will rise to the top, and they have started to eat at the humanity needed in a hiring process at a time when we need more empathy. However, both sides are working hard to find each other, but the systems make it harder for them.

At Sunday Morning, this challenge is shaping how we think about recruitment. How can we build tools that work better for both individuals searching for new opportunities and employers? And what would hiring look like if the process were designed around meaningful interest and a clearer understanding of professional fit, rather than the volume of applications, the tireless optimisations or the speed at which they can be filtered?

Our answer starts with changing how the conversation begins.

Less swiping through CVs. More meaningful matches.

We are building a place that gives individuals searching for new opportunities and companies looking to snag them up two ways to start a conversation.

• Individuals can ask for an invitation. Rather than submitting another application into a crowded queue, they can express interest in a company and its opportunities. The company receives a bio, showing how the person’s experience relates to the role, the evidence behind their capabilities, their career direction and the questions worth exploring in an initial conversation.
• Companies can match with professionals. Employers can discover professionals whose experience aligns with their needs and request an introduction. Candidates decide whether to accept, giving them a say in which opportunities they pursue and which companies get their attention.
• Every introduction starts with mutual interest. Whether a candidate or a company initiates the connection, both sides have more context to recognise a potential match before the first conversation.

Know Your Professionals

Perhaps the question is not how we can get more people to apply, but how we can get better at recognising the people who are right for a role, and better at companies who are really serious about hiring with care. Because these spectrums matter.

Qualifications and experience matter too. So do the people behind these processes,  the problems they have solved, the skills they can bring to a new environment and the direction in which they want to grow. This context has gone without spotlight for a while because as the system breaks, interest in the people in the job market, whatever end of the spectrum, is has become somewhat redundant

At Sunday Morning we’re bringing back interest in hiring, and we call this KYP: Know Your Professionals.

It is a simple idea that we’ve given a lot of thought to.  Employers need a better understanding of the people behind the applications. Candidates need a better way to communicate what they bring to the table, beyond trying to anticipate the keywords, credentials and criteria that might get them through an initial screening. Most of all, they need to be given back control and feel the interest they put in a job application, given right back from the very moment.

The best hiring outcomes begin when the right experience meets the right opportunity, and both sides want to explore what comes next.

Maybe finding a job shouldn’t be a numbers game after all. Maybe it should be about finding your match.