Forty Résumés, One Address

An employer told me last week that they'd received forty résumés for one opening. All forty listed the same address.

Somebody was playing the numbers game. Fire off enough applications and something eventually lands. That employer's pipeline wasn't full of candidates — it was full of noise. And somebody on their team had to sit down and work through all forty before they even understood what they were looking at.

I've spent twenty years placing people in retail, restaurants and hospitality. I've watched this get worse every year. And I'll say something you don't often hear from someone who runs an AI company:

AI has made hiring worse before it's made it better.

The tool we're using is a hundred years old

Here's the part nobody wants to say out loud. We are still judging human beings off a résumé — a format that has been the standard for close to a hundred years.

That was already a weak signal. Now it's a broken one.

Easy Apply means a candidate can click two buttons and apply to a hundred jobs. Half the time they don't know where they've applied. Candidate pools are saturated. Bots are filling them. And anyone can now produce a résumé that perfectly matches a job description, because the tools to do it are free and take thirty seconds.

So the employer with forty identical addresses isn't an outlier. That's just what the top of the funnel looks like now.

Meanwhile the question that actually matters — will this person still be here in six months? — is one a résumé has never been able to answer.

We're still judging people off a document that stopped telling us anything useful.

That is worth sitting with. Across more than 2,800 skills, not one came back as something today's AI can fully take over. And the churn everyone is bracing for is smaller than it was two years ago, not larger.

The number that should worry every operator

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks how many people voluntarily quit their jobs each month. It's the cleanest read we have on whether workers feel they have options.

Restaurant and hotel workers walk out the door at more than twice the national rate. Every month. Not once a year — every month.

That isn't an abstract labor-market statistic. That's a description of what a general manager's week actually looks like. Constantly hiring. Constantly training. Constantly covering a shift for somebody who left.

And every one of those hires runs through the same broken screening process.

And it is the sector where the technology everyone is talking about has arrived the least.

What actually happens in week three

When someone quits three weeks in, it comes down to one of two things. Either they were never really interested in the job — they had one foot out the door from day one and were waiting on an offer somewhere else. Or there was a genuine failure on our side: a lack of training, or nobody clearly set the expectations of the role.

In my experience it's close to a fifty-fifty split.

That second half matters, and I'd rather say it than pretend hiring is the only variable. Half the time we didn't hire wrong. We hired fine, and then we failed them.

The variable almost nobody screens for

If you ask me the single biggest reason people stay or leave, it isn't pay. It isn't the generation. It's the manager.

A manager needs three things: the ability to sell, the ability to be empathetic, and the ability to communicate. When a manager has all three, they give a human being a sense of relief, stability and confidence. That creates attraction. That creates longevity. When you communicate clearly, set expectations, and get someone to agree to those expectations, you create continuity.

The manager is also the one doing the training. They're doing the follow-ups. They're making sure somebody actually learned a process rather than being shown it once on a busy Tuesday.

So when there's instability at the top, that instability runs all the way down. In an industry that's already a revolving door, it compounds — and the pressure, the burnout and the mental health toll land on everyone still standing.

A manager needs the ability to sell, to be empathetic, and to communicate. When they have all three, they give a person a sense of relief, stability and confidence. That creates longevity.

Those are the three the analysis could not find a substitute for. They are also, almost word for word, the things I just said a manager needs. And employers have already noticed — leadership and social influence is the fastest-rising skill in the entire dataset.

Now ask yourself a question. When did you last screen a manager for empathy and communication? Almost nobody does. We check whether they've managed before. We check how many people reported to them. We don't check whether they can hold a team together on the worst night of the month.

Loyalty isn't dead. The trigger changed.

Everyone says workers aren't loyal anymore. I don't think that's quite right.

The days of working at one company for twenty or thirty years — the way the baby boomers did through the manufacturing era — are largely gone. That's true. Gen Z came up differently. Their formative years ran through COVID. They communicate differently. Attention spans are shorter. That's a product of how a generation was raised and educated, not a character flaw.

But loyalty still exists. It just has a different trigger now.

People stay when a company gives them hope and something to work toward consistently. When they know they're making an impact. When somebody has actually helped them figure out what they're interested in and good at.

And in frontline work, the strongest version of that is a visible pathway.

Show someone that working hard, showing up every day, keeping a positive attitude and doing more than the bare minimum leads somewhere specific — and you've given them a reason to stay. But you have to build a culture that actually allows it. Otherwise it's a poster on a break-room wall.

How you give a dishwasher a mission

People push back on this. A dishwasher, a cashier, a server — those jobs don't come with an obvious mission.

You establish it on day one. You say: here's what you can become. And then you point at real people around them who started exactly where they're standing and worked their way up.

That's the American dream. Anybody with a dollar and a dream. You demonstrate work ethic, communication, leadership and vision, and you move.

There's a lot of work to be done. But it starts with admitting that judging people off a résumé stopped working — and that adding more résumés to the pile was never going to be the fix.