I do not know if you have tried to hire people lately, but things have become damn hard. I went back to this “pleasant” activity a few weeks ago, and while I am oddly entertained by it, at the same time I get overwhelmed by despair about the current situation. And let me say that for more than thirty years now I have reviewed quite a lot of profiles and CVs, and I always thought nothing could surprise me anymore. Turns out, it can.
First, my observations from Jobs-bg. We ran four postings there. Traditionally, it is full of curious characters who apply for whatever pops up, clearly just for sport, and without reading the job description at all. They were always there, but now they are over ninety five percent and have basically taken over the internet. Everything that moves gets targeted, especially if the position is mid-management or expert level, no matter what it is or what it involves.
What is interesting is that neither the title nor the complexity of the role scares them. Not even the requirement to send a written confirmation that they have read and understood the conditions and match them. Most of them have no clue what the role is about, but they are ready to learn. Which is not bad in itself, but there are plenty of trainee or junior positions where one can start. And not at this money.
What I also found empirically is a strange trend. The higher the salary offer goes for almost identical ads, the fewer the candidates there are. Not that more money suddenly brings better candidates. Those seem to be missing in general these days. But apparently there is still some inner “shame” among the endless appliers that puts a kind of moral brake on things. An interesting conclusion.
The second interesting thing is candidate mimicry. In the texts attached to the CV, whether it is a motivation letter, a comment under the posting, or the headline of the CV itself, people write phrases that match the ad or the company’s activity, which have nothing to do with the actual career history below. Clearly the goal is to catch the eye in the first screening, and then "whatever the sword reveals" later. I even found some who declare they have worked for us before.
Even more hopeless, however, is LinkedIn, even though it is supposed to be a professional network. We ran several ads there too, and the language did not matter. Bulgarian or English, the result was the same. Besides the profiles described above, two more types flood you there. One group comes mainly from the Middle East world, generally qualified, but obviously eager to get out of there by any means. The other group consists of people running all kinds of side businesses, looking for a place to monetize their own things, either selling something, mostly representatives from the Far East, or offering to consult and help “if we need it.”
At least those ones do not send CVs. They contact you directly, and sometimes there is something interesting, as long as it is not HR or other useless services, metal construction for project proposals, solar panels by the ton, batteries, any miraculous and genius AI solutions and similar products, or people reinventing the wheel.
While we are simply looking for engineers.
© 2026 Nikola Vasilev