If we assume that a posting costs $1 in either direction, the $100 cost to a company of any significant size of posting a single job to 100 sites is pretty negligible.
On the other hand, to someone who has no job, paying $100 to apply to 100 jobs might be pretty harsh—and there isn't the remotest guarantee that this would actually result in getting contacted, let alone getting a job.
Going one step further, paying that kind of money to apply also means you'd be expected to have a credit card or something similar. At the very least a bank account. And someone who's got excellent qualifications, but had a medical disaster cost them their previous job and home, and has been spending time on the streets, is going to have a very hard time maintaining a bank account or obtaining a credit card without an income.
Basically, any time you make a proposal to "solve" the problems with hiring/job searching, you need to ask yourself, "Is this going to nontrivially exacerbate existing class divides?" If the answer is "yes", that's a) probably why it hasn't been done already, and b) why anyone with any compassion (or understanding of the long-term consequences of inequality in society) should reject such a solution.
> someone who... has been spending time on the streets, is going to have a very hard time maintaining a bank account or obtaining a credit card without an income.
Slightly tangential to your main point, but in this day and age electronic transfers are money; cash is in effect just a fallback option for situations where there's no connection to the Internet. I believe that, in the absence of central bank digital currency, banks should be required to have a process for issuing current accounts to homeless people (albeit not necessarily with credit, just like customers who do have fixed homes). That measure alone would immediately fix a range of issues that homeless people face, wouldn't it?
It absolutely would, as would Postal Banking, which there's already a movement afoot to bring back(? I think it was around before? I'm not super up on it).
The problem is, as I noted, spending $100 to post a completely bogus job 100 times is basically nothing to even a medium-sized company.
The asymmetry in power & wealth means that if you want the $1 spent by a job-seeker to even come close to the guarantees you describe, you'll probably need to make the company pay $100 per posting or more. And that would effectively require some pretty widespread and strictly-enforced regulation/legislation.
If you're going to have to get that just for this middleman solution, why not go all the way and have the regulation mandate that any job that a company posts has to be real, with full intent to hire, and every single applicant must get a timely, non-canned response?
The issue is thst we both know those won't happen. Even if it's just scam shops that abuse it and everyone else plays the honor code. Rotten apples and all that.
On the other hand, to someone who has no job, paying $100 to apply to 100 jobs might be pretty harsh—and there isn't the remotest guarantee that this would actually result in getting contacted, let alone getting a job.
Going one step further, paying that kind of money to apply also means you'd be expected to have a credit card or something similar. At the very least a bank account. And someone who's got excellent qualifications, but had a medical disaster cost them their previous job and home, and has been spending time on the streets, is going to have a very hard time maintaining a bank account or obtaining a credit card without an income.
Basically, any time you make a proposal to "solve" the problems with hiring/job searching, you need to ask yourself, "Is this going to nontrivially exacerbate existing class divides?" If the answer is "yes", that's a) probably why it hasn't been done already, and b) why anyone with any compassion (or understanding of the long-term consequences of inequality in society) should reject such a solution.