There are plenty of jobs. There are plenty of applicants.<p>Sometimes good applicants get a shit job or no job, and sometimes bad applicants get a good job. A large percentage of the time, someone is being underpaid. Sometimes, but more rarely, people are overpaid.<p>These are vast inefficiencies in the system that need to be rectified. The problem isn't job search, it's placement - the kind recruiters do.<p>Job search is a misnomer, because you'll never have complete information. Good companies will post woefully inaccurate job descriptions out of inexperience or naivete and bad companies will sometimes out and out lie. In addition, you have to consider job priorities (on both sides) and cultural fit.<p>So the real issue is actually about getting more perfect information. In order to do that, you have to eliminate the incentive to deceive and also provide tools for getting better information from companies that don't currently know how to get it.<p>Finally, at least in the US, you need to fix the culture a bit. The percentage of online job postings that do not list a salary is a joke. Anyone worth their salt (who is actually casually browsing job postings) isn't even going to consider those listings - the potential that they are a waste of time is vast, and there are plenty of other open positions out there.<p>Maybe the best solution is to develop a format for job listings that is standardized, similar to the MLS system, and create a playing field where there is incentive to collaborate between recruiters and also a method of looking a historical job listings from companies (and actually seeing good data). It's a tall order, but if you localized it to NYC (and it actually produced results) you could see yourself counting a lot of cash.