&gt; If there was even a small cost (time or money) to applying, you can be sure that resumes and cover letters would be much more common and of higher quality.<p>I agree. I&#x27;d happily put a nominal fee in escro to ensure that the target company I&#x27;m applying to actually looks at the resume. I&#x27;d also happily pay the fee for them to drop any job ads that they don&#x27;t intend to fill.<p>&gt; Job seekers are much better served spending an hour sending 10 focused applications than spending that same hour to send 100 sanitized applications.<p>I&#x27;m not at all convinced that this is true. The response rate seems completely uncorrelated with the amount of time spent on the application. Even at a lower relative response rate, casting a wider net grabs a larger absolute volume of responses.<p>As an aside: the biggest thing missing from the job hunt process is respect for your applicants _time_. At this point I drop out with companies that don&#x27;t seem to consider that. I don&#x27;t need feedback, but I also don&#x27;t have time to waste doing repeat phone screens and months of interview process.