• Miles Bradley has struggled to find work for three years after losing his AT&T contract role.
• He believes some companies are seeking the perfect "Goldilocks" candidate in a competitive job market.
• Bradley said he's coped with long-term unemployment by minimizing expenses and staying optimistic.

After more than three years of job hunting, Miles Bradley suspects his best chance of getting hired may be a strategy he refuses to try: lying on his résumé.

Bradley has been searching for work since October 2022, when he was let go from a contract software engineering role at AT&T. He said he's connected with several recruiters during his search, and that some have asked him to tailor his résumé to better align with a job posting — requests he's been happy to accommodate.

However, Bradley said some recruiters went a step further — making significant changes to his résumé without his approval, which he felt didn't accurately reflect his experience and qualifications. These changes appeared to help him land a few interviews, but once he realized which résumé had been used, he declined the opportunities and stopped working with the recruiters.

"I was like, 'wait, this résumé doesn't represent me at all, and I'm not ethically going to do this,'" said Bradley, who's in his late 50s and lives in New York.

Bradley is among the dozens of Americans Business Insider has spoken with over the past year who are struggling to find work. Amid economic uncertainty, the early effects of generative AI adoption, and a trend toward streamlining operations, US businesses are now hiring at one of the slowest rates since 2013. Job openings have fallen sharply since peaking in 2022, when they exceeded 12 million, to about 7.2 million as of this past August, the most recent data available.

In a competitive job market, some job seekers are willing to try just about anything to get hired. While stretching the truth on a résumé or during an interview, for example, might pay off, the strategy also comes with significant risks.

Some companies could be holding out for the perfect candidate

Bradley said he's concerned that a competitive job market encourages résumé embellishment by both recruiters and job seekers — and that it's hard for him to compete with fabricated applications.

If companies are patient enough, he thinks someone with the ideal résumé — embellished or not — will often eventually come along. And when that happens, Bradley said, he can't blame companies for choosing the candidate who appears to be the safe, logical option — even if they might not actually be the best person for the job.

"The industry has become addicted to finding the 'Goldilocks' candidates," he said. "They want to have somebody that exactly fits what they're looking for."

There's evidence that companies have become slower to fill job openings, whether due to economic uncertainty or the desire to find the perfect candidate. In October 2019, about 91% of job postings from companies in the Russell 3000 — a stock market index that tracks the performance of the 3,000 largest US public firms — were filled within six months, according to data shared with Business Insider by Revelio Labs. Of the jobs posted in October 2024, fewer than half were filled within the same six-month timeframe.

While Bradley prefers to be as honest as possible on his résumé, he said he's become comfortable being somewhat flexible with certain details. For example, he said he might present certain skills or experiences as more central to his past work than they actually were. However, he's careful not to include anything that he believes would misrepresent who he is or what he's actually done.

Coping with long-term unemployment

In his final days on the job at AT&T, Bradley said he did his best to "exit gracefully," which included training his replacement and ensuring his main project was in as good a shape as possible.

Once he officially left, he began searching for work, targeting engineering manager- and director-level roles. As his job search has dragged on, he said he has also explored product management and business analyst roles, and even applied for a barista position at Starbucks. Despite submitting hundreds of applications, he's still waiting for an offer.

Job-hunting for three years has taken a toll on Bradley's finances, but he said he's fortunate to have support from his partner and family. In addition to that financial help, Bradley said he has been able to get by because he has become a "hyper minimalist." He said he used to have multiple cars, but now drives a single 15-year-old vehicle.

"It means I don't get anything that I don't need," he said. "I've reduced it down to a couple of backpacks' worth of stuff."

Bradley is among the Americans dealing with the economic consequences of long-term unemployment. While the unemployment rate remains fairly low by historical standards, it has risen to its highest level since 2021, when the economy was still recovering from pandemic-related disruptions. The share of unemployed workers who've been searching for work for 27 weeks or longer rose this year to the highest level since early 2022, and remains near that level as of the most recent data.

Bradley said he often reminds himself that, in the big picture, he's fortunate to have the lifestyle he does.

"I still live at the top percentage of the world's population," he said. "So what do I have to be upset about?"

Going forward, Bradley said he's at peace with the possibility that his job search luck may never change — but he still plans to keep looking for work.

"I love to help companies be successful," he said. "But at the same time, if nobody wants to hire me, I shrug my shoulders and keep going."

• Shopify president Harley Finkelstein advocates for work-life "harmony."
• Finkelstein said that his harmony involved some Saturdays at work and some Thursdays spent walking with his wife.
• His approach to "work-life balance" is similar to Satya Nadella's and Jeff Bezos'.

For this Shopify leader, work and life are less of a balancing act and more of a song.

Work-life balance is a classic business mantra, but a difficult one to define. Does it mean working exclusively from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.? Or does it mean shutting off your Slack and email over the weekend? These clear-cut solutions may not fit all office jobs.

Shopify president Harley Finkelstein offered an alternative. On Skims cofounder Emma Grede's "Aspire" podcast, Finkelstein called work-life balance a "misnomer."

"I think actually what we're all searching for is some sort of harmony," he said. "There are some Saturdays where I have to work, and there are some Thursday afternoons that I go for a walk with my wife. That's my version of harmony."

Finkelstein said that work-life balance can also look different depending on the individual circumstances, or life chapter, you're in.

"There's a period in your life, before I was married, before I had kids, where I was able to work 80 hours a week all the time," Finkelstein said. "Then, when I had newborns, I wasn't able to work 80 hours. I think everyone needs to find their own version of it."

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shares a similar definition. In a 2019 interview with the Financial Review, Nadella said that he wanted to "harmonize" what he cares about with his work.

Other business leaders have also expressed a desire to reframe the concept of work-life balance. Mark Cuban said that there "is no balance" for incredibly ambitious people, because competitors will work even longer.

Jeff Bezos referred to work-life balance as a "debilitating phrase" in 2018. "It actually is a circle. It's not a balance," he said.

As hardcore work culture and employee monitoring surges, some office workers may struggle to maintain Finkelstein's flexible work-life harmony. Workers may be required to clock certain hours and report to work on specific days, or face disciplinary action.

As for those 80-hour workweeks, Finkelstein clarified that they weren't necessary to be a high achiever.

"I know some people who work 40 hours a week who are some of the greatest performers ever," he said. "They're just incredibly efficient with their time."

Bill Gates has been right about a lot of things over the years — Microsoft, mosquito nets, the risk of pandemics. One thing he was not so right about: the idea that the internet would cut out the economy's middlemen. In his 1995 book "The Road Ahead," Gates predicted that the information highway would "extend the electronic marketplace and make it the ultimate go-between," leading to a scenario where the only humans often involved in a transaction would be the actual buyer and seller. Given that you are alive in this current time, you already know that is not what happened. Instead, the internet gave way to a new class of commercial go-betweens. Amazon connects gift givers to makers of novelty socks that the recipient will almost surely never wear. Uber serves as the conduit between driver and rider. DoorDash connects (and takes a hefty fee from) the begrudging restaurant and the lazy eater. And while some more analog middlemen — sorry, travel agents — have withered, others in industries from pharma to meatpacking have tightened their grips.

Middlemen are a necessary evil in many parts of the modern economy. Supply chains are increasingly complex, so someone has to manage coordination and logistics. Consumers demand convenience, which middlemen provide. Suppliers don't have a choice — they have to go where the people are, even if that means signing up for a delivery app or e-commerce platform that gives them a raw deal. The result: an economy where the real power doesn't lie with the businesses making goods or performing services but instead with the intermediaries that control access and quietly set tolls.

The problem with middlemen isn't their existence. If I'm in the mood for chicken for dinner, I don't want to drive out to the chicken farm to pick a little guy out — that would take a lot of time, and I am not an expert in what makes a good chicken. I want to be able to go buy it from the grocery store, which relies on Tyson and other middlemen to pick it up and process it. Everyone has a part to play in getting the fowl from the farm to my face. The issue is that middlemen gain so much bargaining power that both the chicken farmer and I are in a bind in terms of the conditions of his contract with Tyson and my ability as a consumer to shop around, and neither of us has full visibility into the steps along the supply chain.

"What these intermediaries do is they try to stand between buyer and seller, and the way that they impose their taxes or take rates on, typically, the sellers is very opaque to the buyers," says Hal Singer, the managing director of Econ One, an economic consulting firm.

Opacity is a middleman's superpower. Most consumers have no idea how much Amazon charges sellers on its platform, what Apple or Google skim off the top of app sales, or what amount a pharmacy benefit manager is keeping for itself. This hidden tax is often ultimately passed on to the consumer because the seller increases prices to offset it. And, it's hard, if not impossible, to get around. Amazon and Apple deter sellers and developers from steering customers to cheaper channels. Credit card companies try to compel merchants to accept all of their cards, regardless of the swipe fee. Food distributors allow farmers little leverage over contracts and pay, and some consumers come to suspect they're not playing fair, price-wise.

In this day and age, if you sell stuff online, you can't not be on Amazon.

Across industries, the pattern plays out — middlemen lock in customers with convenience and lock in suppliers with access. Intermediaries merge or acquire each other until they become entrenched or leave people with few other options.

"Once a platform aggregates millions of buyers and sellers, whether it's Amazon's marketplace, a PBM's drug formulary, or a ride-hail app, over time, contracts, software, and even regulations get written around those intermediaries, turning them from optional helpers into infrastructure," says Anindya Ghose, a business professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, in an email.

In this day and age, if you sell stuff online, you can't not be on Amazon. And if you manage to avoid buying anything as a consumer on Amazon, bless you.

Some of the ways middlemen become so big and powerful can feel almost inevitable. Supply chains are long and convoluted. Consumers value ease. Suppliers want to offload their products quickly. Economies of scale are an advantage. Middlemen can connect buyers and sellers who wouldn't otherwise find each other, developing niche expertise that has value for both ends of the equation.

"The way that they've grown is not that they were kind of started with this evil intent of taking over the economy. No, they grew in power because they were providing a very real service, but in the process of providing that service, they are very often also erecting blinders that limit us and our ability to see the effects of the decisions that we're making," Kathryn Judge, the author of "Direct: The Rise of the Middleman Economy and the Power of Going to the Source," told me in a 2022 podcast interview.

A lot of what middlemen solve for are fixed costs, explains Matthew Grant, an assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth College. They make investments to set up and maintain infrastructure and markets that smaller businesses can't undertake as one-offs on their own. If you're a bookseller or a small farmer, owning and operating a global transportation network, writing up hundreds of contracts, and building out extensive legal and accounting teams isn't really feasible. To offset those costs and generate meaningful profits for taking on all that work, middlemen gain significant market share and leverage it to recoup their expenses.

"In practice, there aren't too many other companies that are trying to be Amazon because they know if they tried it, it would not make money," Grant says.

High fixed costs foster high barriers to entry, which lead to a handful of dominant intermediaries. It's central to the business model.

Middlemen come with trade-offs. Walmart has cheap prices, but if it squeezes local retailers, it also means fewer choices. Sysco is a convenient partner for restaurants and other food service operations, but it gets to call a lot of shots with suppliers and buyers if it's the only game in town. Uber is nice for users who want to avoid flagging down vehicles in the street, and its drivers get an extra way to make money. But it's killed off how we used to do this — taxis — and a lot of drivers and riders feel like ultimately they're getting screwed.

If there aren't many other competitors, or none at all, middlemen get to charge whatever they want. People on both sides start grumbling about how they're either paying too much or not getting paid enough, and it feels like neither side is getting a good deal. That's where you get complaints about fees on ticketing platforms while artists bemoan how unsustainable a music career is. Mystery charges on food delivery frustrate both eaters and restaurants. Both guests and hosts on vacation rental websites realize this would be a better deal for both parties if they could negotiate directly.

Consumers and producers end up griping about each other while the middlemen quietly skate on by.

"A very simple way to think about it is that a middleman increases the size of the pie," says Marina Krakovsky, the author of the book "The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit." "But then how big a slice do they take for themselves?"

In many cases, it's a pretty big one, as being a behemoth middleman is a lucrative endeavor. Amazon booked $638 billion in sales in 2024, Uber generated $44 billion in revenue, and Sysco reported $80 billion in sales. Pharmacy benefits managers, which sit between health insurers and drug manufacturers, rake in billions of dollars a year through a web of fees, price spreads, and rebate sharing that's almost impossible for a layperson to untangle, and they often drive up prices, too.

"Collectively, these intermediaries sit on top of major money flows," Ghose says.

Parties on either side of the transaction the middleman is facilitating might not always know who to blame. Buyers on a secondary ticket market get mad at the seller when their tickets don't come through, when in reality, it's the platform itself that failed to do its due diligence. The delivery guy thinks the customer is a cheapskate after driving through a storm for a minuscule tip, without realizing the platform prompted that option. The restaurant patron is appalled by the menu's high prices, while the restaurant owner is barely making it through the month. Consumers and producers end up griping about each other while the middlemen quietly skate on by.

The answer isn't that there should be no middlemen — again, I am not interested in making weekly trips to the chicken farm, or any farm, for that matter. But it would be better if there were more rules of the road to ensure they don't turn convenience into oversize markups and exorbitant profits. That could take a lot of different forms — increased transparency, more regulatory oversight and enforcement, new laws, or different efforts to ensure competition. Perhaps disclosure requirements for platform fees or restrictions on anti-steering clauses. But given how entrenched — and opaque — these go-betweens can be, wrangling their power has proven to be a tough task.

If an industry has one middleman, it's a problem. The same goes for if it's four and they're all colluding.

"One of the problems and probably a predicate is how concentrated all these markets are," Singer says.

"It would be great if we had a choice of middlemen and they were competing with each other to be the best middleman they can be on price, on quality, on ethics, and everything," Krakovsky says. "And often we lose that."

And so, here we sit, in an economy dominated by middlemen, telling ourselves we'll do better this holiday season and not rely so much on Amazon, and then deciding maybe that's better as a New Year's resolution.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

• OpenAI's ChatGPT boss says there are no live ads or ad tests running on the chatbot.
• Rumors of ads on ChatGPT have surfaced online.
• Its recent updates include a shopping feature, not traditional advertising.

ChatGPT's 800 million weekly users are worried that OpenAI, whose mission is to create artificial intelligence that benefits all of humanity, is starting to publish ads on the platform.

Screenshots of the ChatGPT interface showing what looks like a Target ad have been circulating on social media.

OpenAI's head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, however, dismissed those rumors in a post on X on Saturday.

"I'm seeing lots of confusion about ads rumors in ChatGPT. There are no live tests for ads — any screenshots you've seen are either not real or not ads. If we do pursue ads, we'll take a thoughtful approach," he said. "People trust ChatGPT and anything we do will be designed to respect that."

Earlier this week, an X user posted a screenshot on X of what he described as "ADS TO SHOP AT TARGET."

"If this is a 'feature,' let me turn it off," he added.

The link to shop at Target in the screenshot is likely related to a new shopping feature rather than any move by the company to include straight advertising on the platform.

In late September, OpenAI announced that it was taking the "first steps toward agentic commerce in ChatGPT with new ways for people, AI agents, and businesses to shop together."

With that, it launched an Instant Checkout feature built in conjunction with Stripe, a financial technology company.

When the bot is posed with a shopping question, ChatGPT shows the most relevant products from across the web, and if those products are supported by Instant Checkout, users can hit a "Buy" tab, OpenAI says on its website.

That's not to say ads won't be coming to ChatGPT at some point.

OpenAI has said it is considering advertising on the platform, which is perhaps unsurprising given its massive user base, a fraction of which are paying customers.

In a post on X in late November, developer Tibor Blaho said he had found code in ChatGPT's Android app that included references to "an ads feature."

"Scouring apps for yet-to-be-released features is a long-standing tech hobby, and sometimes it really does yield results. It's also entirely possible that what Blaho found is … something other than an ad product road map," Business Insider's Peter Kafka wrote at the time.

In any case, any plan by OpenAI to publish ads on ChatGPT appears to be on ice after the buzzy release of Google's Gemini 3 last month.

Altman told OpenAI employees in an internal Slack memo, seen by multiple outlets, that he was issuing a "code red" in response to the positive reception Gemini 3 has received. He said the company would allocate more resources to ChatGPT and delay the release of other products and features, including ads.

De Krake, Turley, and OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.