Federal Program Reclassifies Job Interviews as Economic Output, Launching Incentives for Companies and Candidates Alike

Washington, D.C. — A joint initiative between the U.S. Department of Labor and the Internal Revenue Service has introduced financial incentives for both companies and individuals to participate in job interviews, regardless of hiring outcomes. The program, formally titled the Interview Participation Incentive Program (IPIP), represents what officials describe as “the first coordinated federal effort to recognize interviewing itself as a form of economic output.”

Within six weeks of its quiet rollout in early spring, IPIP has produced what Department of Labor statisticians are calling “historic engagement figures”: more than 2,847,000 interviews conducted, zero net new hires, and a 43% bump in the Labor Force Participation Rate that economists are reportedly afraid to examine too closely. One senior Treasury official, speaking on background, described the early results as “either the single most successful labor program in American history or a statistical event we will be unable to explain to our grandchildren.”

The Department of Labor, for its part, has expressed no such ambivalence. In a joint press conference held in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building last Thursday, Deputy Secretary Margaret Holloway-Vance stood beside a laminated chart showing interview volume trending vertically and announced, without apparent irony, that the American labor market had “never been healthier.” Asked whether any of the interviews had produced employment, Holloway-Vance paused for seven seconds, consulted a binder, and replied: “Hiring is considered a downstream metric. We are focused on the upstream signal.”

The upstream signal, according to program documentation obtained by The Externality, is the interview itself.

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The Structure: A Two-Sided Incentive Market

IPIP operates on what its designers describe as a “dual-participant compensation architecture.” Under the program:

• Companies receive tax credits for conducting interviews, calculated on a per-candidate, per-round basis, with bonus multipliers for interviews that exceed 45 minutes or include a panel format.
• Job seekers receive tax incentives for attending them, structured as a refundable credit with quarterly disbursement and a graduated rate for repeat participants.
• Third-party facilitators—a category the program created and subsequently populated—receive a smaller administrative credit for “interview infrastructure support.”

Hiring, according to the program’s founding memorandum, is described as “optional.”

The word appears 41 times in the 312-page IPIP implementation guide. It is italicized in 39 of those instances. The two remaining instances are in footnotes and appear to be formatting oversights. Legal scholars who have reviewed the document note that the repeated emphasis on optionality is itself unusual; in most federal labor statutes, the outcome of a program is assumed to be its purpose. In IPIP, the outcome has been explicitly severed.

“We are not opposed to hiring,” clarified Deputy Secretary Holloway-Vance during a follow-up briefing. “We are simply neutral on it.”

The Credit Schedule

The IRS guidance accompanying IPIP outlines a detailed schedule for how credits accrue. For employers, the baseline credit is $847 per completed interview, with the following modifiers:

• +22% for interviews involving a “technical assessment component”
• +15% for interviews scheduled before 10 a.m. local time (“demonstrated employer seriousness”)
• +31% for interviews requiring in-person attendance
• +8% for each additional interviewer present beyond the first
• +47% for interviews that include a “take-home exercise” component, regardless of whether the exercise is ever reviewed
• +12% for interviews conducted in a conference room with a name

For job seekers, the baseline is lower—$284 per attended interview—but the modifier structure is, in its way, more elegant. Candidates receive bonus credits for demonstrated “interview preparedness,” defined through a series of checkboxes including arrival within five minutes of the scheduled start, use of a portfolio, asking at least three questions at the end, and a dress-code compliance rating assigned by the interviewer.

The interviewer’s dress-code rating, it should be noted, is legally non-binding and is collected, in the words of one IRS administrator, “purely for purposes of the database.”

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The Outcome: An Emergent Professional Class

Within three weeks of IPIP’s activation, labor economists at four separate universities independently identified what they have now agreed to call, for taxonomic purposes, the Professional Job Seeker.

The Professional Job Seeker is a new category of American worker whose primary economic activity is attending interviews. The category has no precedent in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ occupational taxonomy and has been provisionally coded under SOC 13-2099 (“Financial Specialists, All Other”) while the Bureau determines whether it warrants its own classification. Early estimates suggest the population is already between 340,000 and 1.2 million individuals, with wide regional variation.

Early results from IPIP indicate the emergence of:

• professional job seekers
• individuals optimizing interview volume
• six-figure incomes derived entirely from participation

The six-figure threshold has, in particular, drawn notice. An analysis by the Brookings Institution, published in preliminary form on their website last week, found that a sufficiently disciplined Professional Job Seeker attending four interviews per working day—each credited at the baseline rate, with standard modifiers applied—can achieve annual tax-adjusted earnings in the range of $142,000 to $218,000. This figure exceeds the median income of 71% of the American workforce. It also exceeds the median income of many of the positions being interviewed for.

Profile: A Day in the Life

The Externality accompanied Preston Aldridge, 34, through a standard working day. Aldridge, who has not held traditional employment since the program’s launch, maintains what he describes as “a healthy interview pipeline” and tracks his pace through a color-coded spreadsheet pinned to the corkboard above his desk.

Aldridge’s first appointment was at 8:15 a.m., a virtual screening interview with a Series B fintech company for a senior product role he has no intention of accepting. He logged in promptly, adjusted the ring light on his desk, asked three questions at the end, and secured the 15% early-morning modifier. The interview ran 52 minutes.

He had a second interview at 10:30 a.m., a third at 1:00, and a fourth at 3:30. All four were for senior-level positions. He prepared for none of them in any substantive way. He was, by his own admission, not a senior product person, nor a product person at all; his background, prior to IPIP, was in regional logistics management.

“I don’t need the job. I just need the interview.”

Aldridge said this while eating a salad at his desk, between interviews two and three. He said it without irony, or pride, or shame. He said it the way an actuary might explain a mortality table—as a description of how a system works.

By 5 p.m., Aldridge had accrued $1,418 in federal credits. He closed his laptop, walked his dog, and scheduled three interviews for the following morning. The hiring companies will never hear from him again. He will never hear from them. The credits will arrive by direct deposit in 4-6 weeks.

Optimization Strategies Among Participants

An online forum called r/IPIPMaxing, which reached 340,000 members within a month of the program’s launch, has become the central repository of Professional Job Seeker technique. A sampling of top-voted posts reveals a community rapidly developing its own vocabulary:

• Panel stacking: strategically accepting interviews with companies known to include 4+ interviewers per round, exploiting the per-interviewer modifier
• Take-home theater: submitting take-home exercises at the lowest acceptable quality threshold to trigger the 47% modifier without committing meaningful time
• Chain scheduling: building interview days around companies with overlapping recruiter networks to maximize the number of second-round invitations (which trigger a higher credit tier)
• The reverse close: asking an enthusiastic closing question designed to signal interest while ensuring a decline is politely framed
• Calendar laddering: arranging back-to-back interviews with competing companies so that each interviewer is aware of the others, increasing perceived candidate desirability

One user, posting under the handle yield_per_interview, wrote that they had achieved an annualized rate of $247,000 through what they described as “just showing up.” The post was pinned by moderators. It has 18,000 upvotes. The comments are mostly requests for their spreadsheet template.

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New Business Models: The Facilitator Sector

The policy has also given rise to a new class of venture-backed startup whose sole function is:

• scheduling interviews
• conducting standardized questioning
• maximizing eligible interactions

These companies—collectively referred to within the sector as “facilitators” and in federal documentation as “Qualified Interview Infrastructure Providers,” or QIIPs—have emerged as one of the fastest-growing startup categories of the past six months. By conservative estimates, there are now more than 380 funded QIIPs in the United States, with combined Series A and seed valuations approaching $4.7 billion. None of them hire. Some of them were founded by Professional Job Seekers who met at other companies’ IPIP-qualified interviews.

The QIIP Business Model, Explained

The typical Qualified Interview Infrastructure Provider operates on a three-sided marketplace model. Companies pay a subscription fee to access the QIIP’s candidate pipeline. Candidates pay nothing—and in some cases are compensated—for their participation. The QIIP itself collects federal credits for each qualifying interaction facilitated, plus a modest per-interview fee from the employer, plus, increasingly, a small cut of the candidate’s credit disbursement, retained as what one company’s terms of service describes as a “workflow optimization charge.”

The most successful QIIP by volume is a San Francisco-based company called Interlocutor, which describes itself on its homepage as “the leading interview-as-a-service platform.” Interlocutor has, according to a deck circulated to potential Series B investors, facilitated 1.3 million interviews since November. It has hired no one for any of the roles discussed in any of those interviews. It did, however, recently promote its head of scheduling to VP of Interview Operations, a position the company filled without conducting a search.

Asked to clarify the company’s value proposition, Interlocutor’s founder Damien Crest offered the following:

“We’re not hiring. We’re facilitating economic activity.”

Crest delivered this line at the company’s spring investor summit, held in a rented conference space in Palo Alto, to a room of approximately 120 attendees, 80% of whom, according to a post-event audit, had been hired through IPIP-credited interviews at other companies before those companies declined to extend offers.

Notable QIIPs

The category has diversified rapidly. Among the more prominent entrants:

• Rubric: an “interview quality standardization platform” that provides companies with a certified question bank, ensuring each interview meets the IRS’s minimum-substance threshold
• PanelUp: matches companies with freelance interviewers, enabling a firm to stage a five-person panel without employing five people
• Screenside: a conversational AI that conducts the full interview autonomously while a human engineer watches from an adjacent window, for compliance purposes
• The Closing Round: a members-only network of Professional Job Seekers available on short notice for companies needing to hit quarterly interview-volume targets
• BackChannel: facilitates post-interview reference calls that generate a separate, smaller credit under IPIP’s supplementary provisions
• Deadline: sends artificially urgent follow-up emails to candidates who have not responded, classified under IPIP as “candidate engagement maintenance”

A venture capitalist at a Sand Hill Road firm, who requested anonymity, described the category as “the most capital- efficient sector we’ve ever seen,” noting that one portfolio company had reached $47 million in ARR with 11 employees, none of whom had been hired through a traditional interview process. “They were all referrals,” the VC clarified.

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The Logic: Participation as Productivity

The theoretical basis for IPIP, laid out in a 94-page white paper titled Toward an Engagement-First Labor Economy, rests on what its authors call “the activity principle”: the idea that measurable interaction is itself a form of economic value, irrespective of whether the interaction produces a conventional output.

Officials argue that interviews:

• simulate employment pathways
• maintain engagement
• generate measurable activity

One policy note attached to the white paper, marked “Internal Deliberative,” states the doctrine plainly:

“Participation is productivity.”

The phrase has since been adopted as an informal motto within the Department of Labor. It appears, printed on a laminated card, in the lobby of the DOL’s Constitution Avenue headquarters. It appears on coffee mugs distributed to staff at the program’s launch event. It appears, in slightly revised form (“Participation Is Our Productivity”), as the tagline of Interlocutor’s Series B pitch deck.

The Underlying Measurement Problem

Several economists have pointed out, delicately, that the activity principle represents a significant departure from prior federal practice. Historically, federal labor programs have measured success through hiring rates, wage growth, labor force retention, and similar outcome-based indicators. IPIP measures success through what the program calls engagement throughput—a composite metric that captures interview volume, interview duration, follow-up correspondence, and “scheduling density.”

Engagement throughput is reported monthly and has, since the program’s launch, grown every month. Hiring rates are no longer reported by the program, on the grounds that they are, per the founding memorandum, optional.

Dr. Henry Gutenberg of the Port-au-Prince Institute for Market Dysfunction, who has been following the program since a leaked draft circulated in early February, offered the following assessment in a recently published working paper:

“The program solves a problem that could not be solved under prior measurement regimes: it makes unemployment statistically invisible by redefining the activity that precedes a hire as the activity that substitutes for one. In this sense it is not a labor program. It is a statistical program that happens to employ the vocabulary of labor.”

Dr. Gutenberg’s paper, titled The Substitution of Signal for Outcome in American Labor Policy, has been cited seven times in the three weeks since its publication, four of those citations by other working papers authored by Dr. Gutenberg.

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The Corporate Response: Interview Departments Expand

Within the American corporate sector, IPIP has prompted what HR consultancies are calling a “structural rebalancing of the talent function.” In practical terms, this means that companies are hiring interviewers. They are not, in most cases, hiring anyone else.

A survey conducted by Gartner of 847 Fortune 1000 companies found that, since IPIP’s activation:

• 94% of respondents had increased their interview volume by at least 300%
• 78% had created at least one new full-time role dedicated to conducting interviews
• 62% had retitled their Talent Acquisition function as “Interview Operations”
• 41% had added an “Interview Yield” line to their quarterly earnings reports
• 23% had publicly reported interview volume as a growth metric in shareholder communications
• 11% had appointed a Chief Interview Officer to oversee the function

One Fortune 500 company, whose representatives asked that its name not be used, reported that its Interview Operations team had grown from 4 recruiters to 116 dedicated interviewers in under five months. None of the company’s open headcount requisitions had been filled during that period. The company described this, in its internal quarterly review, as “a deliberate restructuring of the hiring function toward long-term pipeline health.”

The Chief Interview Officer

The emergence of the Chief Interview Officer, or CIO-I, as the role is increasingly designated (to distinguish it from the Chief Information Officer), has been among the most visible cultural shifts inside large American companies. According to a recent Forbes profile, CIO-Is typically report directly to the CEO, earn compensation in the range of $480,000 to $890,000 plus equity, and oversee Interview Operations teams of between 40 and 300 people.

The role’s core KPI is Interview Volume, measured weekly. A secondary KPI is Interview Quality Score, measured through a proprietary rubric that most CIO-Is license from Rubric (the QIIP). No CIO-I interviewed for the Forbespiece was able to articulate a third KPI. Two of them mentioned, separately, that they had been instructed by their CEOs to “avoid discussing hiring on earnings calls.”

“We’ve moved away from an outcome-oriented hiring culture,” explained Celeste Warburton, CIO-I at a major consumer technology firm. “We’re focused on the quality of the interview as a standalone experience for both parties.”

Warburton’s team had, at the time of the interview, conducted 14,200 interviews in the preceding quarter. Her firm had hired four people in the same period. Three of those four were promoted internally from Interview Operations.

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The Side Effects: An Economy Recalibrates

Analysts note several unintended consequences of IPIP, though they are careful to frame these as “adjustments within a functioning system” rather than as failures of design. Among the most widely observed effects:

• inflation of interview volume
• reduced signal in hiring processes
• decoupling of interviews from employment

Interview Volume Inflation

The raw number of interviews conducted in the American economy has grown, over a six-month period, by a factor of 28. Labor economists attempting to model this trajectory have noted that it cannot continue at current rates: there are not enough hours in the working day, even assuming full candidate availability, to sustain the projected 2027 interview volume of 4.7 billion interactions. One economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis privately circulated a memo titled An Upper Bound on Interview Capacity, arguing that the system will saturate at roughly 840 million interviews per month before encountering what he called “the clock.”

The Department of Labor has not publicly engaged with the Minneapolis memo. Internal communications suggest the department considers projected saturation to be “a 2027 problem.”

Signal Degradation

A concurrent concern is that the signal content of the interview itself has collapsed. Historically, a job interview served as a filtering mechanism: a way for employers to distinguish promising candidates from unpromising ones, and for candidates to distinguish promising employers from unpromising ones. Under IPIP, the interview has been severed from this function. Employers who conduct more interviews earn more credit. Candidates who attend more interviews earn more credit. Neither party has a financial interest in distinguishing signal from noise, and both parties have a financial interest in the interaction lasting longer and occurring more often.

The result, according to a Stanford Graduate School of Business study released last month, is that the “information content” of a modern job interview has fallen by an estimated 91%. The remaining 9%, the study notes, is primarily communicated through body language that neither party is paying attention to.

The Decoupling

Perhaps the most philosophically significant effect of IPIP has been what observers are calling “the decoupling”: the gradual severance of interviewing from hiring as a causal relationship. In pre-IPIP labor markets, the interview was a step within a hiring process. In the post-IPIP market, the interview is a discrete economic activity that, in the majority of cases, has no hiring process attached to it at all.

“The interview became the job.”

The observation, which appeared in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by labor historian Theodore Marsh, has been widely reprinted. Marsh’s broader argument, laid out in a subsequent book proposal that has already attracted a reported seven-figure advance, is that IPIP represents the natural endpoint of a century-long trend in which American labor institutions progressively detached economic reward from economic output. The interview, in this framing, is simply the purest expression of a process that had been underway in consulting, venture capital, middle management, and federal procurement for decades.

Marsh’s book, due next spring, is titled The Meeting That Became the Point.

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The Cultural Adjustment

Beyond the purely economic effects, IPIP has produced a series of cultural shifts in how Americans relate to the concept of work. Several have been documented:

The New Social Question

At dinner parties, the traditional American opening question—“What do you do?”—has developed a three-part answer structure. The first part is the role the person is currently interviewing for. The second is the role they most recently interviewed for. The third, if pressed, is the role they were last paid a salary to perform, usually several years prior.

Etiquette columnists at The Atlantic and Town & Country have, independently, advised readers that only the first answer is now socially expected. Providing the third answer unprompted is increasingly perceived as a form of oversharing.

LinkedIn’s Rebrand

The professional networking platform LinkedIn, citing “evolving user behavior,” quietly renamed its Jobs tab to Opportunities in early March. The platform’s public filings reveal that “actual job listings” now constitute only 11% of content in the Opportunities section. The remainder consists of interview-only positions, described by the platform as “engagement-forward roles.”

A LinkedIn spokesperson, asked to clarify what an engagement-forward role was, responded via email:

“An engagement-forward role is one in which the engagement itself is the deliverable. We are very excited about the category.”

The Dating App Crossover

Several major dating platforms have introduced features allowing users to indicate whether a first date is IPIP-qualifying. The IRS has clarified, in a notice circulated last month, that romantic first dates do not, in fact, qualify for the credit, although it noted that a “structured informational interview that happens to be conducted over dinner” may qualify, subject to documentation.

The clarification has not appreciably slowed adoption of the feature.

The College Pipeline

Among the most quietly consequential shifts has been at the university level. Career services offices at more than 200 American universities have reoriented their programming around IPIP preparation. The traditional “job fair” has been rebranded at most large institutions as an “Interview Fair,” and the language used to describe success has shifted from placement rates to interview attainment rates.

Harvard Business School now offers a two-credit elective titled Advanced Interview Methodology: Earning Without Earning. The course, which has a waiting list of 340 students, is taught by a former McKinsey partner who left the firm in January to, in his own words, “pursue a more engagement-forward practice.”

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Broader Implication: The Shift Toward Activity-Based Economics

Experts increasingly suggest that IPIP reflects—or perhaps catalyzes—a broader shift in the structure of the American economy. The shift is toward:

• activity-based economics
• incentive-driven participation
• outcomes becoming secondary

Under the activity-based paradigm, the measurement of economic health shifts from what the economy produces to what the economy does. GDP, in this framework, becomes a lagging indicator. The leading indicators are the number of meetings held, the number of reports circulated, the number of interactions logged. Each of these, proponents argue, represents a form of value that the prior measurement regime simply failed to capture.

Critics point out that the activity-based paradigm has the potentially awkward property of rewarding the performance of work over the completion of it. Proponents respond that this is a feature, not a bug, and that the completion of work was always, on closer inspection, a kind of performance anyway.

Dr. Gutenberg, in his follow-up paper Gross Engagement Product: Toward a Post-Output Economy, argues that the transition is already well underway in most developed economies and that IPIP is simply the first federal program to name the transition openly. The paper closes with a line that has been widely quoted in policy circles:

“We did not choose activity-based economics. We noticed we were already practicing it, and we were embarrassed to keep pretending otherwise.”

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Congressional Oversight and the Hearing That Wasn’t

IPIP has attracted congressional attention, though not uniformly critical attention. A House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections convened a hearing on the program in late March, ostensibly to examine “concerns raised by economists regarding the program’s outcome-neutral design.” The hearing lasted four hours. Its outcome was ambiguous.

The Deputy Secretary of Labor testified that the program was “delivering unprecedented engagement metrics.” The IRS Commissioner testified that “credit disbursement is proceeding smoothly and without material fraud.” A representative from the Brookings Institution testified that the program represented “a creative response to structural labor market challenges.” A representative from Interlocutor testified as an invited industry stakeholder and, during his remarks, announced that his company was hiring. He clarified, under questioning, that he meant hiring interviewers. Three subcommittee members expressed interest in the role.

The only substantively critical testimony came from an independent economist named Rosalind Kew, who had been invited to represent dissenting perspectives. Kew’s prepared remarks warned that IPIP had, in effect, “created a parallel labor economy in which participation is compensated but output is not,” and that the program represented “the most significant misalignment of incentive and outcome in federal labor history.”

Kew’s testimony was interrupted twice by procedural questions regarding her microphone. Her remarks were ultimately entered into the record. The hearing adjourned without issuing recommendations. The subcommittee’s final report described the program as “operating within expected parameters.”

Kew, reached for comment last week, noted that she had since been approached by seven separate QIIPs offering interviews for senior economist roles.

“I attended the first three,” she said. “The credits were substantial.”

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The Opposition: A Small and Puzzled Coalition

A small coalition of critics has formed around the program, though it has struggled to achieve coherence. Its membership includes:

• Traditional labor economists concerned about measurement integrity
• Hiring managers who report being unable to fill genuinely open positions
• A subset of candidates who actually want jobs and find the current interview ecosystem disorienting
• Small business owners who cannot afford to participate at the scale required to generate meaningful credit
• Philosophy professors

The coalition has produced several open letters, a petition with approximately 12,000 signatures, and a podcast that was briefly popular before its host was offered a $340,000 position running Interview Operations at a mid-sized enterprise software company. The podcast is currently on hiatus.

The Hiring Manager Problem

Among the most persistent critics are hiring managers at companies that genuinely need to fill roles. These managers, often working in operations-intensive sectors such as logistics, healthcare, or manufacturing, have reported that IPIP has paradoxically made hiring harder. Qualified candidates, they report, are increasingly reluctant to accept offers because doing so removes them from eligibility for future interview credits. The candidates would rather continue interviewing.

One operations director at a Midwestern logistics firm, interviewed by The Externality, described the situation as follows:

“We made an offer to a strong candidate last month. She declined. She said the math didn’t work. I asked what math. She sent me a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was correct.”

The director’s firm has since raised its offered salary by 34% and has still been unable to fill the role. “We are competing against the program,” he said. “The program has infinite budget. We do not.”

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The Expansion Phase

Asked whether the program would be scaled back or reformed in light of emerging effects, Deputy Secretary Holloway-Vance was direct. The program, she confirmed, is expanding.

“We are seeing strong engagement.”

The expansion, outlined in a memorandum circulated to federal agencies in early April, will introduce three new incentive streams over the coming year:

• Informational Interview Credits: extending IPIP-style credits to coffee-chat interactions, subject to a 45-minute minimum duration and documentation of at least three topics discussed
• Internal Mobility Interview Credits: allowing companies to claim credits for interviews conducted with existing employees for hypothetical internal roles
• Retrospective Interview Credits: a pilot program that will allow companies to claim credits for interviews conducted during the three years prior to IPIP’s implementation, with documentation

The retrospective credit, which is projected to cost the Treasury approximately $847 billion over its five-year pilot window, has attracted the most public commentary. Treasury officials have noted that the retrospective credit will be funded through projected increases in engagement throughput, which they expect to materialize.

International Adoption

Three additional countries have announced IPIP-equivalent programs. The Canadian program, launched in February, is structured as a refundable tax credit modeled closely on the American design, though with a smaller baseline credit ($CAD 412) and a requirement that at least one interviewer be fluent in both official languages. The United Kingdom’s program, launched in March, omits the hiring-is-optional language but in practice operates similarly. A Singaporean pilot, launched this week, includes a bonus credit for interviews conducted in conference rooms with a view of the harbor.

International coordination, officials suggest, is on the horizon.

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Closing Statement

At press time, the program continues to expand. The Department of Labor’s most recent engagement throughput report, released Tuesday, showed interview volume up 12% month-over-month. The department’s press release, which ran to four pages, did not include a hiring figure.

At press time:

• interviews were being scheduled
• candidates were attending
• companies were… interviewing

Continuously.

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Editor’s note: This article was compiled from a combination of federal program documentation that does not exist, interviews that did not occur, and an economic reality that increasingly resists description through conventional labor-market vocabulary. The Externality regrets that it could not find anyone currently holding a job to review the piece prior to publication. Several sources expressed interest in being interviewed about it.