I would have found it much more interesting and useful if the author had tried to sincerely answer or even ask the question of the title. Instead it’s just a complaint.
I guess the answer must be: Companies have no incentive to make it easy to apply to their job without manual intervention. Which makes sense -- if it were easy enough to apply to companies automatically, I guess some people would just write a script to apply to every company in their field, right?
The underlying problem is you need a JSON format about the company. But the things candidates care for generally are easy to lie about (good culture, career progression, even remote working options), so scatter guns are required. As they say recruitment is broken - but its not easily fixable because it’s broken because of game theory and human behaviour.
This is something of an issue with conference proposals as well. In fact, I've seen some conferences recently that put a strict limit on number of submittals. As a sometimes conference reviewer, I hate people throwing a bunch of overlapping and often generic stuff at the wall.
IMHO the author does answer the question without even noticing it.
At the end of the post, "The larger employers and job-hosting web sites need to get their acts together and work this out".
In a comment right below, the author says that this would be "giving job-seekers more control over their data".
Obviously, the larger employees and job-hosting web sites have no interest in allowing job-seekers more control over their data, quite the opposite, so they won't. And their active cooperation is absolutely required for such a data format to be adopted - so it won't be, at least not in a way that satisfies the author's wish of gaining more control over their data. That's it, it's that simple.
