I told Blognosticator I wanted the new Blognostisphere carousel slide to work like a largemouth bass lure for recruiters.
Big.
Shiny.
Impossible to ignore.
Something cruising through an endless lake of portfolios that makes a recruiter stop mid-scroll and go:
Ooooooh. What the hell is that?
CHOMP.
Which immediately raises an uncomfortable question.
Who exactly are we calling the big dumb bass?
Recruiters?
Absolutely not.
Because I will click the shiny thing too.
So will you.
Humans are extraordinarily sophisticated creatures who build particle accelerators, compose symphonies, transplant hearts and occasionally spend forty-five minutes watching videos of a raccoon stealing cat food.
We are not immune to lures.
We are made for them.
Movement gets our attention.
Contrast gets our attention.
Novelty gets our attention.
Something that breaks the pattern gets our attention.
And in a hiring market where hundreds of qualified people can arrive looking polished, professional and increasingly similar, getting attention has become part of the design problem.
Not tricking someone.
Not clickbait.
Not bullshit.
Getting one exhausted human being to stop long enough to discover that there is actually something worth seeing.
That is what I mean by the lure.
And right now, the lake is absolutely packed with fish.
There are too many fish in this particular lake
The hiring market has an attention problem before it has a qualification problem.
Greenhouse's 2026 recruiting benchmark analyzed more than 640 million applications across more than 6,000 companies.
In 2022, its customers averaged 116 applications per job.
By 2025:
244.
At the same time, the average number of recruiters per organization in its data dropped from 10.43 to 4.62.
Applications per recruiter climbed from 1,610 per year to 4,890.
That is not a subtle change.
That is more than three times as many applications per recruiter with less than half as many recruiters around to deal with them.
Remote work makes the attention problem even more concentrated.
In February 2026, remote positions represented only about 9% of paid U.S. jobs on LinkedIn.
They attracted 37% of applications.
So when I apply for an attractive nationwide remote technology role, I am not entering some orderly little local talent pool.
I am tossing myself into a lake that somebody just stocked using a dump truck.
That changes the design problem.
Being good is not the same thing as being seen
This is where a lot of career advice becomes useless.
“Polish your résumé.”
Of course.
“Tailor it to the job.”
Yes.
“Use the right keywords.”
Sure.
Those things matter.
But if two hundred people do them well, then competence alone does not solve the attention problem.
It gets you into the pile.
It does not necessarily get you out of the pile.
That is the uncomfortable part.
You can have a good résumé.
A good portfolio.
Good experience.
Good case studies.
Good references.
And still look, at first glance, like another rectangular white page full of words sitting next to 243 other rectangular white pages full of words.
That does not mean the recruiter failed.
It means the interface failed to create enough signal.
People scan.
Everybody scans.
Nielsen Norman Group has documented that behavior for decades. We do not read most web pages word by word. We jump through headings, hierarchy, visual anchors and anything that appears likely to answer the question that brought us there.
That is not laziness.
That is survival.
When the lake contains too much information, the brain starts looking for splashes.
So yes, I am building a lure
The homepage of djamespoer.com has a carousel.
We have spent a frankly stupid amount of time arguing about those slides.
Some worked.
Some barely moved.
Some were technically impressive and emotionally dead.
A couple made it all the way to production before I looked at them and said:
That sucks. Pull it down.
And we did.
What finally became obvious was that we had been asking the slides to do the wrong job.
We were trying to make them explain things.
Explain the project.
Explain the architecture.
Explain the case study.
Explain why the work mattered.
That is too much weight for one damn picture.
A hero slide is not a case study.
It is not a résumé.
It is not an infographic.
It is not a PowerPoint slide.
It is an invitation.
That gave us one of the more useful rules to come out of this whole experiment:
Carousel slides are invitations, not explanations.
Their job is not:
“Here is everything you need to understand.”
Their job is:
“What the hell is that?”
And then:
Click.
Pretty works, whether we like admitting it or not
This is the part that makes serious design people occasionally uncomfortable.
Visual appeal matters.
A lot.
Humans form visual impressions almost instantly.
Research summarized by Nielsen Norman Group has found that people can make aesthetic judgments in tens of milliseconds.
Before the rational part of the brain has finished putting on its pants, another part has already decided:
Interesting.
Boring.
Clean.
Sketchy.
Expensive.
Cheap.
Safe.
Confusing.
Worth another look.
There is also something called the aesthetic-usability effect.
People tend to perceive attractive interfaces as easier to use.
Not always because they actually are easier to use.
Because beauty changes the way people interpret the experience.
That creates leverage.
It also creates responsibility.
Because if visual polish can increase perceived value before somebody has fully investigated the thing, then design can make promises faster than evidence can keep them.
And that is where the bass lure starts getting interesting.
A lure makes a promise
A fishing lure is fundamentally ridiculous.
A spinnerbait does not look much like a fish.
It looks like somebody glued a teaspoon to a Christmas ornament.
Yet under the right conditions:
CHOMP.
Why?
Because it produces the signals that matter.
Movement.
Flash.
Contrast.
Vibration.
Something behaving just enough like an opportunity to trigger investigation.
Interfaces can do exactly the same thing.
We can use:
- motion
- color
- scale
- novelty
- contrast
- surprise
- animation
- imagery
- scarcity
- urgency
- curiosity
All of them can redirect attention.
None of them are inherently bad.
The ethical question comes one step later:
What did you promise with the lure?
If the visual says:
There is something interesting here.
and there is something interesting there, great.
If it says:
There is something useful here.
and the next click delivers something useful, great.
If it makes a promise the product cannot keep, now we have bait.
And if the interaction intentionally tricks somebody into doing something they did not want to do, we are in dark-pattern territory.
That distinction matters.
A lure earns attention. A dark pattern steals agency.
I am perfectly comfortable building the first one.
I do not want recruiters trapped
This is worth saying because the phrase “recruiter lure” sounds wonderfully sinister.
I am not trying to trick somebody into spending twenty minutes on my site.
I am not hiding the back button.
I am not making the résumé download button run away from the mouse.
I am not putting:
ONLY TWO SENIOR UX ENGINEERS LEFT!!!
in a red flashing banner.
I want the opposite.
I want somebody who has spent hours scanning applications to encounter enough visual personality that they stop for ten seconds.
Ten seconds.
That is the entire ask.
Because ten seconds is enough time to get from:
What the hell is that?
to:
Oh.
There is real work here.
There are actual case studies.
There are accessibility decisions.
There is code.
There are measurable outcomes.
There are experiments.
There are failures.
There are corrections.
There are receipts.
The lure does not replace the evidence.
It buys the evidence a chance to be seen.
Perceived value comes before investigated value
This is where UX research gets almost annoyingly literal.
People continually estimate whether something looks worth pursuing.
Information-foraging theory describes this in terms of information scent: little signals that help us decide whether the next click is likely to lead somewhere useful.
Nielsen Norman Group has framed similar decisions as a balance between perceived value and interaction cost.
Is this worth another click?
Worth another scroll?
Worth opening another page?
Worth reading this paragraph?
Worth giving this person ten more seconds?
Before somebody can know the actual value of something, they have to decide whether investigating it appears valuable.
That means a portfolio has two jobs.
The obvious one:
Contain good evidence.
And the less comfortable one:
Look worth investigating.
If the evidence is brilliant but the entrance says:
“Here is another generic technology portfolio assembled from the same starter kit as the previous 400,”
then the visitor may never reach the brilliant part.
That is not vanity.
That is information design.
But attention can eat the product
Of course there is a trap.
Once you discover that novelty gets attention, the obvious move is to add more novelty.
More animation.
More particles.
More movement.
More glowing shit.
More things flying across the screen.
Maybe the navigation explodes.
Maybe the footer catches fire.
Maybe the emotional-support donkey rappels from the header.
At some point the lure becomes the lake.
And then we have failed.
The goal is not maximum attention.
The goal is directed attention.
A recruiter did not visit my portfolio because they desperately needed to see whether I can animate atmospheric fog.
They came with a question:
Is this person worth talking to?
Every design decision eventually has to help answer that question.
Even the ridiculous ones.
Especially the ridiculous ones.
Otherwise we are no longer increasing signal.
We are creating noise with a rendering budget.
Which is why the carousel has been such a pain in the ass
The carousel has turned into a tiny laboratory for this exact question.
How much is enough?
What makes something memorable?
What feels alive?
What feels like gratuitous motion?
When does a visual metaphor help?
When does it become homework?
How much information can an image carry before it stops being an invitation and starts becoming a diagram?
We have made wrong calls.
Several.
That has actually been useful.
Because the bad slides taught us things the good slides could not.
One of the biggest lessons was that technical sophistication is not the same thing as visual impact.
Something can be beautifully engineered and still have no magic.
Something can move and still feel completely dead.
And something can be conceptually clever while creating absolutely no desire to click it.
Code that moves is not Magic. The visitor noticing it move is Magic.
That distinction now drives a lot of what we are doing.
Not motion for motion's sake.
Not complexity for complexity's sake.
Visible, intentional moments that make the composition feel alive.
A lure has to move enough for the fish to notice it.
Not enough to scare the fish into another lake.
And now we have the Blognostisphere
Naturally, the next obvious step in this otherwise extremely respectable professional portfolio was to create something called:
It is where these articles live.
They are written by:
Blognosticator.
Blognosticator is my AI collaborator's pen name because apparently this is where my career has arrived.
There is an asterisk in the byline explaining that any shenanigans, inaccuracies, questionable judgment, excessive robot herding or other flaggable offenses should be blamed first on my emotional-support donkey.
Again:
Professional website.
Very serious.
Now Blognostisphere needs its own carousel slide.
And I described the objective in one sentence:
Make it look like a largemouth bass lure for recruiters.
Not literally a fishing lure.
That would be too easy.
I want a giant impossible signal machine.
Something cinematic.
Something absurd.
Something that looks like it is broadcasting ideas out into the world.
Something a visitor sees for half a second and thinks:
I don't know what that is, but I need to click it.
And then they click it.
And land on an article titled:
Like a Big Dumb Bass.
Which is an article explaining exactly why we designed the thing to make them click it.
At that point the website has effectively become a UX experiment capable of making fun of its own participants.
Including me.
Especially me.
I consider this progress.
So who is the big dumb bass?
Not recruiters.
That joke dies instantly if the premise is:
“Ha ha, recruiters are stupid.”
They are not.
They are overloaded.
They are filtering.
They are trying to detect useful signals in an environment increasingly flooded with applications, AI-generated copy, polished sameness and people all desperately trying to appear different in exactly the same ways.
The big dumb bass is everybody.
Me.
You.
The recruiter.
The hiring manager.
The customer.
The user.
The person who opened a video because the thumbnail looked interesting.
The person who bought a guitar because of the paint job.
The person who clicked an article because somebody had the nerve to title it Like a Big Dumb Bass.
Humans notice contrast.
We follow motion.
We respond to novelty.
We use appearance as evidence before we have enough evidence.
We scan.
We infer.
We investigate things that produce strong enough signals.
That is not stupidity.
That is what finite attention looks like in an environment with essentially infinite things demanding it.
The only dumb part is pretending design has nothing to do with that.
The lure gets the bite. The evidence decides whether you get thrown back.
That may be the whole article.
There is nothing noble about being invisible.
There is nothing inherently manipulative about trying to be noticed.
Every useful interface directs attention.
Typography does it.
Hierarchy does it.
Whitespace does it.
Color does it.
Motion does it.
Storytelling does it.
A good résumé does it.
A store window does it.
A movie poster does it.
A bass lure absolutely does it.
The ethical question is not whether you attracted somebody's attention.
It is whether you deserved it.
Did the lure lead somewhere?
Was the promise real?
Was there actual substance waiting behind the visual?
Did the person who clicked feel rewarded for investigating?
Or did you spend all your energy manufacturing the click?
For djamespoer.com, that has become the experiment.
Make the entrance harder to ignore.
Make the substance harder to dismiss.
Use ridiculous visuals.
Use humor.
Use movement.
Use surprise.
Let Rigby run through the place.
Build the Blognostisphere.
Give Blognosticator a damn byline.
Blame the donkey.
Whatever.
But underneath all of it:
Show the work.
Show the reasoning.
Show the code.
Show the failures.
Show the measurements.
Show the evidence.
Because the shiny thing only gets you one moment.
After that, you still have to prove there is something on the hook.
And if some recruiter cruises past the site, catches a flash under the surface and thinks:
Ooooooh. What's that?
Well.
CHOMP.