That's not very arbitrary. If you're hiring someone, you're always in a position of power. If you're dating someone, there's no power differential (or if there is, that's a problem all by itself).
How are you "always in a position of power" when hiring someone? That's only true when there's more supply than demand, and it's the opposite in markets where the candidates get multiple high-quality offers to choose from.
Because you are paying that person money and have the ability to fire them. In the US you're also probably providing their health care.
I get what you're saying, but no one moves jobs every week. The sunk costs of switching employment are significant for the employee, less so for the company.
They provide you valuable work in exchange for that... Internally you are probably imagining some big corp that can pick from 100s of replaceable workers.
If you provide health care, you always have power over that person. Less so if they are relatively healthy - but any condition, theirs or a family members, means that the person has no real choice but to do enough good work to keep the job. Even if they hate the company. Even if you treat them poorly. They still must work for you. This is even more true if you have hundreds of people that will replace them and your health coverage is good enough - or at least, better than the opposition.
To a lesser degree, the same goes with vacation time and other benefits. At least in the US, anyway. This is why having some of this stuff coded into law and decoupled from employment takes some power away from employers.
In practice, that's how it works, particularly at the lower end of the economic spectrum. If that wasn't the case then the concept of a minimum wage wouldn't be necessary - the market would take care of it.
Of course, this is a point of view and not everyone agrees with me, but to me it appears that for a chunk of the population the available jobs do not pay well enough to meet a certain standard of living.
If the candidate had more power, she would set up interviews and force the employers to impress her.
Of course, that scenario happens only in extreme edge cases. Even in a booming economy with a shortage of workers, John Doe is not going to be pursued aggressively to fill the Senior Marketing Manager role.
This makes intuitive sense: employers have a ton of money, so people come to them.
Right now I have a client who needs to hire truck drivers and can't do it fast enough. I asked him what he'd done to make his company the most attractive (pay, technology, perks, etc.). He said he's done nothing.
Recruiters and headhunters don't necessarily seek people to fill a role. They seek people to fill their batch of application forms to send to those actually doing the hiring.
Recruiters don't replace the interview process, where the dynamic is that the applicant is the interviewee. They only change the way the applicant discovers the job.
If candidate had more power, companies would create whole section of company to try to find and hire talents. Companies would literally pay to find candidates.
A candidate has multiple job offers, and decides which one to take.
The company interviews multiple people for a single position, rejecting the others.
There are only a small number of sectors where the first situation is reasonably possible, a lot of us on here are incredibly fortunate that engineering happens to be one of them. For the majority of the job market (by volume of people rather than volume of money), it takes people attempt after attempt to get a job. They don't get to choose between multiple offers, they have to take the first thing that will allow them to pay the rent, and then they have to hold on to it.
And yet from the point of view of the one who everyone is discriminating against, the feeling is pretty similar: Everyone rejects me and there's nothing I can do about it.
