File this one under the cruel irony folder: Employers around the Bay are now having a hard time filling jobs because too many people are looking.

What a state of affairs. Anyone who's dared advertise a position recently will attest to receiving bales of mail from a swelling militia (now 246,600 in the Bay Area) of aggressive, desperate job seekers. The unemployed are applying to everything, hat in hand, spamming HR in-boxes with résumés that reveal they're overqualified or mismatched for the job advertised.

Says Yoh IT technical recruiter Jeannine Bellaci with a sigh (and a headache), "There's absolutely no way to get to the 5,000 résumés in my box."

Like many facing the deluge, Bellaci is feeling the pain of having too much of a good thing. Now she's relying on referrals. Others are resorting to internal shuffling, doubling up, and cutting corners to get by.

Even those wading through the résumé piles find little reward. "I see desperation in people's eyes rather than enthusiasm," says Garrick Naguit of Bay Classifieds.

Jonathan Fan, an engineer at an East Bay firm, is worried about applicants who profess interest but really want a springboard to the next job. "It's hard to get a good read on them," says Fan. "They'll say anything."

"People don't want our job, they just want a job," another interviewer complains.

Perhaps most discouraging to the unemployed, unfilled positions are sometimes being eliminated or left vacant indefinitely. "Finding someone takes time, and I didn't have the time to deal with it," says Naguit.

This approach brings the cycle full circle: The jobless become more desperate, mailing more résumés, accosting people at cocktail parties to network, which begets more frustration from employers. "It doesn't make me stop applying," says Denise Lu of Oakland, who's been looking for work for seven months. "It's just an all-around bad situation for everybody."