Warning: incoming rant.
Employers are drowning in AI-generated job applications, with LinkedIn now processing 11,000 submissions per minute—a 45 percent surge from last year, according to new data reported by The New York Times.
Due to AI, the traditional hiring process has become overwhelmed with automated noise. It’s the résumé equivalent of AI slop—call it “hiring slop,” perhaps—that currently haunts social media and the web with sensational pictures and misleading information. The flood of ChatGPT-crafted résumés and bot-submitted applications has created an arms race between job seekers and employers, with both sides deploying increasingly sophisticated AI tools in a bot-versus-bot standoff that is quickly spiraling out of control.
The Times illustrates the scale of the problem with the story of an HR consultant named Katie Tanner, who was so inundated with over 1,200 applications for a single remote role that she had to remove the post entirely and was still sorting through the applications three months later.
The last time I got a job without a prior connection was in 2012, and it (audiobook conversion) wasn’t even in my field.
When I quit my job in January 2020 (great timing), it took two-and-a-half years, and after sending out more than a thousand applications across several industries – after using two different companies for ATS résumé optimization – I eventually only got a job as a billing clerk because I met the owner of a logistics concern in a detox program.
I’m focusing squarely on networking outside of events designed for it. Honestly, the grueling online process is a step up from being told in person that you’re missing a key skill, with each hiring manager listing a different skill.
My résumé isn’t linear, because I’ve been stuck in a cycle of finding emergency jobs since a newspaper layoff in 2006. There were a few papers in there, but man, have they liked their layoffs for decades now.
Searching on LinkedIn and Indeed are pointless, and the smaller job boards are scarcely better, given that they want a single career track, no deviations. Nobody wants a polymath, and even after removing early positions, gauging my age is easy enough – aging into a protected class didn’t help.
And the last time I got a job simply by walking in, résumé in hand, was 2010.
Add to this the sheer volume of ghost jobs online, messages from “recruiters” who start out seemingly interested in my background but are actually MLM “be your own boss” types, and the whole experience is not only a timesink but aggressively dehumanizing.
If you can’t be honest during the hiring process, why on Earth should I trust you as an employee?
Right there with u man. If LLMs mean the death of the modern resume process, I say good fucking riddance. Maybe the only good thing we’ve gotten out of LLMs.
the problem is, what is the alternative? I have never been on the employer side of a hiring process before, only the job-seeking side, but from what I’ve read, it’s not a very good system for either side, yet I can’t easily think of a better alternative.
Guilds that act as intermediaries?
Tbat would be baaaad. So bad.
Where do I sign up to Hail Sithis?
From the article:
Are those the best solutions? I don’t exactly know, the problem is bigger than any one person can solve. But any of those would probably be better solutions than what we’ve been doing the past 20 years.
In my ideal world, people don’t have to go through any this bs to get a job. People don’t have to become their own salesperson just to get a job with a living wage. Maybe this is too communist for some people, but it would be nice if some government body just matched me with a job that matched my skillset and education, and then they guaranteed a living wage. If I work the job and I don’t like it, they let me pick one of my secondary matches. I don’t want to have to think about this shit, I’m not entrepreneurial and I don’t want to be entrepreneurial. In this scenario, I would think employers would also save a mint on recruiting costs.
I actually used government services, while unemployed, back in the early 2000s, but they were very miss. All they seemed to be focusing on was you hitting a quota of seeking out employers that they have listed for you, regardless of what you claimed to be as your profession or qualifications. Just so you can stay on the dole.
Preach. I’m so bad at selling myself!
I just want a job with a living wage now, and it’s agonizingly, dehumanizingly hard to look online. Especially if you have the extreme rejection sensitivity aspect of ADHD.
That sounds like joining the military with extra steps
I mean sure except if I don’t want to do violence and I don’t want to adhere to rigid military standards then there is no place for me in the military. That leaves out most people.
Those are all good points, except of course that “live problem-solving sessions” and “trial work periods” were definitely already a thing at my current job, yet the employer needed the résumé to decide whether to invite/consider me for that in the first place.
Well, right now it’s basically an arms race between recruiters and job seekers on who can put less effort in the process.
I’m fairly certain many recruiters absolutely abuse the hell out of LLMs to read résumés, and when LLM-generated resumes arrive en masse - why even bother.
And then you have some “bright minds” using AI agents to even do interviews, making people talk to robots. At some point the job seeking party is gonna do the same, and either it will be “interviewing is dying”, or there will be some serious reconsiderations from employers on how not to organize hiring process.
I know quite a few that are using online resources (like LinkedIn/Indeed/etc…). Its not better (arguably worse). Nowadays theres so much AI trying to pull peoples resumes for free to get training data, its just spam (aka Ghost jobs that was discussed in the Post).
The best interview is one where you know the company, industry, and people working there. So yeah its still mostly word of mouth haha. Thats how I got my last jobs.
Man I’ve haven’t touched real socialedia yet and if I need “facebook for jobs” I’ll go crazy
I had to create a new Facebook profile in 2013 because at the time, no Facebook meant being roundfiled. So, sign up for a shitty data-mining account just to be fucking considered for a job. I got interviews after that, but they didn’t go anywhere because I was already in my mid-30s, and everyone already wanted to pay entry-level wages for what had previously been mid-career positions.
Oh, and the ladder had already been pulled up. Entry-level for life was the goal for those making $80K-100K who just wanted to assert dominance.
At least the Facebook thing is in the past (entry-level applicants are far less likely to have ever joined Facebook than in 2013, when it was simply expected like it was a cellphone), but now we’ve moved on to breathless accomplishment posts on LinkedIn.
There’s no humanity left in the process without already knowing someone on the inside. Already, way back in 2003, when I was poached, company policy was that they had to post the job. So, they knew they were hiring me, but corporate made them post a nonexistent job anyway.
It’s admittedly better to be on that end of a ghost job, but AI didn’t start the fire. The system had already been (likely for a while) replete with jobs with someone already selected.
The main difference? Those jobs actually existed; the only deception was that it was still open.