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?
If it wasn’t dead before, the employers were using softwares to deny people long before ai came out, they deserve AI slop
It was always dead. My english teacher told us that he cheated on his resume and thats the only reason he is here. He is a good teacher but not because his resume was good.
Yes people practically have to lie on their stem resume to get the job , since stem is notoriously hard to get into job wise. I’m not surprised. I followed a former classmate on LinkedIn and he was purposely adding 1 year for ever half a year he was still in college to his experience
If the employers are using computers to read my resume, why shouldn’t I used a computer to write it?
Assholes to the lot of them.
It is possible (common really) for individuals to make completely rational, sensible, even correct decisions, which ultimately contribute to a larger systemically catastrophic problem. It comes from improperly aligned incentives within the system. For examples, you can reference the prisoners dilemma.
the obvious solution to this is that you aren’t making a rational and sensible decision if it supports a shit system, as the rational decision would be to do anything that works toward dismantling or changing the system.
But you are if the personal incentives in your situation are bad enough.
For an extreme example. You might not want to support the black market for human organs. You know how terrible it is as a system. But you’ll die if you don’t buy a black market organ. Is it reasonable to expect everyone to give their life for that ideal? No.
Indeed it is so.
Nevertheless, assholes.
exactly. we’re just using AI to talk to their AI. they started it first.
Don’t be a lazy bum! Take out your chisel and stone!
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:
Instead, the future of hiring may require abandoning the résumé altogether in favor of methods that AI can’t easily replicate—live problem-solving sessions, portfolio reviews, or trial work periods, just to name a few ideas.
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.
it’d be great if the existing government bodies that explicitly exist to help people find jobs did their own fucking jobs and didn’t just sit around jerking off to paperwork and humiliating poor people
yeah maybe those people need their own work requirements and accountability structure
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
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.
yeah that’s different from what I am describing. That’s the bs work requirement for welfare/TANF - in that case, they don’t care at all about finding a good match for you, they just care that you are doing something to find any job. EDIT: My bad you were talking about unemployment work requirements, which are similar but not exactly the same thing. Still bullshit imo - if they aren’t going to actually try to match you with a job that is a good fit, they might as well just let you search on your own. The unemployment has a time limit, and you can only qualify for it in specific situations. I don’t get why they have to also enforce a work requirement, as if you chose to be laid off from your previous job.
Yeah, it was a very wasteful system. As in wasting both my time and that of tax payers.
I didn’t care that I was technically entitled for unemployment money. After the first three locations that I’ve gotten offered, including sitting through a job seminar that quasi-turned into a car-wash operator course, where I was surrounded by folks that were really eager to take that job offer, I’ve declined further appointments at the youth job centre and sought out IT employers by myself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As an autistic individual that doesn’t network easily this is going to be a bad time
Yeah, we computer people don’t typically count networking as a forté. But I fear that while before the network was merely important, now it could turn into the only thing that matters.
I just feel… fake? forming a connection with the intention of advancing my career, i’d rather talk with that coworker that loves to discuss every aspect of the DEC Alpha
My spouse just got a new job. She was dissatisfied with her current employer, so over the past month she submitted about 60 resumes. She landed 4 interviews, 2 of which turned into second interviews, and one of them just made her an offer. The other company called her for a third interview, but she declined.
It’s pretty horrendous even before AI,
I was fortunate to find something that I have enough skills for but I absolutely agree on the polymath thing. One would think that it’d be a useful skillset to have but I don’t think most businesses can grasp the concept. As a result my employer doesn’t receive anywhere near the benefits they could from me.
And you likely don’t see the compensation you could. My last professional job hired me in 2015 as a “copyeditor” – but they actually meant someone who moved rectangles around at a remote editor’s direction on newspaper pages without reading copy.
Then there’s the scheduling. Moving out of state with a guarantee that I’d be off by 11 p.m. so that my wife would still be awake when I got home turned into being immediately put on a team that worked until 2 a.m., as we were producing two papers I used to work for (one where I’d been managing editor from 2003-2006, and the other a temporary desk job in 2014) that were on Pacific Time.
With my marriage starting to fray, I walked into the executive director’s office and said this schedule was not what I was assured when pulling up stakes from Oregon to Texas – with a 20% pay cut and rent being triple what it was – and that this needed to be fixed. Now.
As it turned out, the wheels were already turning on a new commercial department to bring in external clients. It wasn’t full-time yet, but I got switched over to dayside design in the meantime ahead of being the team lead for the new department.
Going into detail on the automation I did to keep things humming smoothly is somewhat pointless, but I dusted off my coding skills and learned JS to create a workflow for my team in Google Sheets. It went swimmingly, and my team had a blast while almost everyone else was miserable.
So, now I was a threat. Causing – hard as it is to believe being possible – even further realization on other teams that we were all intentionally getting fucked by intentionally dysfunctional processes. But the directors needed bad data for disciplinary purposes, so I was causing too much of a stir and shunted to another department, where I learned the InDesign DOM and turned the work of a three-person team into 30 hours total via JS.
That’s when IT got word that a designer was coding! We can’t have that if it’s not in your title – even though IT knew fuck-all about the production workflow and couldn’t have done what I did. After being forbidden from further automation, I was strung along for 18 months about transitioning to an IT role.
Never again will I work for an employer more interested in control than results.
The people doing application review typically have no idea what they’re hiring for and dont bother to try. They just look for candidates that check the boxes.
Your commentary worries me as I am unemployed and have never gotten a job due to someone I know since high school.
