How AI is Ruining Hiring and Getting Hired
An overview of how the modern job market has devolved despite tools making everything better, faster, and more efficient.
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Job seekers: Why does everything related to hiring seem so slow? One of the largest reasons is because the very things that are supposed to make hiring/getting hired faster are actually having the opposite effect. The tools are so good they're making things worse.
As a job seeker you're likely applying to multiple roles. Between optimized search and aggregation, Easy Apply mechanisms, and nifty AI tools you've never had more ability to efficiently find roles, crank out resume/cover letter tweaks, apply, and move onto the next. After an initial burst, you may be applying to a dozen jobs a day and tracking multiple job boards.
Let's look at the other side of the equation. If you're the person doing the hiring your ATS (applicant tracking system), LinkedIn, and AI tools help you craft the "perfect" job ad with less biased language, blast your listing across the Internet, and cherry pick candidates that meet your criteria before you even post. In terms of approach you've expanded your ideas of what experience really matters in evaluating talent, and done the work to ensure your process is fair and impartial. You’re open to more people than ever (ideally anyway).
Those are huge improvements on both ends, making things more efficient for the job poster and the job seeker. However what does that efficiency mean? Volume. Ease of applying leads to a lot of applicants. Ease of posting means a lot of postings, leading to lazy applications just to get through them all. I've personally posted roles at the end of the day and come back to hundreds of applications after less than a day. That's exciting but more than a bit overwhelming. Even with half of those being spam, wildly underqualified, or seemingly having not read the posting at all it's a lot to manage, especially at a smaller organization.
What happens when all of those applications overwhelm the system? Silence, delays, and zero clarity on where you stand with a role, and finding postings that just opened already taken down or unsure if your application will even be seen, leading to more tools to be seen and more tools to improve filtering. AI battling AI. Everything works yet no one is actually better off. Whee!
I'm not sharing this to discourage job seekers . I just wanted to share some context for those that might not have considered the whole picture when ranting on LinkedIn. The market’s changed for everyone and we’re all trying to keep up. You're working hard to get jobs and recruiters are working hard to fill them. There's just a lot to wade through on both sides. Here’s how I suggest you navigate this environment.:
Apply anyway. Seeing that a large number of people have applied is no reason to not apply yourself. You never know how recruiters are filtering and they may skip a huge block of applicants once it’s been too long in favor of more recent ones. There’s no way to know, so just apply anyway. Sure, your application might be lost in the shuffle, but you’ll never get noticed if you don’t apply.
Be efficient. You really don't need to apply to everything. If you *are* going to do that, don't burn yourself out crafting a masterpiece for each application. Templates are your friends and you should have a few for both your cover letter and resume, spending more time on the roles that are really catching your eye.
Network. One side effect of too many candidates is even more weight placed on internal referrals. The more people you know the more you have people that can be your advocate.
Getting a job has never been easy. It's not easy now even with all of the tools out there. Just do the best you can and don't let things out of your control discourage you too much.
If you need help adjusting your strategy to stand out even in this saturated market, reach out and let's talk it over. I'm here to help.