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?
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.
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
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.