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?