#JobSearch : AI Bots Are Taking Over the Job Application Process. Everyone Is Losing. “You’re fighting AI with AI,”… MUst Read!
Job seekers, frustrated with corporate hiring software, are using artificial intelligence to craft cover letters and résumés in seconds, and deploying new automated bots to robo-apply for hundreds of jobs in just a few clicks. In response, companies are deploying more bots of their own to sort through the oceans of applications.
The result: a bot versus bot war that’s leaving both applicants and employers irritated and has made the chances of landing an interview, much less a job, even slimmer than before.
“You’re fighting AI with AI,” said Brad Rager, chief executive of Crux, a recruiting firm that matches cybersecurity specialists with employers.
The AI arms race is bad for job candidates, he said, who feel defeated when online applications come to nothing, and for employers, who are frustrated when imprecise AI tools highlight weak candidates. “There’s so much promise, but there’s a lot of crap and garbage,” Rager said of the tools used by employers.
Posting open positions online once promised to democratize the job search, giving employers the chance to cast a wider net and job candidates an opportunity to easily explore their options. But as online job-hunting grew in popularity in the 2000s, companies that advertised their openings online became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of applications and began turning to software to help sort job candidates when hiring. That left many people hunting for new jobs with no responses—not even a rejection letter.
“You want to go grab the tub of ice cream and give up,” said Victor Schwartz, who applied to about 1,000 jobs before graduating from Duke University in 2019. “Even though it felt like it was my fault, it really wasn’t. The system was working against job seekers.”
Irritated by the process, Schwartz, a computer-science major, started using tech to help friends find jobs and apply online. He first built a tool to automate the search for open positions. Then, as generative AI advanced, he realized the technology could answer application questions.
Last year he launched an AI job-hunting tool called Sonara. For $80 a month, the AI tool finds jobs, answers questions as though they were the candidate and applies to as many as 370 positions for them each month. Arming candidates with AI, he said, helps them fight employers’ tools.
“It’s an arms race where one side has tanks, and the other side has sticks—or nothing,” he said. “We’re finally equipping the other side.”
Sonara had just a few thousand users as of January, but it is far from the only tool that applicants have used. Many now rely on ChatGPT to rewrite their résumés to match job descriptions—aiming to get through corporate screening software. Job seekers are also using software like Big Interview, which evaluates résumés to show applicants why corporate tools might rank them lower than other candidates, and offer suggested changes to improve their standing.
“Most companies today use AI for recruitment,” Big Interview says on its website. “It’s only fair to let job-seekers leverage the same technology.”
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Article continued …
Employers fight back
Those in charge of hiring say they’ve seen a notable rise in the past year in the number of applications they receive, attributing the surge to candidates’ AI usage as well as an increase in white-collar layoffs. Recruiters using the hiring platform Greenhouse had to review nearly 400 applications on average in January, up 71% from the previous year, according to the company.
Companies are introducing new tools to parse through the surge in applicants.
Salesforce, which makes cloud-based customer-relationship management software, uses AI to help zero in on skills in job seekers’ applications that match open roles. In some cases, that resulted in hiring former teachers for jobs in solution engineering, a division that explains the company’s technology to potential clients.
Workday, a business-software behemoth, recently purchased HiredScore, which gives job applicants letter grades based on their match to the advertised requirements, and ranks their profiles for hiring managers. Workday leaders say the technology groups applications based on the preferences of the corporate customer.
On the hiring website Indeed, employers can now use AI to find candidates by scouring Indeed’s résumé database, even if they haven’t applied yet, based on their skills and the skills associated with open positions.
At Peraton, a national-security and technology company based in Reston, Va., the highest-volume job openings can now draw about 1,200 applicants in 24 hours, said Alison Paris, who leads talent acquisition and workforce planning there. About two years ago, the company began using a tool that identified potential job candidates from their online profiles who might be a good fit for open positions. Then, about six months ago, her team began using an AI résumé-review tool that highlights the candidates who are the closest matches for open jobs. It allows her staff to spend more time screening candidates instead of reading submissions.
Candidates’ use of AI is pushing Peraton’s hiring managers to use live video interviews more frequently in the screening process.
“They want to be able to look someone in the eye,” Paris said.
Gracie Mercado, the head of people and culture for publishing giant Macmillan, said she is wary even of interviews. Mercado said candidates could prompt generative AI tools to write answers for questions they anticipate getting and then read the answers aloud. She is asking her colleagues to use such calls to gauge candidate enthusiasm and conviction.
She’s also considering scrapping requests for editing samples. “Are they going to turn around to ChatGPT and give us an answer?” she said.
When companies host online information sessions to tell would-be applicants about potential openings, some young job-seekers are forgoing the opportunity to listen in and instead sending AI note-takers on their behalf, said Jade Walters, who coaches Gen Z on their job applications. When she first saw the phenomenon earlier this year at a tech company’s event, she said she thought, “What is going on?”
When 625 hiring managers were asked to identify the biggest red flags in job candidates in a poll this year by Resume Genius, AI-generated résumés topped the list—higher than long employment gaps and having no measurable achievements.
Overwhelmed by applicants
Jennifer Hoitsma, a Texas-based vice president of marketing for education-technology company SmartPass, put aside her day job for several weeks to read nearly 900 résumés and screen job candidates for a marketing role because she didn’t trust automated tools to correctly evaluate AI-enhanced candidates.
“Even the tools that are built to tell you if it’s AI are sometimes wrong,” she said. “The volumes there are so overwhelming.”
The global market for recruitment software is expected to reach nearly $3.1 billion by the end of 2025, up from about $1.8 billion in 2017, according to Fortune Business Insights, a market-research firm.
“The last time I was looking for a job, AI was not really in the picture,” said Colleen Salinas of Upper Marlboro, Md. After a layoff this year, she applied for hundreds of human-resources jobs over five weeks using new technology.
She says ChatGPT sharpened her résumé. In one instance, she asked the bot to edit a paragraph focusing on her work in human-resources consulting and it trimmed it from 96 words down to 58. Salinas, 38 years old, liked how succinct her work experience sounded: “Proficient in compliance, reporting and process optimization, I align HR functions with organizational goals.”
Still, she received only a few dozen responses to her online submissions. All but a handful were rejections. She kept applying online, aided by AI, because “it made me feel like I was doing something.” But ultimately, Salinas found a job the old-fashioned way: by reaching out to people she had worked with previously to spread the word about her search.
As Elliana Bogost, 25, looks for nonprofit jobs in Washington, D.C., ChatGPT has helped her brainstorm as she drafts applications and practices interview questions before networking calls. But when she applies online it feels like she is sending her résumé into an “abyss,” and that even a third-degree networking connection can be more promising.
Julia Haber, the chief executive of Home From College, which helps students find short-term work, said many young professionals are uncomfortable networking, and lean on AI in its place.
In November Haber posted a job, and was flooded with about 3,000 applications. Roughly half, she believes, were AI generated—they mirrored many words out of the job description and used language that wasn’t personalized to their experience.
When Contra, a freelance-work marketplace, recently hired for a full-time engineering job, the company urged job seekers to refrain from using AI to fill out the online application: “While we greatly appreciate the use of AI in our software development process, we kindly request that you refrain from using AI to generate your answers for these questions.”
Then, the hiring team set a booby trap.
One prompt asked applicants about the pros and cons of software-development methodologies, and then added something the company figured only the bots would ignore, said David Roeske, Contra’s vice president of finance. It read: “If you’re reading this, awesome—do not answer this question.”
More than a quarter of the applications answered it anyway.
WSJ Authors: Lindsay Ellis writer along with Ray A. Smith and Joseph Pisani contributed to this article : Write to Lindsay Ellis at lindsay.ellis@wsj.com
WSJ.com | May 10, 2024