For job-seekers and recruiters, the job market can feel like a too-crowded party where AI is the DJ.
With little room to sneak a foot in the door, applicants are slinging gobs of AI-tailored resumes and cover letters at anyone in a position to change their fate. In response, some recruiters, HR professionals, and hiring managers are tapping AI to help deal with the deluge. Job-seekers, believing that artificial intelligence is pushing their application to the bottom, are then coming up with more AI-based hacks they think will cheat the system.
Daniel Chait, the CEO of the hiring platform Greenhouse, calls this a “doom loop,” or “the idea that each side is using AI to try and help themselves.”
“You have this huge increase in volume, but everybody’s applications are starting to look more and more alike,” Chait said.
With low overall hiring rates, 1.1 unemployed people for every opening, and a lot of available talent for employers to choose from, this would be a tough labor market even without automation as a part of the equation.
But for job-seekers who feel they’re being unfairly passed over, AI provides as good a scapegoat as any.
AI as a screener? It’s happening.
Greenhouse data shows the average recruiter is receiving about 400% more applications than they did just a few years ago, Chait said. Recruiters are also having to deal with straight-up fraudulent candidates.
To swim through the onslaught, Johnny C. Taylor Jr., CEO of SHRM, an industry group for human-resource professionals, said his organization has used AI to screen resumes to ensure they meet a role’s minimum job requirements. A role they recently posted received 150 applications in its first day online. Small companies simply don’t have the human resources and recruiting teams to review such an avalanche of applicants, he said.
“I can tell you confidently that, generally speaking, the candidate is not seen if the AI tool has screened them out,” Taylor Jr. said.
To be sure, humans are still sifting through resumes in plenty of circumstances, despite applicants’ fears of AI automatically rejecting swaths of qualified candidates based on opaque reasoning, recruiters told Yahoo Finance.
“There’s so much misinformation, and that’s the problem that I see,” said Elias Cobb, director of the Denver-based staffing and search firm Quantix and author of the book “From a Recruiter’s Brain.”
In his view, though, AI’s use in screening resumes is limited. Sure, some larger applicant tracking systems have AI features, but “it’s a minority of companies that use them.”