AI May Be Breaking the Hiring Process

Guys...I think AI may be breaking the job search and completely ruining recruiting.

And listen, I get the problem.

Companies are getting THOUSANDS of applications for a single position. Recruiters are overwhelmed. Teams have been cut. Candidates are using AI to apply faster, which means employers are using AI to screen faster, which means applicants are now using AI to figure out how to get past the AI. We have created an absolutely ridiculous AI arms race.

Meanwhile, job seekers are on Reddit trading ATS hacks like Cold War intelligence.

“Change this keyword.”

“Use this exact job title.”

“Put this phrase in your résumé.”

“Don’t use columns.”

“Maybe the robot hates Helvetica.”

And increasingly, getting through the application isn’t even the end of it. People are now getting PHONE AND VIDEO INTERVIEWS conducted entirely by AI. Not scheduling bots. Interviews.

You spend years developing expertise, leadership skills, judgment, nuance, and the ability to navigate complicated human situations…only to explain your career to Jennifer.exe. Amazing.

And the frustrating part is that recruiting already had a context problem. Recruiters can’t possibly have deep technical knowledge of every job they recruit for. So transferable skills get missed. Direct experience gets misunderstood. Candidates who know the industry get screened out because their résumé doesn’t describe something in exactly the language someone expected. Automation can make that worse.

If a posting says “Adobe Illustrator” and my résumé says “Adobe Creative Suite,” a human familiar with design knows those things are related immediately. A rigid screening process may not. And THAT is the part that worries me.

Because hiring isn’t just matching words. It’s pattern recognition. It’s understanding that this person did X over here, which means they can probably solve Y over there. It’s recognizing potential, context, trajectory, judgment, and the weird combinations of experience that sometimes make someone a better candidate than the person who checked every box.

AI can absolutely help with volume. It probably has to. But somewhere between 4,000 résumés and a hiring manager, there still needs to be room for a human being to say:

“Wait. This person is interesting.” Because if the goal of recruiting becomes finding the résumé that most perfectly matches the prompt instead of finding the person who can actually do the job…

I’m not sure we’ve made hiring smarter. We’ve just made rejection faster.

How are ya'll holding up in this job market? And curious, has anyone had an interview with an AI bot? What was it like?