AI-Generated Resumes Flood Job Market, Sparking Hiring Crisis and Tech Arms Race

The résumé is dying, and AI is holding the smoking gun

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-vs-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 them three months later. In an age where ChatGPT can insert every keyword from a job description into a résumé with a simple prompt, her story is not unique. The problem began shortly after the emergence of mainstream generative AI bots in 2022, when some companies applied the technology to job applications to help overwhelmed job seekers. Now, several years later, the technology has evolved from a convenience tool to a systemic disruption of the hiring process. Some candidates are now taking automation even further, paying for AI agents that autonomously find jobs and submit applications on their behalf. Recruiters report that many of the résumés look suspiciously similar, making it more difficult to identify genuinely qualified or interested candidates. Computer tools have been assisting with creating résumés for decades, and everything from the typewriter to word processors to spellcheck and résumé templates have increased the ease of making a competent résumé. But AI has pushed the trend into overdrive. The potential to create endless output makes AI fundamentally different from its predecessors. Whereas earlier technologies helped people craft one good résumé more efficiently, AI enables candidates to generate hundreds of customized applications with minimal effort -- turning what was once a time-intensive process of demonstrating interest into a numbers game that overwhelms businesses trying to find genuinely qualified applicants. The frustration has reached a point where AI companies themselves are backing away from their own technology during the hiring process. Anthropic recently advised job seekers not to use LLMs on their applications -- a striking admission from a company whose business model depends on people using AI for everything else. The slow, painful death of the résumé In response to the deluge, companies now deploy their own AI defenses. Chipotle's AI chatbot screening tool, nicknamed Ava Cado, has reportedly reduced hiring time by 75 percent. However, this trend from businesses has led to an arms race of escalating automation, with candidates using AI to generate interview answers while companies deploy AI to detect them -- creating what amounts to machines talking to machines while humans get lost in the shuffle. Ironically, LinkedIn has stepped into the middle of the crisis by providing even more AI, with new tools that aim to help both candidates and recruiters narrow their focus. For example, an AI agent launched late last year can write follow-up messages, conduct screening chats, suggest top applicants, and search for potential hires using natural language on the platform. Beyond volume, fraud poses an increasing threat. In January, the Justice Department announced indictments in a scheme to place North Korean nationals in remote IT roles at US companies. Research firm Gartner says that fake identity cases are growing rapidly, with the company estimating that by 2028, about 1 in 4 job applicants could be fraudulent. And as we have previously reported, security researchers have also discovered that AI systems can hide invisible text in applications, potentially allowing candidates to game screening systems using prompt injections in ways human reviewers can't detect. And that's not all. Even when AI screening tools work as intended, they exhibit similar biases to human recruiters, preferring white male names on résumés -- raising legal concerns about discrimination. The European Union's AI Act already classifies hiring under its high-risk category with stringent restrictions, and while no US federal law specifically addresses AI use in hiring, general anti-discrimination laws still apply. So perhaps résumés as a meaningful signal of candidate interest and qualification are becoming obsolete. And maybe that's OK. When anyone can generate hundreds of tailored applications with a few prompts, the document that once demonstrated effort and genuine interest in a position has devolved into noise. Instead, the future of hiring may require abandoning the résumé altogether in favor of methods that AI can't easily replicate -- live problem-solving sessions, portfolio reviews, or trial work periods, just to name a few ideas. For now, employers and job seekers remain locked in an escalating technological arms race where machines screen the output of other machines, while the humans they're meant to serve struggle to make authentic connections in an increasingly inauthentic world. Perhaps the endgame is robots interviewing other robots for jobs performed by robots, while humans sit on the beach drinking daiquiris and playing vintage video games. Well, one can dream.

Flood of AI-generated resumes causes chaos for recruiters, who resort to AI to screen them

Paper? Never heard of it. Credit: Howard Kingsnorth / Getty Images AI-generated resumes are flooding the job market, forcing employers to use their own AI screening tools in return. According to a report from the New York Times, LinkedIn saw a 45 percent increase in applications submitted through the platform in the past year -- an average of 11,000 applications per minute. Generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, in addition to LinkedIn's own AI tools for tailoring job applications, is a major contributing factor to the surge of applications overwhelming recruiters. On top of that, dozens of AI resume apps promise to build resumes or even automate the job application process entirely. A quick search returns endless results on tips for using AI to edit or entirely write resumes. Such tactics include asking ChatGPT to tailor a resume to a specific job description or to generate text that highlights your skills in a way that stands out to recruiters. Ironically, using ChatGPT to make your application "stand out" is actually making resumes look "suspiciously similar," according to recruiters who spoke to the Times. And those recruiters are having an increasingly difficult time finding candidates that are genuinely and uniquely qualified. In response, employers are also increasingly using AI tools to screen applications, creating a kind of "arms race," as the report described. In October, LinkedIn introduced a tool aptly called Hiring Assistant to help recruiters automate some of the hiring process, such as writing job descriptions and finding candidates that best match the qualifications. The Times report details how companies like Chipotle have significantly reduced hiring time by using chatbots to screen candidates. Of course, candidates could also be using their own AI agents to respond to recruiters. "We end up with an AI versus AI type of situation," Hung Lee, author of a recruiting newsletter, told the publication. In a way, automating the job search with AI is an evolution of the same song and dance applicants and recruiters have always done. Candidates have always tried to get their resumes to the top of the pile by using keywords and highlighting particular skills to get past the initial screening phase. And even before the generative AI era, recruiters relied on software that could automatically screen candidates' applications. Now, they're using AI tools to offload the tedious work.

Applying to Jobs Has Become an AI-Powered Wasteland

If you're one of millions of job seekers struggling to find stable employment, just know it's probably not you. With the onslaught of so-called "generative AI" -- Silicon Valley's term for complex prediction algorithms that can be used to create new content based on vast amounts of material that they gathered without the permission of its creators -- the job search has become a veritable gauntlet of fake job listings, automated application bots, and computer-generated interviews. Though it's only been a little over two years since consumers got their hands on ChatGPT -- the first widely available generative AI model -- the tech has already caused devastating harm to the digital job market. Per the New York Times, the number of applications sent via LinkedIn has surged over 45 percent since 2024; the rate now stands at a dizzying 11,000 apps per minute on the site. One HR worker was gobsmacked when her fully-remote job posting received 400 applications in just 12 hours, surging to over 1,200 apps 36 hours later. Access to AI makes it incredibly easy for legit applicants and scammers alike to spam employers with résumés, often uniquely tailored to the job's details. That makes standing out as a purely human applicant -- which was already difficult before AI -- a Sisyphean task. "It's an 'applicant tsunami' that's just going to get bigger," one recruiter told the NYT, often devolving into an "AI versus AI type of situation." But the problem didn't start with job seekers. The trouble can be traced back to the mass adoption of AI HR bots, with 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies admitting to the use of AI to filter applicants, and 40 percent anticipating using AI to conduct interviews. And as job seekers turn to AI to level the playing field, companies -- which hold almost all of the power in the labor market -- are cranking the lever to dump more AI on the problem. Employers are now unleashing AI to verify applicant identities, administer computer-generated skilled assessments, and auto-generate messages to applicants -- all deployed with essentially zero recourse for anyone wrongfully rejected or subject to bias by the faceless bot. Case in point, LinkedIn is unleashed a so-called "AI agent" to help HR managers keep up with the flood of AI-assisted job applications -- essentially fighting fire with gasoline. It's a labor arms race to the bottom, and until regulations like the EU's Regulation on Artificial Intelligence become universal, applicants lacking the funding, resources, and techno-savvy of organized companies are bound to lose.

Why AI Resumes Are Overwhelming Recruiters and Managers

Some 1.5 million Americans have been out of work for six months or longer, according to the Labor Department's May jobs report. And recent college graduates are hitting a wall when they're handed their diploma. The unemployment rate for grads hit 5.8 percent in March, up from 4.6 percent the same time a year ago, according to a report issued in April from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. To beat the odds, a growing number of candidates are using AI to either tweak their resumes to include keywords from job listings or submit a resume to a wide array of postings on LinkedIn on their behalf. That's causing a flood for employers. The number of applications submitted on LinkedIn has surged more than 45 percent in the past year. That AI-driven hiring arms race is proving to be overwhelming for founders and hiring managers looking to fill an opening.