A.I. Sludge Has Entered the Job Search

Katie Tanner, a human resource consultant in Utah, knew the job would be popular: It was fully remote, was at a tech company and required only three years of experience.

But she was still shocked by the response on LinkedIn. After 12 hours, 400 applications had been submitted. By 24, there were 600. A few days later, there were more than 1,200, at which point she removed the post. Three months later, she’s still whittling down candidates.

“It’s crazy,” she said. “You just get inundated.”

The number of applications submitted on LinkedIn has surged more than 45 percent in the past year. The platform is clocking an average of 11,000 applications per minute, and generative artificial intelligence tools are contributing to the deluge.

With a simple prompt, ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI, will insert every keyword from a job description into a résumé. Some candidates are going a step further, paying for A.I. agents that can autonomously find jobs and apply on their behalf. Recruiters say it’s getting harder to tell who is genuinely qualified or interested, and many of the résumés look suspiciously similar.

“It’s an ‘applicant tsunami’ that’s just going to get bigger,” said Hung Lee, a former recruiter who writes a widely read newsletter about the industry.

Enter the A.I. arms race. One popular method for navigating the surge? Automatic chat or video interviews, sometimes conducted by A.I. Chipotle’s chief executive, Scott Boatwright, said at a conference this month that its A.I. chatbot screening and scheduling tool (named Ava Cado) had reduced hiring time by 75 percent.