Jobseekers and recruiters are at a technological standoff.
Candidates upload (and retype) their resumes into an applicant tracking system (ATS) with no sense of whether or not their applications are getting seen. Recruiters are buried under hundreds or even thousands of applications for a single listing.
Frustrated jobseekers are doing everything they can to better their chances of a callback, increasingly through the use of AI. This means parsing job posts for potential keywords, generating cover letters that mirror the wording of a job description, or even using bots that send out thousands of customized applications for jobs with a button click.
Recruiters are adopting AI too. These tools can help find certain qualifications faster (and with more flexibility) than an ATS, authenticate candidates, and automatically reject candidates based on their eligibility. They’re also using AI to sniff out bots and to make sure candidates are who they say they are.
The use of AI on both sides of the job hunt has created what Daniel Chait, CEO of software company Greenhouse, calls an “AI doom loop”: thousands of applicants sending indistinguishable AI-generated resumes that leave recruiters to rely on their own AI tools to sort through the slush.
“Employers optimize for filtering because they feel overwhelmed. Job seekers therefore optimize their visibility. Then employers double down on filtering, so job seekers double down on visibility,” says Sarah Trumble, a researcher of ATS design and job applications.
In the hiring world, AI has accelerated a war of attrition that neither side wants to wage—leaving neither applicants nor recruiters happy.
How AI enables people to apply at scale
“I look at trying to find a job the same way I view dating. I’ve become very jaded. It’s a numbers game,” says Mike, a freelance writer in Toronto. He requested to go by a pseudonym to speak freely while job hunting. He’s been on the job market for two months, applying through the usual process, hoping to hear back, rarely getting a reply. “I feel like I’m literally shouting into the void.”
That’s why he — along with as many as 76% of jobseekers — is using AI in his application process. That can look different to different people, whether scanning keywords in a job description to tailor resumes for each opening, polishing (or drafting) cover letters, or scouring for recruiter email addresses.
With the help of his friend Neo (a Toronto-based programmer who also requested to go by a pseudonym to discuss his development work), he has a tool that offers personalized resume-tailoring advice, a list of well-suited jobs, and strategies to skip the queue altogether with backdoor hiring tips.
“I spoke into Neo’s MacBook for 20 minutes about my career path: what I’m looking for in a job, where I want to take my career. He had a bunch of AI agents to summarize all that information and created a dashboard for me. You can see every single thing in one place, which is very helpful,” Mike says.
Some jobseekers are going a step further by using agentic AI to auto-apply to thousands of roles in a single evening.
“I was applying for jobs a couple of years ago, and I remember Googling the title that you’re looking for, filling out maybe two applications, and then you’re happy for the day,” Neo says. “But now you have an agent make a list of 500 jobs in less than a half an hour, and you just send them out there.”
Recruiters are well aware that AI is an increasing tool — or crutch — for applicants. Sometimes, the use of AI is easy to spot.
Stacy Zapar, founder of Tenfold, a recruiting consultancy focused on candidate fraud, says “the recruiter might go in and see that a person’s applied to 30 jobs in 30 minutes and is therefore a bot, a malicious actor, or someone who’s just not serious.”
Many ATS and AI platforms can tell when an applicant is using a bot. The applications are often generic-sounding and marginally tailored to the job. Plus, if a bot applies to several jobs within the same company, it’s possible that the ATS or recruiter will notice and disqualify the applicant. Worse yet, some platforms might even flag mass-apply resumes as fraud, which can put applicants on a blacklist if the software is used across several companies.
Candidates are struggling, but so are recruiters
The average recruiter fields three times the applications for each job than they did only a few years ago. Recruiters across industries — tech in particular — are getting laid off. HR and recruitment teams were hardest hit among layoffs at Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, comprising roughly a third or more of layoffs at each firm since 2023. Even ATS giant Workday cut 8.5% of its workforce (around 1,750 employees) in 2025.
“The applicant volume has gone up four times on average, so we have half the team dealing with four-time applications,” Zapar says. “That’s eight times the volume per recruiter to deal with.”
Many have to do more work with fewer resources as a result of HR layoffs, and these tools weren’t designed to handle the kind of volume now seen during one of the toughest job markets in memory.
That’s why recruiters are relying on AI to get through thousands of applications, sometimes reducing the number of nonqualified candidates they have to sift through manually. Some companies have adopted AI tools that rank and score candidates before a recruiter sees their application. These tools can predict a candidate’s fit, job performance, and whether or not they’re likely to accept an offer. The output is usually a list of candidates for a recruiter to review.
Bonnie Dilber, recruiting leader at Zapier, says “Good recruiters are still ultimately going to look at everyone, but there are ways that certain people might bubble up to the top. At the end of the day, human recruiters are the ones looking at applications and resumes to make decisions.”
Zapar isn’t as confident.
“A little bit of the decision making is being done by these tools, and recruiters are believing the AI rather than being informed by the AI,” Zapar says. “They’re just agreeing with the AI in some cases.”
Jobseeking at a stalemate
Applying for and filling a job in 2026 means entering into a doom loop. Overstretched recruiters sift through thousands of applications, many of which are keyword-stuffed, AI-generated, and indistinguishable from each other. The signal-to-noise ratio is low on both sides.
It’s not just about noise, either. The volume of resumes, bolstered by AI-enabled bots, is creating real bottlenecks in hiring. Good candidates are being removed from consideration only for recruiters to find out they were speaking to fraudulent actors.
“I have one recruiter who told me last week she did 12 interviews last week. All 12 of them were fake candidates. She’s just lost a week on these roles, and all the real people that are buried,” Zapar says. Some use deepfake video filters, others refuse to turn on cameras. Fake candidates may have LinkedIn profiles with no history, or IP addresses from abroad.
“She did not talk to a single real candidate; she has nothing to show for it.”
Jobseekers may not have much of a choice but to pursue every competitive angle they can. The level of competition is too high not to.
“You go on LinkedIn and you see a job, and over 100 people have already applied,” says Rich, a marketing and commercial strategy executive. “Are [companies] actually looking at this stuff? We’re using AI to get to you, and you’re using AI to weed people out.”
The AI doom loop creates more friction, more hurdles, and more work for everyone. The time-saving tool makes resumes generic and good candidates harder to find.
“If you have a broken process,” Zapar says, “AI makes it break faster.”