{"id":295588,"date":"2025-10-11T21:01:37","date_gmt":"2025-10-11T21:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/295588\/"},"modified":"2025-10-11T21:01:37","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T21:01:37","slug":"i-applied-to-more-than-100-jobs-bots-have-made-job-hunting-impossible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/295588\/","title":{"rendered":"I applied to more than 100 jobs. Bots have made job hunting impossible."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

I got laid off five months ago. Every morning I drink a pot of coffee while I write cover letters, tweak my r\u00e9sum\u00e9, and submit job applications into the abyss, knowing they will likely never be seen by human eyes\u2014only crawled by the cold, lifeless algorithms of an artificial intelligence. I feel like General Zod from Superman, floating off into space trapped inside a two-dimensional phantom zone, screaming in silence about my job qualifications and core competencies.<\/p>\n

The job market is a mess. The old system is broken and a functioning replacement has yet to fully emerge. We\u2019re stuck in the between years\u2014a dystopian digital doomscape that has job seekers and hirers picking through a landfill of A.I.-generated garbage and longing for the halcyon days of an analog past.<\/p>\n

Some people take a more charitable view of the job market. A veteran job coach I\u2019m working with at an outplacement agency says, \u201cIt\u2019s not broken; it\u2019s just different.\u201d But the main difference I\u2019ve noticed is that the old system worked, and this one doesn\u2019t. A.I. is advancing faster than our ability to process it. It\u2019s overloading outdated applicant tracking systems\u2014aging software designed to sort, rank, and track job applicants online\u2014with a firehose of generative slop, polluting the job market with A.I.-written r\u00e9sum\u00e9s, and creating so much noise that quality signal gets lost in the static.<\/p>\n

Even when your application status gets mysteriously changed from \u201creceived\u201d to \u201cunder consideration,\u201d any forward motion in ATS purgatory is usually an illusion. Within a week, your application is buried under a pile of thousands, with dozens\u2014if not hundreds\u2014added to the heap every day. By month two, the job listing gets reposted on LinkedIn for reasons nobody can understand. The hiring team\u2019s hesitation has created an ever-worsening workload for themselves, and an even greater dependency on the robots to sort out the mess they created in the first place.<\/p>\n

The situation has already spawned an entire predatory industry of digital snake-oil merchants peddling A.I.-powered remedies\u2014new toolkits that will crawl the internet for job postings, then apply to hundreds of jobs on your behalf with custom-generated cover letters and keyword-optimized r\u00e9sum\u00e9s. Again, the false promise is that A.I. can fix the mess it has created by generating even more clutter.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve applied to more than 100 jobs in the past four months. I\u2019ve been rejected by roughly half, and ghosted by the rest\u2014all without making human contact. Recently, I\u2019ve had several promising interviews and a few leads, but that\u2019s thanks entirely to old-fashioned networking and referrals. Nothing has come from months of sending my applications into the gaping maw of a broken ATS.<\/p>\n

Sadly, I\u2019m not alone. According to a recent survey<\/a> of 500 job seekers published by CareerSprout, a job coaching service that helps experienced tech professionals land high-paying jobs, 85 percent of job seekers claim it took them nine-plus months to land a new role. Additionally, a whopping 63 percent of those interviewed said they had to apply to 337-plus jobs to finally land a job offer, with a conversion rate of 2 percent\u2014meaning they had only two interviews for every 100 job applications.<\/p>\n

A separate poll published by huntr.co looked at job board response rates during second quarter of 2025 and found LinkedIn had a 3.3 percent response rate, comparable to ZipRecruiter\u2019s 3.8 percent. Indeed finished a whisker ahead with a 4.7 percent response rate. In short, your chances of getting ignored are better than ever.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve reached the point in history where the robots are no longer satisfied with taking our jobs; they also want to prevent us from getting new ones. The best way to navigate the broken system is to make an end run around the ATS gatekeepers to find a back door into the company by connecting with a human who works there.<\/p>\n

But that can be tricky in instances when you don\u2019t recognize the names of any of the hiring companies, understand what they do, or know anybody who works there. I\u2019ve applied to positions at firms like \u201cSettlePoint Synergies,\u201d \u201cHello! Z5arpe 25,\u201d and \u201cMarluflouxx N\u00fc Solutions,\u201d or some other cryptic word jumble to that effect. Most of these companies have something to do with generative or agentic A.I., fintech, or health care\u2014or some unexpected combination of the three. The \u201cabout us\u201d tabs of these companies offer little clarity, even when I copy and paste the text into ChatGPT and ask: \u201cExplain this to me like I\u2019m 10 years old and was raised in a cave.\u201d<\/p>\n

In desperate instances like this, when I\u2019m truly flying blind, I have no alternative but to turn to the same A.I. tools that I just spent the first half of this essay bashing. Despite my better judgment\u2014and with a sense of morbid curiosity\u2014I recently asked ChatGPT to help me write a cover letter for a job I didn\u2019t understand. I figured that if company robots were going to screen my applications, I too would enlist robots to help me write them. Let the machines discuss my qualifications in their own native language.<\/p>\n

I have to admit, what ChatGPT spit out on my behalf wasn\u2019t half bad. More importantly, it was completely different from the traditional cover letters I had been writing. Different structure, different formatting, different word choice. Overall, I think ChatGPT is a good sounding board\u2014when you\u2019re careful and smart about what you\u2019re asking it to do\u2014as long as you don\u2019t outsource your thinking to the robots.<\/p>\n

ChatGPT does, however, need a human copy editor. For example, in a moment of heady optimism, I applied for a communications job at an aerospace and defense contractor, which would likely upset my mother. As I was reviewing ChatGPT\u2019s cover letter, I came across this curious line: \u201cMy extensive experience in environmental reporting aligns with your company\u2019s values and goals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Huh? I went back to the job description and found this line: You will bring to the role an understanding of the company\u2019s competitive environment and knowledge of industry challenges. Yikes! ChatGPT thought my experience reporting on the environment qualified me to understand the aerospace industry\u2019s \u201ccompetitive environment\u201d?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Kate Lindsay
\n This Controversial Actress Looks Exactly Like Me. I\u2019m Horrified.
\n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

A few days later, I asked ChatGPT to optimize my r\u00e9sum\u00e9 for a different job. But I made the mistake of using an old ChatGPT window that I had left open on my desktop for several days, with a long history of other unrelated queries\u00a0and bits of information pasted into the prompt bar. It was too much for ChatGPT to handle.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n <\/p>\n

    The Right Is Attacking a Franchise It Once Loved. The Reason Why Is Laughable.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  2. \n <\/p>\n

    It Controls Sex, Bowel Movements, and Even Sitting Down. It\u2019s Impossible to Get Any Help With It.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  3. \n <\/p>\n

    I Got Laid Off. Job Hunting in the Age of Robots Has Been a Pain.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  4. \n
    \n This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only<\/p>\n

    Forget \u201cDEI\u201d\u2014Bari Weiss Is Proof That Merit Doesn\u2019t Matter
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The r\u00e9sum\u00e9 it spit back at me was an unrecognizable hallucination of fictitious work history, invented job titles, and fake degrees at universities I never attended. ChatGPT was apparently pulling from disparate bullet points and other stray bits of information from previous searches. It was essentially cobbling together a Frankenstein r\u00e9sum\u00e9 from leftover pieces of information harvested from my search history, and passing it off as my own work experience.<\/p>\n

    It looked and read like a real r\u00e9sum\u00e9, but it was completely fabricated. It made me feel like I was looking back at a parallel life through the rotating plane of my two-dimensional phantom zone\u2014like, this could have been me if I had studied economics instead of political science, or if I had talked to that guy sitting next to me on the train in 1997.<\/p>\n

    Anyway, I\u2019ll stick this counterfeit CV in my back pocket and consider using it for future job applications when we fully transition to a post-truth society in the coming months. A.I.-generated Alt-me might have better luck in this job market than real me.<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":295589,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[738,64,2095,420,67,132,68,9916],"class_list":{"0":"post-295588","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-evergreen","11":"tag-jobs","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-workplace"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115357554107835957","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}