Paloma Canseco has applied for 250 jobs since July. She polished cover letters and filled out long, monotonous forms in internal forms at various companies. job offers. And last week, she received a call back from a recruiter about a graphic design job. Robin was polite and friendly on the phone, asking Canseco open-ended questions, like: “Tell me about your latest project and what you liked about it. » But Robin was not a person. It was a AI Recruiter.

Canseco hung up. “It’s supposed to be a conversation,” she told me. “I’m not going to spend my time with this recruitment company if they don’t hire real recruiters.” It takes her an average of half an hour to apply for each job, she says, and making that effort to receive an automated response feels like an insult.

Job hunting has never been fun, but the process “feels broken,” says Rohan Rajiv, head of career products at LinkedIn. According to company data, job applications have increased by 20% since last year. It’s an intense and frustrating process. And LinkedIn wants to bridge the gap, in part by fighting AI… with AI.

Earlier this year, the company rolled out new AI tools for premium subscribers. People could open a chat window and ask a chatbot if they were a good fit for a position based on their profile and job description. Then, this summer, LinkedIn unveiled an update that would use Generative AI to quickly write cover letters based on job descriptions and a user’s profile. I tried it and found the results weren’t bad: a cover letter may just need a few tweaks or additional customization before it looks like me.

In the coming weeks, LinkedIn will begin to evolve its AI job matching tools that are widely accessible to all users, Rajiv tells me. They can look at any job posting and ask LinkedIn to show how they fit, and the generative AI will detail how well they fit the role and explain how a recruiter can evaluate their profile. The hope is that with more transparency, people will apply for fewer jobs – but for jobs that better match their qualifications – and stop “swinging every time.” not“, says Rajiv, adding, “It’s natural to make quantity and volume your friend. But the bigger the volume, the harder the match.”

It turns out that the age-old career advice that it’s okay to try has a limit that we’ve passed beyond insanity. Can LinkedIn save us from recruiting hell?

Just 30 years ago, most people found jobs through their networks, job fairs, and newspaper ads. Monster launched its job site in 1994 and LinkedIn came about a decade later. Recruitment software and AI, which seemed like opportunities to streamline the process, have in some ways further complicated the art of landing a good role. Applicants are asked to fill out lengthy forms that repeat information already listed on their CV and LinkedIn profile, in what appears to be an endurance test of their ever-declining mental health. Sites like LinkedIn are great for finding tons of relevant job openings in one place, but people can end up applying too much, casting a wide net to positions that may not be a good fit.

This is especially true for those who use LinkedIn’s Easy Apply feature or generative AI tools that help them apply in bulk. In a ZipRecruiter survey last year, 25% of respondents who got a new job said they used AI to help them. After the peak of the pandemic, people were looking to quit and change jobs during the “Great resignation” at the highest rates since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the data in 2000. That means more and more people are entering this chaotic job market and facing problems all the time.

Job seekers and recruiters are caught in what seems like a never-ending loop.

All those hopeful (or crappy) CVs also hit a wall of overwhelmed recruiters. Some are using AI to try to reduce the noise. In a Society for Human Resource Management survey of companies using AI for recruiting, nearly 65% ​​of respondents said they use it to write job descriptions, 34% said they use it to review and scan resumes, and 33% said they use it to communicate with candidates throughout the process. Other recruiters are wary of technology because we still don’t know enough about how these tools make decisions. And automated HR technology has historically favored men over women, as well as downgraded resumes with black-sounding names or those with employment gaps.

Weariness has hit job seekers hard. This week, in a post that went viral on LinkedIn, Hayley Finegan, a human resources professional, posted an “open but picky” banner on her LinkedIn profile, mocking the “open to work“LinkedIn banner, which some job seekers view as desperate and newsworthy. ‘I’ve applied for exactly three jobs, and it’s because I’m waiting for the right one,’ she wrote.” I’m not here to just take any job – I’m here for the right role. Capturing the mentality of the overworked job seeker, the post quickly went viral. (Finegan did not respond to an interview request for this story.)

Job seekers and recruiters are caught in what seems like an endless loop. The two can seem like opposites, with candidates trying to find a way around the recruiter and getting paid, and recruiters struggling to figure out who is inflating their resume or even lying. The two ghost each other more and more. In reality, they want the same thing: a good job for as little effort as possible. There may not be an ideal number of jobs to apply to: Indeed recommends people apply to about 15 jobs per week, or two to three per day. But the average time to hire for a job is increasing, reaching 44 days in early 2023, human capital consultancy The Josh Bersin Co. found. And there isn’t enough transparency about what drives decision-making .

For people who haven’t updated their profile, provided as much detail about their skills, or posted on the feed, tools like LinkedIn’s may not work as well to fully showcase their qualifications. But Rajiv says the company’s AI tool will synthesize not only a person’s highlighted skills, but also other data, like the posts they share on the feed, which can include other skills she has. LinkedIn is also shaking things up for recruiters. Starting Tuesday, some recruiters can use the company’s Recruiting Assistant, a tool that lets them upload job descriptions and have generative AI summarize the qualifications for the position and build a list of candidates.

The best tool for job seekers is speed. They need to see jobs soon after they are posted and apply, which gives them a better chance than applying to hundreds or thousands of jobs. AI can help inform candidates when the right positions are posted. Finding the perfect job quickly “can happen, and it will happen more and more as these algorithms get smarter,” says Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter also rolled out revamped AI tools to help job seekers find better matches this summer. And earlier this year, Indeed began offering an AI tool to better recommend candidates to recruiters.

Some recruiters say AI doesn’t give a complete picture of candidates. Millie Black, lead technical recruiter at Techtrust, says she is passionate about the potential of AI. But she says she discovered that tools like ChatGPT don’t “read between the lines” and overlook certain skills that may make a candidate ideal, even if they are not the ones directly listed. The same thing happened for some LinkedIn searches, she says. This is something she could relate to as she has extensive knowledge of the specialized tech jobs she recruits for. When looking for the one person on the planet who can fill this role, recruiters still have to review resumes.

But Black also says she’s recently seen an increase in fake applicants. Sometimes she’s had to ask applicants for identification documents before even sending them through the process, or pre-screen people on video calls “just to see a face,” she adds. While it recruits for high-paying U.S.-based jobs that offer remote work, scammers are more common. “My whole job is to beat” the counterfeiters before they head to the hiring managers. She also learned to add questions to try to weed out less serious candidates. “If you just advertise a job as Easy Apply and don’t add screening questions, you’re attracting way too many people,” she says.

Canseco hasn’t tried LinkedIn’s AI tools yet because she’s not a premium user, but she might get access to them soon. When applying for jobs, she often uses LinkedIn and tries to contact the company directly to stand out. A recruiter for a position she recently applied for told her she was one of 3,000 applicants they received that week.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, covering the technology industry. She writes about the biggest companies and technology trends.