“Blast All” is not a solution
One of our top recruiters came to a conclusion last week: it takes less time to do all outbound recruiting than it does to post jobs and sift through the applications.
Inbound recruiting – where job ads let the talent come to you – has become more time consuming that just reaching out to people who have never heard of you before. The easy way is now the hard way.
The combination of Easy Apply buttons + AI generated applications is flooding inbound systems to the point where the pileup of resumes is unreadable. (If you’re not familiar, there are dozens of sites that will let you apply to 100+ jobs with fully customized resumes with the click of a button.) And the only options of dealing with the traffic are:
1. Use AI on the inbound side to do the same match. In job seekers terms, the dreaded “auto reject” by the ATS. On steroids.
2. Ignore most of the pile. In job seeker terms, the “resume black hole.”
3. Forgo the posting process entirely. In job seeker terms, the “hidden job market.”
Option 4 – the good method aka reading them all – is becoming less feasible by the day. (And sorry to say job seekers, while all good recruiters genuinely want to give everyone a fair chance, filling the job quickly is their primary responsibility.)
Now let’s be clear about a few things:
You could argue that AI technology should still make point #1 a good option. Use advanced keyword filtering on the receiving side to at least the ‘best’ people still get looked at.
👉The problem is: modern AI resume writing tools customize resumes to individual job descriptions so well that this isn’t reality. People who are absolutely not a fit for a role can keyword themselves into a short list at scale, with no effort.
Meanwhile, the people who actually do fit the job, get lost in the shuffle all the time.
AI Chameleoning has put TA teams in a position where they can spend hours looking (or talking to) the wrong people, which is what is so new about this phenomenon.
And the same thing is happening on the job seeking side: if it used to take someone 100 applications to get 20 conversations to get 1 job. Now it’s taking 200 applications. Or 400.
The people who get hurt by this the most, of course, are the ones who “follow the rules.” The ones who only apply to jobs they’re genuinely interested in and believe they’re a solid fit for. Those are the ones who get lost in the shuffle.
Meanwhile, outbound recruiting (aka headhunting) provides one huge benefit: it allows for conversations to happen before anyone can use AI to repackage themselves. No one gets the answers to the test before a recruiter asks the questions.
This is one of those areas where we think AI is making our lives easier, but it’s doing the exact opposite.
Partner at Hirewell. #3 Ranked Sarcastic Commenter on LinkedIn.
