Flood of AI-generated resumes causes chaos for recruiters, who resort to AI to screen them

AI-generated resumes are flooding the job market, forcing employers to use their own AI screening tools in return.

According to a report from the New York Times, LinkedIn saw a 45 percent increase in applications submitted through the platform in the past year — an average of 11,000 applications per minute. Generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, in addition to LinkedIn's own AI tools for tailoring job applications, is a major contributing factor to the surge of applications overwhelming recruiters. On top of that, dozens of AI resume apps promise to build resumes or even automate the job application process entirely.

A quick search returns endless results on tips for using AI to edit or entirely write resumes. Such tactics include asking ChatGPT to tailor a resume to a specific job description or to generate text that highlights your skills in a way that stands out to recruiters.

Ironically, using ChatGPT to make your application "stand out" is actually making resumes look "suspiciously similar," according to recruiters who spoke to the Times. And those recruiters are having an increasingly difficult time finding candidates that are genuinely and uniquely qualified.

In response, employers are also increasingly using AI tools to screen applications, creating a kind of "arms race," as the report described. In October, LinkedIn introduced a tool aptly called Hiring Assistant to help recruiters automate some of the hiring process, such as writing job descriptions and finding candidates that best match the qualifications.

The Times report details how companies like Chipotle have significantly reduced hiring time by using chatbots to screen candidates. Of course, candidates could also be using their own AI agents to respond to recruiters. "We end up with an AI versus AI type of situation," Hung Lee, author of a recruiting newsletter, told the publication.

In a way, automating the job search with AI is an evolution of the same song and dance applicants and recruiters have always done. Candidates have always tried to get their resumes to the top of the pile by using keywords and highlighting particular skills to get past the initial screening phase. And even before the generative AI era, recruiters relied on software that could automatically screen candidates' applications.

Now, they're using AI tools to offload the tedious work.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.