Job seekers are exhausted. Tired of having their resumes up in the air or ghosted, many people are starting to pay for AI tools that blow applications into every open position they can find. But employers are just as dire, according to Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait, who has a name for his employment nightmare: the AI doom loop.
“This is the first time that both sides have been truly unhappy,” Chait said. luck. “The market is not working for either side.”
Job seekers are “piling up more and more job applications into a black hole, but they’re not making any progress,” he said. No matter how much you send, it never gets anywhere.
So they turned to AI tools to make the process less painful. “You can just search on Google, we have tools to advertise and use AI to automatically apply for every job at Greenhouse,” said the head of the recruitment committee. “Someone goes and buys the tool, it’s like $20, and then they can send out job applications to as many jobs as they want.”
On the other side of the inbox, recruiters are drowning. Greenhouse currently has 175,000 job listings on its platform, and on average, approximately 254 job seekers apply for every job posted, a 412% increase in applications per recruiter.
“We often receive hundreds or thousands of applications in just a day or two, and we can’t keep up,” Chait said. Worse, because many of these applications are AI-generated, “they all start to look the same,” and candidates will no longer be able to tell the difference between someone who auto-applied to 1,000 jobs overnight and who is seriously interested.
As a result, employers will rely on AI just to survive the high volume of applications, while candidates who continue to be ignored will have no choice but to respond by applying to more jobs.
“We call this the AI doom loop,” he added. “Everyone is using their own AI to solve their own problems, but it’s making the whole system worse,” he said.
CEOs and even Anne Hathaway have the same problem. I can’t find good candidates because of AI.
Data backs up how things broke. More than 1.2 million applications were submitted for just under 17,000 postgraduate roles in the UK alone last year. A young man with a master’s degree applied for thousands of positions without hearing back for more than six months. And things could get even worse. Goodwill CEO Steve Preston said job centers are preparing for an influx of unemployed youth as AI erodes entry-level jobs.
For CEOs, finding the right candidate can literally mean finding a needle in a haystack.
Arvind Jain, the former Google engineer behind $7.2 billion AI startup Glean, explained that his company receives thousands of job applications. every day–And we still haven’t been able to find the human resources we need. That’s because the best candidates arrive before you even have time to sift through a fifth of the applications.
“Students think it’s hard to find a job, and we think it’s hard to find a job,” he said. luck.
Actress Anne Hathaway has hit the same wall. of odyssey Starr revealed that after she was recently hired, she received a ton of thank you letters written on ChatGPT.
“I want to warn you, if you’re out there trying to escape something, you could be exposing yourself,” Hathaway said.
Greenhouse solves doom loops, but networking and handwritten thank you notes also help
Chait agrees that the answer is not for everyone to stop using AI. Problem solved. There are too many people applying and too few roles for anyone to go back to the old ways.
But his company has so far initiated two fixes. The first is a feature called “My Dream Job,” which allows job seekers to flag just one role per month as their top priority across all companies on Greenhouse’s platform. Because it’s rare, Chait says, true intent is enforced and signals that the employer can actually trust that intent. Nearly half a million applications for “dream jobs” have been submitted since launch, and Chait says these candidates are hired at about five times the rate of other candidates.
Second move: Greenhouse recently acquired an AI voice interviewing company (Ezra AI Labs). This allows all applicants to be interviewed, rather than just a few shortlisted candidates. “Why automatically send out thousands of job applications when you have to go through interviews for all of them?” Chait said. The goal is to eliminate the incentive to send spam in the first place, as well as completely remove the resume screening step, which Chait says is full of bias, adds about six days to the hiring process, and offers little real benefit.
But for desperate young workers who want to take action into their own hands, there are ways to stand out among the millions of unemployed people fighting for jobs.
First, the extra effort of writing notes by hand can be an easy win, especially since one hiring manager, especially for Gen Z, points out that very few people handwrite their notes these days.
Meanwhile, Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri recently said: luck The only reliable way to get a job anymore is to skip applying altogether and build a relationship with someone internally. Because, in his words, some of the best work is “never published” at all.
His advice for young, hungry, childless job seekers is to get out and network at least two to three times a week. “Knowing who you know, how you get to know them, and building your network will pay off over time.”
