City Council officials say they need to rethink how they hire staff after a surge in AI-generated job applications.
Lee Fallows, director of corporate resources, said Bolton City Council has seen a “significant increase” in applications for jobs.
“It’s been tightened up quite a bit. What we’re looking at now is, when we’re getting a lot of product, are we ensuring quality,” he said at a meeting of the Corporate and External Oversight Committee last week.
Committee chair Anne Galloway asked her colleagues at Thursday’s (5 February) meeting whether the job market had tightened in recent years.
She said: “In recent years, I feel that regulations have become much stricter, especially for graduates who are finding it difficult to find employment.
“What do you think about the job market at the moment?
bolton town hall (Image: Anthony Moss)
Fallows said he would agree that three to six months ago the job market was tight, but that there has been an uptick in applications recently.
He said: “Keeping in mind that what we are about to say has really specific challenges in some specific areas.
“For some jobs – IT is typical – the external market pays far more than councils can ever pay.
“That’s a challenge we’ll always have.”
He said council staff now receive a large volume of AI-generated applications and have to do more work to process them all.
Fallows said: “We receive a lot of AI-generated applications, which poses a challenge for us because it takes more work to sift through the applications and many of them all say the same thing.
“We have to really think about how we recruit staff.”
