slate.com/technology: I got laid off five months ago. Every morning I drink a pot of coffee while I write cover letters, tweak my résumé, and submit job applications into the abyss, knowing they will likely never be seen by human eyes—only crawled by the cold, lifeless algorithms of an artificial intelligence. I feel like General Zod from Superman, floating off into space trapped inside a two-dimensional phantom zone, screaming in silence about my job qualifications and core competencies.
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This is incredibly frustrating. Within the last year and a half both of my parents have been laid off and on the job hunt and my partner has also spent a lot of time looking for jobs. All three of them ran into this issue. It seemed like applying to any jobs online led to absolutely nothing. My mom recently got a new job and she got it through someone she used to work with. I remember her talking about how all it took was one conversation and an email to finally get answers after being ghosted over and over. And something that I found to make it more frustrating is that she has a very specific job and I kept thinking how many people can possibly be applying to these. I always wonder if Stage Management is competitive or not. It is a very specific job that is maybe less well known but maybe not. And we tend to have small teams meaning there are less jobs. I am curious to see what it looks like for me post graduation.
I don’t even think AI is the only factor. The job market is a mess right now, no matter what level of job you’re applying for. I applied to 40+ jobs before the summer, most ghosted me, and I only got an interview at one, which luckily hired me. These were all minimum wage no experience required positions like being a cashier or being a busser or ushering or something like that. from a higher level job standpoint, because I don’t think Burger King‘s using AI to reject me from a job flipping burgers, I think it’s morally wrong that we are letting robots choose the jobs that people have seemingly with a little oversight. I see so many articles and blogs and thought pieces about how the job search is getting literally impossible, and people are just applying to hundreds and hundreds of jobs with no response at all, and according to this article a 2% interview rate. What I would really like to see is an article from someone who works on the inside. I wish I could know what’s actually going on behind the scenes and how they are making the job search impossible I want to know like what the invisible jobs are, and why people care so much about what little they do for companies.
I found that the point towards the end of this article, about the best way to go about this career market was to navigate to the backend human side, was a very interesting point. This is what really gets me about AI- or what we call AI now, since it’s really just a dressed up Google Search in my opinion when it comes to things like this. One of the best things about being able to apply to jobs online is that you can reach and recruit from a wider hiring pool, especially when it comes to hiring remotely. This means that you can more easily find a wide variety of experiences and professional strengths that can help your workforce get stronger. The AI kind of ruins all of this, as it tends to gum up these sorting algorithms, leaving applicants confused without a response and potential employers end up going for those they know. It takes a lot of equity out of the equation when the best way to get a job reverts more back to who you know and who you can get in touch with instead of what your skills and qualifications are.
I definitely understand this one, it’s become such an issue, even applying to summer jobs like Target. Speaking to our hiring managers over the summer, they had massive issues for jobs at target because they are well known, people deploy bots to apply to each of our stores in our district, every single application (even tho they all do the same exact thing), so we get a lot of repeat names. They also learned how to do the “applicant survey” which is one of those quizzes that gives you situations, so most of their virtual interviews do not match up to how they answered on the quiz, so thats a massive waste of time. I also see this while going through social media, hiring managers do not like these bots as it just fills up the queue with useless thoughtless applicants who they just immediately deny. I do hope they add bot blocking soon to these applications, it’s a massive problem thats only getting worse with generative AI getting to where it is.
I am worried about graduating in this age of AI filling the job application market. I think it’s incredibly frustrating that real people have to fight in the same pool and faceless mass of AI bots. Possibly worse, the idea of the AI is the one looking over resumes and applications now. I think another layer that is unfortunate is some people use AI to make their resumes, and people who do not are being instructed to make changes to their resume to make it readable/stand out to AI reading machines. I hope what one of my teachers said was true that maybe, at least theatre people, would start to shift back to a more in person-oriented process and cut the online submission/linked in/portals out of it. I also know another factor crowding the job market are ghost job listings where companies list job openings that don’t exist or are not intended to be filled by regular people applicants. I hope there are laws or a cultural shift in the near future to curb this need to apply to hundreds of places to get a bite.
Everything I hear about the job market just becomes more and more depressing. I hear stories like this all the time, of people applying to a million different jobs, only to be ghosted by the vast majority of them, and those job postings don’t go away. It’s especially frustrating when there’s also a mindset among people of “well, nobody wants to work anymore,” which is really just so untrue. The bots are both applying for the jobs as well as sifting through the applicants, and as a result, both the humans who want jobs and the humans trying to hire employees aren’t getting any benefits in this situation. The job application market is a pretty scary place right now, which is really terrifying for the version of me in the near future that is going to be looking for a job. In some ways, our industry, due to how incredibly niche it is, finds itself somewhat safe from this, but even still with summer jobs, the constantly being ghosted thing is real.
What grabbed me about the article is how it frames using tools like ChatGPT for resumes and cover letters as a double-edged sword. On one hand, yeah, you can speed things up and tweak your wording a lot faster than doing it all by hand. But on the other hand, the article points out that if you lean too heavily on AI, you might end up with something generic, automated, and too alike to everybody else’s application. The bigger issue: employers are starting to sense when something was written more by AI than by a person, and that familiarity might actually hurt you. It made me rethink the idea that “AI will fix everything” in a job search—because it won’t. What actually stands out is the human stuff: your story, your tone, the details that no formula can replicate. So if you use AI, treat it like a tool—not the author. Make sure you’re still doing the authentic work of making the application feel like you
As someone who is currently trying to find a ‘normal people job’ (ie a job in the service industry), I can single-handedly say that it is hell out here. I have applied to so many jobs I can’t even count. I continue to not hear back from any of them. I have tried applying directly to websites and using the multitude of apps that service job finders. I do not have good results either way. I have now gone to only apply to jobs on campus because I know they are real and looking for people like me. In terms of more specialized jobs, my mother just went through a job search of over a year for a director position at hospitals, and she had better luck with responses but it still took a year to get an offer. I have not considered the fact that AI might be complicating the job search process. This would make sense as to why it is so hard to get responses. With possibly fake listings and bots spamming the submission boxes it is so much harder to get seen.
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