I woke up today to a text from a friend. He’s a software engineer who’s looking for a new job, and had been playing around with a new AI harness.

He’s sending fully automated job applications.

No human in the loop for selecting which jobs are a good fit, or reviewing an AI-written resume & cover letter. Job applications go out; he decides if he’s interested once he gets an interview.

I’ve hired for multiple positions — even before the ChatGPT moment, we were getting 400+ job applications for many positions. Now I’m seeing >1000 direct applications per software engineer position.

Along with the huge jump in applications, the signal to noise ratio is falling. Three years ago, maybe 1 application in 30 got offered an interview. Now it’s less than to 1 in 100.

Most of this growth seems logically to come from AI making it easier to apply¹. If applications are faster to research, write, and submit, why wouldn’t people apply to more jobs? Sure, there’s other factors in play (eg. tech jobs are having a rough moment), but not a >2x growth.

We’ve got a set of technical and cultural trends that drive lots of low effort job applications:

1. AI is quite good at tweaking resumes & writing coverletters, so it’s easier to create a customized application.
2. With the recent surge of “claws”², setting up automation to do job applications is getting much easier.
3. Job seekers have been trained by companies to pump out lots of applications: many job applications disappear into a void, some companies post open jobs when they aren’t hiring to try to trick investors & competitors they are growing, other companies hold open job applications to build up a backlog of resumes for when they do start hiring.

This will lead to a tragedy of the commons. Each job seeker has lots of incentives to pump out job applications, and they won’t experience the negatives until the entire market does. As hiring companies get overwhelmed with applications from candidates that aren’t good fits, they’ll pivot to what’s always been the fallback: hiring via head hunters or in-network connections.

Or maybe we’ll give up and only accept applications that are dropped off in person?