// WIRED US/UK — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
AI Use in the Job Market Is Creating an Infinite Doom Loop
Jodi Beggs' résumé got dinged for being two pages long. She used her middle initial on one document but not another, which also cost her points. If she changed “percent” to the % sign, her score went up.
Beggs, a data scientist and job seeker, got this feedback from an online system that compares a job description with an applicant's materials to assess how well they match up. The most well known of these tools is Jobscan, though Beggs didn't say which one she tested.
“If my job is to please the robots,” Beggs says, “then even if I don't like AI-generated content, maybe the machines do.”
Jobscan and other apps like it work on the premise that hiring committees use AI to automatically rate and rank candidates in their applicant tracking system (ATS). Only the top 10 to 20 percent of applicants are considered. The bottom 80 might never see the light of day. That's the belief, anyway. To get on the short list, candidates must tailor the formatting of their CVs and cover letters and pack them with the right keywords to match what the ATS wants to see.
The problem is, this premise isn’t always correct. Automated ranking absolutely happens in some organizations, but in others, hiring is still managed personally by humans from start to finish.
At its most basic, an ATS collects job applications, helps hiring committees review them, and tracks applicants through the interviewing and hiring process. Some systems offer more, from onboarding management to automated AI screening interviews.
Daniel Chait, CEO of an ATS company called Greenhouse, says there's a lot of folklore about these tools, particularly from the job seeker side. No two ATSs are the same. The technology changes fast, so an AI tool inside an ATS might work one way today and a different way tomorrow. Whether an ATS uses AI at all depends on the exact product and which features a team pays for and uses.
Regardless, as long as applicants believe AI is involved, they'll still try to game it using their own AI.
To put the fate of your job search into the hands of a tool that says it can optimize for an ATS is a shaky proposition. One recruiter proved how even with atrocious Jobscan scores, she still got a dozen interviews and an offer. Consider, too, that Jobscan costs $30 to $50 per month. The company isn't exactly incentivized to get you off the job market.
Being in a low-fire, low-hire economy only makes matters worse. Job postings are scarce. Scams and ghost jobs are enough of a problem that some states are looking to write new laws to combat them.