Job Seekers Dehumanized by AI-Driven Hiring
Job seekers are experiencing frustration and a lack of personalized attention during the application process. They feel their applications are often processed by impersonal AI systems, leading to generic rejections, wasted effort on cover letters, and a sense of being treated as data points rather than individuals. The current job market exacerbates these issues, making the search feel overwhelming and discouraging.
SOURCES (60)
“Probably don’t want people to be honest about how bad some companies really are.”
This has happened far too often to even be parody anymore.
“Then I can apply with degrees, certifications, and skills I don't have, for visibility. Right?”
“Too expensive for the government to actually police that. Better system is maybe some type of credibility score for each employer on the website, like 1 to 5 stars to indicate the integrity of the employer regarding how they use the job posting website. It'd have to be complicated though, like the employer would have to confirm that a certain user was hired for the job and then I guess the user would also have to confirm they were hired, idk. I can't think of a simple and reliable method”
“I feel you. I'm 44. I was instrumental in moving multiple large enterprises from their on-premises data centers to GCP and AWS. I lead engineering teams at eCommerce and healthcare tech companies. I actually moved into tech strategy consulting because it was basically the only job I could get that paid the bills. Now that's under threat because people think AI can somehow do my job. Maybe it will be able to in a few years, but it's already leading to less business and people being la”
“I hate that too. It shouldn’t be so hard to apply for simple jobs like a cashier. Who do they want for the role, or is it dumbass ai rejecting everything that doesn’t have some magic keyword no one knows what it is?”
“I'd apply only to make them waste time, and I'd do handle all the application process via AI so you don't waste time yourself AI can invent a reasonable excuse for you to have not seen that note”
“The part worth taking from this beyond the eval joke: any assessment where a candidate's code depends on external assets, images, config files, dependencies, needs to be treated as arbitrary code execution, not just the .js file you'd eyeball. That's exactly the gap here, the payload wasn't in code someone would read, it was in an SVG the code merely loaded. On the hiring side, this is a good reminder that the standard advice, review the diff, doesn't cover anything binary or”
“good question. it’s a score out of 100, but it also explains the score through matching skills, missing keywords, experience fit, and other job details. i agree that a random number alone can feel made up, so the reasons behind it matter more. feel free to send it to your friend. if he genuinely finds it useful, let me know. i’d be happy to give him pro access free for a month. would honestly love to see it help him land a marketing role.”
“Judging someone based on personality and perceived enthusiasm is really ableist. It’s allowing your bias to decide your hiring instead of reason. Doing this will weed out all the highly competent autistic individuals that just don’t emote the way you expect them to. It doesn’t mean they won’t actually work well with everyone once hired. Also performative enthusiasm during a job interview does not mean they will work well with everyone or that they won’t be toxic. Hire the most qualified person.”
“Learned this the hard way too.. The best employee I ever hired had the weakest resume but ended up being the most reliable hehe”
“This is why work samples beat resumes almost every time. A polished CV mostly measures how well someone can narrate themselves, not how they think when the work gets messy. The people who ask sharp questions usually understand the job better than the ones trying to sound impressive.”
“The job boards should require the listing employers to provide cold hard documentation that they are truly hiring for a position. My thought is corporations and companies may be pooling applications to see skills/duties and then using those to find AI programs that will do the same work.”
““I’m not really a computer person” But you can be sure they had something like "advanced Excel skills" on their resume.”
“As employers continue to use A.I. to rationalize the process of identifying strong applicants, applicants have begun to use similar tools to game the systems evaluating them. The vicious cycle thus begins: Employers buy or build new tools, which job seekers cotton on to, and on and on. It becomes a futile “Spy vs. Spy” showdown instead of a useful way to meet the ostensible goal of giving qualified people jobs. submitted by /u/QuantumAfterlife [link] [comments]”
“Exactly everything said in the title. I am just so frustrated as to why would they want people to set a time for a video introduction solely for them and not face the people themselves. Are they not aware that setting at least a presentable overall impression from you takes time from prepping ur face to at least get in your set up and in front of the camera. It's just plain lazy and I can't even tell whether I'm going to get a response because sometimes they never view the video at a”
“Is cringe and or just awkward writing now the new captcha for bots? Are they using this to just weed out the humans then run though an AI system to then send a rejection letter? Has anyone else seen language on an application like this? submitted by /u/chimmFTW [link] [comments]”
“The funny thing is HR and Recruiting doesn’t make the final decision most times in the hiring process. You should be blaming the hiring manager.”
“Yesterday I decided not to pursue a job that a recruiter reached out to me about. An AI interview. ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY NOT. Just. NO. Yall doing these AI interviews? ETA: concerns about discrimination of all kinds…worse than having to have a picture on LinkedIn. These fkng companies have found myriad ways to manipulate and discriminate…. submitted by /u/GirlPhoenixRising [link] [comments]”
“Out of all things, a "this is not productive" lecture on a venting sub about recruitment process, lmfao.”
“I analyzed why AI-sounding resumes get skipped — here are the 5 actual patterns, not vague "AI detection" hand-waving Quick disclaimer before anything else: there's no reliable way for a recruiter or a tool to actually detect whether a resume was written with AI. One of the few real studies on this (not a vendor survey) had recruiters distinguishing AI-assisted text from human-written text at basically coin-flip accuracy. So if you're worried about "getting caught," t”
“Please do not "cold DM" people. As a former hiring manager and current hiring panel member I absolutely do not want to see that from candidates, and I usually assume scam or time waster.”
“Arguably it’s a more honest version of interviewing, instead of pretending like you know everything, you show a realistic version of yourself working in your most comfortable and efficient way. If the interview is good, the candidate should pass, right? Why does using AI prevent you from properly assessing them?”
yea time to switch to blue collar. nobody is doing AI interviews for that.
“This is an actual job description that is posted, live, and probably getting tens if not hundreds of applicants. I won't dox the company, or the site i found it on, and I'm only going to post excerpts from it and break down how absolutely absurd and laughable this job description is. Again, these are actual requests by an employer who wants to pay you a salary. This company may or may not be in the tech space involving the letters "I" and "A". "on the hunt for th”
“Like I said. These automated tools don't need to be great at finding the best candidate. They just need to be cheaper at reducing the candidate pool to some "decent" options. But they're not meant to find the best candidate. If you automate 500 candidates to 20, you can spend time on the remaining 20. The AI is likely to pickup on at least 1 top 50 candidate. And a top 50 candidate is all the company really wants IF they're cheaping out on hiring.”
“The only reason I’ve used AI to conduct interviews are to help me come up with questions because I got tossed into them without warning lol”
“I didn't say ATS had anything to do with AI. It has to do with automation. AI interviews also are automation. That's why it is mentioned with it. Automation isn't new. And companies are absolutely going to adopt more automation, regardless if the AI bubble pops. Because AI has already proven it is useful to add at the start of job hiring. Even if it isn't a high quality sieve, it is still a sieve. And it's cheap. Same way it isn't going to disappear for writing emails, or”
“its a reddit post I wrote as a rant lmao mb for being incoherent. Cover letter for SWE postions imho is cringe...its not like before where there used be a few grand companies, and a finger count of candidates. Why would a high profile candidate spend hours writing a meaningful cover letter? the ROI doesn't add up when that time could be spent applying to more applications and increasing luck surface area given the current market. I would hate to read cover letters as a requiter too. Reading”
“I am the most AI pilled person you will likely ever meet but using AI to conduct first and second round interviews is not only cringe but such low effort and shows how idiotic baseline understanding about AI is at the company??? This is so dystopian and stupid. I just got an email for the "First round technical assessment" for an FDE role that sends me to a website where on the homepageI KID YOU NOT an AI generated slop video like I am talking about skibidi toilet level slop of the AI”
“Yeah. I’m a finance exec I also supervise our HR. We routinely hire in India and every resume has this format. Seriously. And they’ll all BS bluster when I talk to them. So I can only assume it’s an AI generated resume for the roles we’re looking for. I’d check what type of format the usual AI tools produce and do not make yours look like that. Just do a plain format.”
“Recently I got an automated email from a company I’d applied to, asking me to do a 2 hour online assignment. It didn’t give specifics, just said SQL and Python. When I started it, it turned out to be SQL plus a full end to end model development project. I think I did fine since the problem itself wasn’t too difficult and it’s something I do daily. This was followed by an automated rejection email. So I spent hours prepping and doing an assessment without ever talking to a human. It made me quest”
“Welcome to the corporate world? Just collect your paycheque and work on your own projects while you look for another role if you really find this untenable.”
“Goodwill offers AI Training certificates through coursera, which is pretty much just prompt engineering (aka, telling chatgpt or Gemini whar you want to try ger better results). Are there ANY jobs where that could be useful or is that just more like an extra feature on your resume? (Been trying to get something somewhat entry level outside what I've been doing - medical office, retail, customer service only - that can pay somewhat decent) submitted by /u/Cryofthewolf9000 [link] &”
“Hey ya'll I've never made a post on Reddit before so pardon my manners. I hate to ask for this, but is anyone willing to review my personal statement? I really want to send my applications in by the end of the week, and I've been struggling so hard to find a thesis that feels meaningful to me. I finally wrote something I feel good about, but I don't have weeks to spend waiting for professors and university writing center to get back to me with reviews and go back and forth with d”
“More like August-October, hiring usually slows around the holidays. But yeah, typically those months are peak, but obviously you can get hired at any time”
“I was reading a thread in another subreddit earlier where people were talking about using AI tools to tailor their resumes for hundreds of applications. Honestly, how are you supposed to compete with that? https://preview.redd.it/lttacr7jrfdh1.png?width=1518&format=png&auto=webp&s=fed96d038173181315e51432eeb6cfa198d3c4ed It feels like everyone has access to the same tools now, so tailoring your resume doesn't really set you apart anymore. It just feels like the minimum expectatio”
“They didnt even look through this AI generated garbage before posting on LinkedIn. Edit:I changed the title and didn't proofread. The irony is not lost on me. submitted by /u/Remarkable_Refuse [link] [comments]”
“I did one AI where they had three questions to be answered in 3 minutes. Got cut off in the middle of my third answer, then they asked for a bunch of personal info. I noped out. It's all such bullshit at this point.”
“That scene where Aaron Paul’s character is asking his job recruiter over the phone if they’re human, but it turns out they’re AI? We’re in that future right now. Wild.”
“Hey all, I use a cane the majority of the time and it is a more recent development so I haven’t had to face job hunting with it yet. I’m at the point where I’m applying to new jobs, but I’ve hit an issue: do I bring my cane to the interview? If I don’t, when can I bring up that I use one? I *can* stand/walk independently for up to 10 or so mins before consequences start setting in, so I know I could swing an interview at a small office without it, and I wouldn’t need any other accommodations for”
“Tbh, if I wasn't selected the first time and they repost the job, I'm not likely to reapply. I assume they didn't want me the first time, so, for whatever reason they didn't select me, they probably will not want me the 2nd time around either.”
“It’s frightening. A job posts on LI and within a few hours it’ll have 500 applicants already. Bet a huge chunk are bots”
“For sanity sake, I feel like there should be an intermediary that auto-hides/delete rejection letters.”
“Exactly...tell them what they want to hear...the interview process exists to select the best 'yes' wo/man...not the most qualified one”
“What jobs are you applying for? Thats going to help narrow it down more. I remeber an IT company called NMCI that paid their civilians like terrible pay for normal IT troubleshooting/ password resets and account lockout stuff, but everyone went to them cauae they would pay for your clearance after working for them for 2 years.”
“How do they fuck this up over and over? If a company can’t handle emails and a calendar you have to wonder about the entire business.”
“im in between jobs and gotta get something temp to make ends meet, I got 90% through an application for a minimum wage job with bare minimum effort role and they hit me with a request - video cover letter pending. who? who is doing this?? who sits down and does video cover letters for a simple courier role? I mean is this the norm in your industry? If yes, what are they even testing for? submitted by /u/TimelyLion6 [link] [comments]”
“Alright so mind you up until this point I had to do 3 rounds of interviews to get to this interview. Recruiter call, automated assessment, AI "interview" (eye roll), and this one with the hiring manager. First red flag, she'd only been with the company for 2 months lol. But otherwise, the interview was going well I feel like. I mean I've done dozens of these interviews so I know how to feel it out. It was all going well... until........ she asked me how I think AI could be best”
“I want to warn my other job seekers out there because I know this is getting more and more prominent out there. I wont single anyone out, but many companies are interviewing asking you how to break into key accounts, how you would sell their platform, etc etc etc, especially if you are a senior rep. Interview after interview asking about your processes… just so they can gather that information and reject us. Takeaway: play your cards close to your chest, especially you senior reps out there who’”