Feature
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | August 19, 2025
Handling the Flood of Job Applicants: How Employers Can Escape the AI Feedback Loop
When Alexandra Magaard applies for a job these days, the problem isn’t about having to wait long for a response. In fact, it’s usually only seconds before she’s invited to be interviewed. “You submit your application, and then immediately you get an automated text saying, ‘Are you available for a short call with a recruiter?’ It’s instantaneous.” Magaard, who has eight years of experience in public policy, is eager to get back to work. She has been applying for tech policy jobs in mid-size companies and consultancies since late 2024. But when the call comes, it’s not a recruiter on the other end: It’s an AI bot reading a script. “The AI was like, ‘How long have you worked in policy? Where are you based? Are you open for a full-time role? Are you open to remote?’” she said. Answers to all of these questions were clearly laid out in her application.Despite selectively and thoughtfully applying to roles for months, Magaard believes she’s is a casualty of the AI arms race taking place in the job market right now. With fewer open positions and more people competing for them, job seekers are using AI-powered tools to churn out applications at an unprecedented rate. Employers, in turn, are adding AI to their recruiting stacks to keep up with the avalanche of resumes that arrive by the thousands. At New York Life, recruiters receive as many as 100,000 applications for 1,400 open roles. Based on those numbers, “it’s easier to get into Harvard than it might be to get a job at New York Life,” said Glenn Padewski, the firm’s head of experienced-professional hiring and executive search, during a From Day One conference earlier this year. HR analyst Josh Bersin told From Day One a similar story via email: One of his clients posted a banking IT job at midnight and clocked more than 1,000 applications by 12:05 a.m. While not quite on the level of requests for Taylor Swift tickets when they go on sale, most employers aren’t equipped to thoughtfully consider that many applications.Job postings are proliferating as well, even though actual hiring is sluggish in many industries, because companies still want to stock their talent pipeline or test the current talent pool. Recruiters are now juggling 56% more job postings than a few years ago, said Steve Bartel, founder and CEO of recruiting platform GEM, during a From Day One webinar. Applicant numbers have tripled for many roles, yet recruiting teams aren’t growing. “In fact, 20% of our customers see thousands of applicants for a single role,” he said.“How can an employer deal with these floods,” Bersin wonders, “and what possible good is this ‘AI-war’ doing for job seekers?”‘The Process Has Become So Automated. Who Do I Follow Up With?’Layoffs, hiring slowdowns, and a fresh wave of college grads has made looking for a job feel like a slog, especially for the class of 2025. “The labor market for recent college grads in 2025 is among the most challenging in the last decade,” Jaison Abel, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told NPR last month. Job searches are getting longer for everyone, and candidate morale is dipping.To sift through the mountain of applications, companies are leaning hard on AI: one-way video or voice interviews, skills tests, and automated chatbots, especially at the top of the hiring funnel. Some candidates appreciate the instant screenings, saying they feel it finally gives them a shot at jobs they might otherwise be overlooked for.But there’s a downside to the deluge for both employers and prospective workers. Many applications aren’t from genuinely interested candidates, and others contain fudged credentials or skills tests completed with AI. Fake and fraudulent job applications have employers arming up even more, with identity verification and deepfake detection software.For candidates, the process has become exhausting: long applications, multiple interviews, unpaid test projects, and then often radio silence from the hiring company. “The process has become so automated, that it’s like, Who do I follow up with?” said Magaard. After AI-powered screening calls with three different companies, she’s never received a human response.Why Some Recruiters Are Going Old-SchoolWhile employers add layers of friction and sophisticated screens to sift out casual (or outright fake) applicants, AI alone won’t solve the problem.“I think there’s going to be more recruiter-led sourcing, more hiring-manager-led sourcing, and more referral work, so that someone is vetting the candidate organically before you’re filling the role,” said Ken Matos, director of market insights at HR tech platform HiBob. To some degree, tech is out. Analog is in. In other words, recruiters are going old-school. Companies like Cisco and McKinsey are bringing back in-person interviews after years of defaulting to phone calls and Zooms. Recruiters are relying on word-of-mouth referrals to surface good candidates actually interested in the job. “Many hiring leaders tell me the quality of candidates has gone down, so there’s even more effort going into human sourcing and recruiting,” Bersin said. And rather than take-home projects that are easily faked, some companies are hiring top candidates for a day so they can “try out” for the job.To free up more time for human contact with top candidates, HR teams are using AI to handle the tedious tasks of recruiting, like interview scheduling and outreach. The goal: to build a smaller, higher-quality pipeline from the start. Bersin notes that in the current climate, “careful, deliberate job seekers are more or less ‘left out’ in this mess,” and employers have to work harder to make their employer brand, values, and workplace expectations clear up front. Honesty about workload, flexibility, and culture can help filter out candidates before they apply.As for the job seekers, Matos suggests that the ability to apply to hundreds of jobs in minutes may be hurting more than helping. Volume doesn’t produce results, and there’s only so much rejection one can handle. People will benefit by applying to fewer jobs, getting fewer rejections, and being more likely to get an interview, “rather than this black hole of dumping effort and energy, then just feeling unwanted.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, a podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Photo-illustration by Montri Uaroon/iStock by Getty Images)
