How chatbots sent the jobs market into chaos

Telegraph

a day ago

Excited about that graduate job opening? It's yours – if you can beat an army of other candidates, pass the automated CV screening system and ace your interview with the deepfake HR rep.
The odds are stacked against you. The rise of generative AI systems such as ChatGPT has led to an explosion in job applications, leaving employers drowning in cover letters and applicants desperately fighting to be heard.
In 2019, there were 50 applications for every graduate position, according to the Institute of Student Employers. Last year it was 140, a record level and up 59pc in just 12 months.
For some roles, the number is far higher. Vacancies regularly receive thousands of applications within hours of being posted. Jobs site LinkedIn says it is processing 11,000 every minute.
AI means that it takes just seconds to spin up a CV and cover letter, personalised to fit the job description perfectly. Some job-hunters claim to be applying for 100 roles a day.
One online tool, LazyApply, goes a step further, allowing candidates to automatically apply for jobs after entering a few personal details.
One software engineer used the tool to apply for 5,000 jobs in a week. He landed 20 interviews – a dismal hit rate of 0.4pc, but one that came with almost no effort.
This surge in applications, many of them filled with generic, recognisably AI-generated text, is causing havoc for recruiters, who say they are finding it harder to find the best candidates.
'Companies are dealing with a tsunami of sameness in applications', says Estelle McCartney, the chief executive of employee screening company Arctic Shores.
McCartney says that companies have always faced a large number of applications for entry-level jobs, where experience was not a barrier to entry, 'but with the advent of the AI-enabled candidate, we're now working with companies across a much broader range'.
Neil Carberry, the chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, says candidates are increasingly taking a 'spray and pray' approach to applications.
The job market has become worse both for jobseekers and recruiters, he says. 'On current trends it's harder both ways.'
Normalising 'cheating'
Some point the finger at employers.
Well before ChatGPT was released in late 2022, companies were using CV-screening tools to whittle down their candidates, a practice critics say has encouraged conformity and box-ticking.
For more than two decades, companies have used 'applicant tracking systems' to check for certain keywords, often to filter for experience or to check they have read the job description.
Huw Fearnall-Williams, of Lancaster University, who has studied the use of technology in recruitment, says such systems would often punish candidates for incorrect formatting on CVs that were invisible to the naked eye.
Turning such software back on recruiters might only be considered fair.
'Even before AI, a lot of students were taught how to use particular power words, how to give a model answer to certain questions,' Fearnall-Williams says. 'AI is obviously quite good at that.'
Many managers say they can spot an AI-generated cover letter a mile away. For all the advances in large language models in the last few years, systems such as ChatGPT still write with a recognisable, middle-of-the-road tone that is obvious to the well-trained eye.
Potential employers might see this as enough to discount a candidate, considering that anyone who cannot be bothered to write their own application is unlikely to be a star employee.
But the practice is increasingly becoming the norm.
According to the job site Adzuna, less than half of workers considered it cheating to write a CV or cover letter from scratch using AI. Almost two thirds have used AI to write their own resumé.
James Neave, Adzuna's head of data science, says that AI 'holds immense potential to better match candidates' skills with the right roles and speed up the hiring process'.
However, in practice the technology is often used to simply produce industrial levels of applications. 'Many of the AI tools in the recruitment market appear focused on application volume rather than doing what hiring truly requires,' he says.
Game of cat and mouse
The growing use of generative AI has raised concerns that candidates are exaggerating their capabilities. The Institute of Student Employers (ISE) say an increasing number of successful candidates are not meeting expectations on measures such as self-awareness, resilience and verbal communication.
AI means that 'at best, the training process is disrupted, at worst, the candidate finds themselves in the wrong job', according to the ISE's Stephen Isherwood.
While some employers have banned the use of generative AI, others allow or tacitly encourage it.
The Civil Service now allows candidates to use AI to 'enhance' their applications or 'improve the clarity and quality' of written answers. The recruitment giant Michael Page said last year that AI helps take applications 'to the next stage'.
Last week, the Government said it planned to develop an AI tool to help unemployed people find jobs. The Department for Science and Technology said it would work with the private sector to develop an AI agent that can fill in forms on people's behalf, including job applications.
This means the use of AI in job-hunting is only likely to go one way. And as the applications roll in, employers are turning to new methods to separate the ideal candidate from the wave of low-effort chancers.
Manchester-based Arctic Shores provides game-like psychometric tests that are used by employers including Amazon and Siemens, and which the company says AI systems cannot pass. The tests measure qualities such as critical thinking, problem-solving and appetite for risk, which can give a score out of 100 for a particular role.
An increasing number are turning to 'one-way' video interviews, in which an animated executive asks a series of pre-recorded questions. These can then be assessed later by a human, although they may also be automatically transcribed, with answers assessed by AI software.
Yet candidates are responding in turn, often running systems such as ChatGPT in the background during video interviews. The result is a cat-and-mouse game with recruiters who try to stop it, such as by demanding that prospective hires share their screen or asking curveball questions such as 'What did you have for breakfast' to flummox AI.
A growing number are turning to tried-and-trusted methods. Carberry says that the recruitment industry is seeing a 'flight to quality', in which candidates are often brought in by specialist recruiters who know potential hires personally.
Meanwhile, an increasing number of companies are bringing back in-person interviews. Google chief executive Sundar Pichai says the tech giant now hosts its final interview at its offices amid a flurry of cheating in coding tests.
The AI arms race has turned into a nightmare of rapid-fire applications and low-quality candidates. Employers might be ready to de-escalate.