AI was meant to fix job hunting. Most of it is making it worse
I lost my job on 6 June. Since then, thousands of jobs have landed in my inbox. I have applied for dozens. I have heard back from almost none of them.
Almost none of what I was sent was relevant, and that is what I kept coming back to. Every platform now says it uses AI, and still the noise keeps coming. So I went looking at what the AI is actually being used for.
It is being used to produce volume
Auto-apply tools send your CV to hundreds of jobs for you, and many charge a monthly subscription for it. The person who is already out of work pays, and the employer at the other end gets more noise. And if a tool applies automatically, what stops it sending your details to a fake listing? Nobody checks it by hand.
Some job sites also pad their pages with listings copied from elsewhere, without the employer being asked. Auckland recruitment agency Rice & Co wrote about this last month and compared it to selling your house through one agent and finding it in another agent's window. The listing count looks impressive, and the candidate has no idea whether anyone is behind it.
It is being used to harvest
This month, Mary Argue reported for RNZ on Charlie Maclean, who sat an interview with an AI agent for a remote role, then was ghosted by the company. After some digging online, she fears it was after her personal data to train AI. She has since launched a petition to Parliament to ban ghost job ads.
To be fair, nobody has proved it. Victoria University's Ben Walker told RNZ he has no case-closed evidence of phantom listings, recruiters said they had not come across it in New Zealand, and the big job boards say ghost jobs are not a material issue on their sites. But the worry is a fair one. As his Victoria University colleague Andrew Lensen put it, a CV holds your career history, what you have learned and the skills you have, and people are right to be asking where that goes.
One marketing role. 127 applicants. About 5 who were a real fit.
What it does to both sides
A recruiter told me those numbers about a single role. Think about both ends of that. The job seeker is guessing, firing off applications and hoping. The employer is wading, trying to find five people in a pile of 127. When it is that hard, people hand over whatever they are asked for, and some will take advantage of that.
What AI is actually good at
Reading. A model can read a whole CV and a whole job description and explain, in plain language, whether they fit. That is what I built EMeetE to do. Every match gets a score out of 100 and a reason. There is no search bar and no cover letter. You press Apply and you are done.
It does not apply for you, copy anyone's listings, run interviews or charge job seekers. Every employer is validated by a person before they can post a vacancy, and listings are reviewed along the way. Employers pay one flat fee to list a job. Your CV file is deleted once it has been read, and if you delete your profile everything goes immediately.
Three questions for any job site
Who checks the employers? What happens to your CV once you upload it? Who pays, and what do they get for it? If the answers are vague, that tells you what you need to know.
AI can do the reading so people do not have to. That is the only job I have given it here, and it is the one it is good at.