Getty Images; Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/BI
AI was supposed to make the job hunt easier, but job seekers should expect landing a new gig harder in the coming years, thanks to companies growing increasingly suspicious of candidates using bots to get their foot in the door.
Hiring managers, keen to sniff out picture-perfect candidates that have used AI to augment their applications, are beginning to tighten their standards to interview and ultimately hire new employees, labor market sources told Business Insider.
Recruiters said that has already made the job market more competitive — and the selection will get even tighter as more companies adopt their own AI tools to sift through applicants.
In the first half of the year, 72% of business leaders said they were raising their standards for hiring applicants, according to a report from Workday. Meanwhile, 77% of companies said they intended to scale their use of AI in the recruiting process over the next year.
63% of recruiters and hiring decision makers said they already used AI as part of the recruiting process, up from 58% last year, a separate survey by Employ found.
Jeff Hyman, a veteran recruiter and the CEO of Recruit Rockstars, says AI software is growing more popular among hiring managers to weed through stacks of seemingly ideal candidates.
"Ironically, big companies are using AI to go through that stack, that AI has brought first place, and it's becoming this ridiculous tit-for-tat battle," Hyman told BI in an interview. "I would say human judgment … is what rules the day, but certainly, we use a lot of software to reduce a stack from 500 to 50, because you got to start somewhere," he later added.
Tim Sackett, the president of the tech staffing firm HRU Technical Resources, says some firms are beta-testing AI software that can allow companies to detect fraud on résumés — a development he thinks will make the job market significantly more competitive. That technology could become mainstream as soon as mid-2025, he speculated, given how fast AI tech is accelerating.
"It's just going to get worse," Sackett said of companies being more selective of new hires. "I mean, if more candidates become really used to utilizing AI to help them match a job better, to network better, it's just going to happen."
The interview-to-offer ratio at enterprise companies declined to 64% in July of this year, according to Employ's survey, which indicates companies are interviewing fewer candidates before making a hiring decision.
"Recruiters are scrutinizing candidates more closely," Hyman adds. "My candidate interviews have become longer and more in-depth, designed to truly test a candidate's abilities beyond a polished résumé."
Employers aren't big fans of AI as a tool for candidates to get a leg up. That's partly because it's led to hiring systems being flooded with applications sent using AI, Sackett and Hyman said, which has made hiring decisions way harder.
Workday found that job applications grew at four times the pace of job openings in the first half of this year, with recruiters processing 173 million applications, while there were just 19 million job requisitions.
Having too many candidates for a position was the third most common problem recruiters faced in 2024, Employ added.
Hyman estimates the number of applications he reviews has doubled over the last year. Some of the more lucrative job postings are seeing close to 1,000 applications, he said, whereas they would have attracted 100-200 applications before the pandemic.
"I mean, a stack so big, that you can't even go through it, it's just not even possible to spend that kind of time," he said.
Candidates sending in applications spruced up with AI has also made it harder to determine who can actually do the job.
Sackett says he's seen an increase in "false positive" hiring, where a worker is hired and is quickly let go of their position when it becomes clear they're unable to do the job.
"I think what hiring managers are concerned about: Is this CV real when I'm talking to this person? Am I talking to the real person or are they using AI in the background?" Sackett said. He recalled one client he worked with who realized multiple candidates responded to interview questions in the same way, likely because they were using AI to write their responses. "So I think people just want to know that I'm getting what I think I'm getting."
