Amid a chorus of promises to reduce workloads and headaches, AI tools have made a loud entry into the world of talent acquisition (TA)and…everywhere else. Recruiters who are no strangers to automation in the hiring process are now discovering a series of new hacks employed by their counterparts, job seekers, in efforts to bolster their chances of employment.
This cohort of already understaffed and over-burdened HR pros is navigating a tsunami of applications for open roles, and new applicant efforts to get ahead are impacting the candidate experience, time to fill, quality of hire, and even poses real security and privacy concerns.
“It’s getting easier and easier to apply for jobs and harder and harder to get a job,” said Dan Chait, the CEO of recruiting platform Greenhouse. “I don’t look at a job seeker—who’s trying to get a job and really needs a job—as the villain.”
Chait told HR Brew that the rise of pandemic-era remote work and the ability to employ talent untethered by location, a cooling market for job seekers, and, of course, AI, have all contributed to this new set of problems facing recruiters and TA pros.
“Generally speaking, they’re in a doom loop that’s all making stuff worse,” he said. “Job seekers are applying to many more jobs, and they’re like, ‘I’m never gonna get a job. I’m gonna use AI and automation to apply to hundreds of jobs instead of dozens of jobs,’ and then employers are turning around and saying, ‘This is ridiculous. I’m not gonna read a thousand résumés; AI, tell me the five I should pay attention to.’ And that’s getting worse, not better.”
According to new research from Greenhouse, job seekers are increasingly turning to AI tools to help apply for more jobs, to tailor their résumés more closely to job postings (sometimes with information or skills that are untrue), or skirt past knock-out questions in applications. Behaviors start to cross the line when job seekers employ the tool to make its own decisions on their behalf in order to move forward in ways that can border on dishonesty or be outright false, he added.
Applicants are using AI tools in interviews (45%) to help aid their expertise, and in some cases this is not malevolent behavior. AI company Athropic, for example, is “looking for candidates who excel at collaborating with AI,” and outlines ways candidates are encouraged to work with the tools ethically during the hiring process.
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Others are even injecting code into their applications to prompt the AI tools to surface up a positive response to the particular application. Greenhouse internal hiring data reveals that this is indeed happening, he said.
“All these places where AI tools are showing up. People are figuring out ways to try to trick the AI,” he said.
Greenhouse in June launched Real Talent, a new product designed to help recruiters cut through the spam and fraud in the hiring process, to better surface up quality candidates. The platform partnered with CLEAR, the identify verification vendor you can spot at the airport.
But TA orgs don’t need the Greenhouse infrastructure to guard against the slop.
“Some of them are quite rudimentary,” he said of the ways TA pros are addressing this. “What companies are doing today, absent Real Talent, literally, I’ve had a company say, ‘We’re having job seekers show their ID on an interview with a recruiter.’”
Talent organizations can also collect and review ATS data for signals of fraud, including the device that submitted the application, the location of the IP address, the email the applicant used to apply, whether the content in the application matches or mirrors other content from other applicants.
Some TA pros are developing a system to assess the onslaught of applications as they come in. Chronological is illogical now, but some organizations are developing ways to better understand the skills and needs of a role and “analyze the inbound applicants” to surface different signals about “who may or may not be a more likely fit,” he said.
Additionally, Chait pointed to efforts the platform is working on to deliver a new set of relevant hiring signals to recruiters that look different than bygone norms. Earlier this year, Greenhouse launched Dream Job, allowing job seekers on the platform to submit one “dream job” application per month. TA pros can pay special attention to those applications, which would likely signal an increased level of care and intentionality by the applicant, due to the scarcity of the option.
“You might be using automated tools to send a thousand résumés out; that’s up to you,” he said, “But you get one dream job a month, and so as a job seeker you better think carefully…our customers are seeing that those people are passing through at about four times the rate.”