'I applied for 200 jobs' - How 'spray and pray' AI job applications can backfire
I keep thinking about the phrase "spray and pray" because it captures something genuinely strange about this moment. Applying to 200 jobs used to be a sign of desperation, now it's a strategy enabled by AI that can rewrite a CV for every opening. The research suggesting it backfires makes sense to me. If everyone is using the same tools, the outputs start to blur together, and employers are already training detectors to spot the telltale polish of a chatbot.
But the part that really sticks is the claim that graduates have no choice. That's the trap. When the system is broken, people will use whatever cheat codes they can find, and then the system gets more broken, and the cheat codes get more elaborate. I'd want to know how much of this is actually being caught, and whether the backfire is about detection or just about the sheer noise of 200 near-identical applications. The weirdest outcome would be a labor market where humans are just unreliable middlemen between two sets of algorithms, one applying and one filtering. I don't want to live in that world, but it might be where we're headed.