AI has made applying for jobs impossible—and it’s harming us all

I grew up with computers, and have worked in tech since the ’90s. I learned to program computers at the University of Radio Shack, where I worked out a deal with the North Plaza Mall store manager to explain the TRS-80 to customers in exchange for being able to use the machine itself. She didn’t know anything about computers, hardly anybody did then, so she pointed customers to the nerdy queer kid in the computer corner. The arrangement worked well, although I should have asked for a commission on sales. 

I moved to San Francisco in 1994 after landing a job with a small software company that was based in the Flood Building. They made a programming language for phone systems called VOS (Voice Operating System). The majority of their customers were phone sex companies and psychic lines, plus a long tail of weirdos like a company in Marin that ran a 900 number you could call to hear samples of New Age music.

I worked in sales and customer support, and joked with friends that I was a phone sex repairman. We had a mysterious customer in Japan who would send cryptic faxes and wire $50,000 at a time. As hard as we tried, we never did figure out what he was building, but we guessed it was something kinky and porn-adjacent. 

I was here for the dot com boom and crash, which was an interesting time because everybody knew the internet and the web were going to be important, but nobody had a clue what would work. Although it seemed excessive, there was also an innocence about it because most of the people involved were actual inventors who were trying things out. Most of them failed but a few made it through. The parties were fun too. I remember there was a website devoted to tracking and crashing dot com parties, SFGirl.

Around that time, some friends and I created Guerrilla Queer Bar, which was a roving bar crawl where we would invade unsuspecting straight bars. We were bored of going to the same bars in the Castro and thought it would be fun to get people out of their comfort zone. People loved the concept, including the bars we targeted, especially the bar staff who made more money in a night than they typically made in a week. Back in those days, you actually had to leave your apartment and talk to people to get laid, much like you had to talk to people to get a job. 

San Francisco and the Bay Area have been the center of the tech industry for decades, and for much of that time, the tech industry was run by inventors and hippie hackers who were interested in building things. But something happened 10 or 15 years ago where it was taken over by financial “engineers” who turned it all to shit, and this has become exponentially worse with the AI boom that is centered here. 

Some aspects of AI are pretty cool (I use it for meeting notes, coding, and research), but it’s definitely giving me déjà vu about the Dot Com Boom, except the amounts of money at stake are truly extreme. Dot AI has become the new Dot Com, with new companies formed every day on the premise of “It’s X but with AI”, just like people were busy bolting websites onto business models back then. 

One thing AI is being used for is to completely ruin the process of hiring people, both for applicants and hiring managers. Back in the day, you would email your resume or drop it off at an employer’s office, and getting to an interview was pretty easy if you didn’t look like you had just come off a multi-day bender at The Endup. (Although with certain employers that might have been a signal of grit and determination).

I’ve spent the last 20 years helping companies expand internationally, which is something a lot of companies need, but it is also a weird niche specialty. Getting a job was usually a combo of an intro and a 30 minute meeting. Sometimes I would just cold email the CEO, who would forward my email to another manager and get a meeting. Easy. People were surprisingly easy to reach then. 

No more. Today the hiring process has been completely ruined by AI slop cannons (AI bots that apply on behalf of candidates) blasting applications en masse countered by AI enabled ATS (applicant tracking systems) that are designed to filter candidates, which has created a bot versus bot arms race with candidates in the cross fire. 

One ATS platform, Pleasanton-based Workday, is the target of a class action lawsuit alleging that its filtering algorithms have the effect of excluding candidates based on age, race, and disability. If you have worked in tech for any length of time, you know ageism, ableism and racism are pervasive, so no surprises there. I left one job after sitting in on a performance review of a colleague who was about my age where all they talked about was how old he was. He was subsequently forced out. I could see the handwriting on the wall and knew it was time to GTFO. 

I’ve seen firsthand how AI has screwed everyone. As an applicant, everything is run through AI filters that ensure you can’t talk to anyone unless you have an inside connection. As a hiring manager, you are equally screwed because fake applications overwhelm the real candidates who you probably don’t ever see thanks to HR and their ATS, or they don’t apply in the first place because what’s the point? In roles where I was a hiring manager, I always made a point of reading every resume, and because they were specialist hires, we never got more than a few dozen applications.

I recall a specialized localization role at Netflix that attracted about 2,000 applicants off LinkedIn alone. This struck me as odd because there are a few hundred people in the world and maybe a few dozen in the Bay Area who would be a fit for the job. Doing the math, well over 90% of the applications had to be fake or poorly targeted AI applications. I felt bad for the hiring manager who had to deal with that, and I am sure many qualified people were filtered out without ever being seen.

Besides wrecking the hiring marketplace, this mess also puts people in toxic environments in hostage situations, because nobody wants to deal with today’s job market if they can avoid it.

Also, if you are the friend of an Old who is seeking work (over 45 is old in tech) please stop offering unhelpful advice to “get a job.” AI is coming for your job, too, because once the majority of middle class knowledge workers are broke, nobody is going on vacations, dining out at nice restaurants, or doing anything else non-essential. I know Elon Musk is promising that we will all have “Universal High Income” thanks to AI, but that is another one of his ketamine addled pipe dreams, just like his stainless steel urinal on wheels that is mercifully being put out of its misery. 

I’ve applied to over 200 jobs in the past year and never once talked to a person. Another colleague is up to 500 applications without a callback. I have one consulting gig that pays a quarter of what I used to make, but the full-time market is a brick wall. My only two interviews were with AI bots. Besides being completely off-putting in an uncanny valley way, it’s hard to imagine a bot being able to read the room the way a person can. As a hiring manager part of your job should be to recruit and meet with people instead of hiding behind filters. 

There is a fix for this though, and it is super low tech. Companies can stop accepting online applications and require mail-in or drop-off applications. That will stop the AI slop cannon problem in its tracks, and if someone is willing to make the effort to mail an application, or even better, drop it off in person, that tells you they are an actual human, and one who is motivated enough to show up. Yes, it will add a bit of friction, but that’s the whole point: to require a modest effort from candidates, while making AI slop cannons economically unviable.

The tech industry is good at running experiments, so it would be interesting if some Bay Area employers tried versions of this and published the results. For example, companies could still accept online applications but snail mail a verification code, the way banks mail PINs. 

The most important thing to know is that if you are sending hundreds of applications into a void, it’s not you. It is the system that is fucked, and it needs to be fixed. 

Brian McConnell is a 30+ year resident of San Francisco, author and localization/internationalization expert. 

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