Unemployed Man Uses AI to Apply for 5k Jobs, Gets 20 Interviews

This is the future. Every unemployed person will have an AI scanning all the job listings. They can send off 5k applications a day. Conversely, every open position will receive 100k applications, almost all of which will have fictional resumés and perfectly tailored cover letters. These will be fed into the company AI, which unavoidably has to make hiring decisions.<p>The actual hire will be someone the hiring manager knows from college.

It’s a pretty grinding process. I’ve been fortunate in the past, staying with 2 companies over the span of 15+ years and I am now having to job hunt for the first time since 2005.<p>I found a local contracting opportunity that sounded really interesting and something I could probably be a good fit for. It was a small company, 4 people, so I actually emailed the president directly with a well thought out introduction and explaining why I thought I would be a good fit for the position. Radio silence…<p>So, even the old adage of ‘hit the bricks and knock on doors’ has gone the way of the dodo.

The price (starting at $99) is a huge turn-off. I don&#x27;t have that much money to spend at all; I don&#x27;t have a job, for crying out loud. I&#x27;d rather sign a contract to give away the first $250 or so of my income. Hell, even make it $500. Just don&#x27;t make me pre-pay for the chance to win a job - I cannot afford to gamble on this.

Sounds like a promotional article for the service he used, honestly.

It&#x27;s a low conversion rate, but given the return on effort is incredible.<p>This is seems to be a good example of AI enriching&#x2F;assisting with other processes.

I have applied for three jobs in my career of 11 years and got two of them. This is bafflingly ineffectual, comparatively.

that&#x27;s an awful application to interview ratio, jeez

I found myself in a similar position (unemployed) after I left my cozy (but soul-sucking) corporate job last year and [disclosure: ] I built a somewhat similar tool but I decided against automating the application process.<p>Instead of focusing on quantity - number of applications - I decided to focus on quality - better resumes that emphasise the candidates skills that align with the job ad.<p>And instead of applying to all job ads, my service analyses a candidates resume and finds positions that closely match the candidate experience.

I saw some YouTube video, where someone was applying to 500+ jobs per week with some automation in the same fashion. So this is probably already quite common. Makes the need for building ones own network even more important at this point, there&#x27;s really no way to differentiate yourself from 10k people who apply to a job in the first 5 hours of its being posted, other than a internal reference.

I find interesting that he only got 20 interviews after the ai sent 5k applications and same 20 interviews after applying manually few hundred times. I wonder what &quot;few hundred&quot; means? 200 or 900?<p>I think I had a similar response rate when looking for work few months ago. I applied to ~40 jobs and I got 3 interviews.

Why even write cover letters anymore?

Recently I got an interview for a job after refusing to do the pre-interview PR test. They had received an avalanche of pull requests on that repo that looked suspiciously similar so my impudence made me the most human-sounding candidate.