Is AI Killing Your Job-Hunting Mojo? Don’t Forget The Human Connection

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its potential impact on the job market, and humanity, continue to be front pages news. The prognosis oscillates between a semi-utopian world in which AI is a technological collaborator helping people produce their best work and a dystopian view in which the rise of machines dooms us all.

The reality is more nuanced, and when you’re searching for a job, you probably don’t care whether it’s AI or not preventing your resume from getting from point A, you, to point B, a recruiter or hiring manager. Applicant Tracking Systems (or ATS, the software recruiters use to collect resumes) have been around for many years and are already a universal scapegoat for job seekers frustrated by the impersonal labor-intensive process of applying for a job. It’s easy to imagine that you click “send” and your cover letter, resume, hopes, and dreams vanish into a digital abyss.

However, AI’s impact on job hunters is not as extreme as people may believe. Is AI making job recruitment more efficient for the employer at the expense of the candidate? Ask yourself why AI is being used to improve job recruitment.

The way that people find jobs today differs from yesteryear just as dramatically as cars differ from planes. The digital no man’s land is the product of a one-click-to-apply environment. You can access job openings across the world. You can post your resume on many job boards at once. Platforms like LinkedIn give you unprecedented access to company information that would once be impossible to obtain (e.g., employees and their titles). These are just a fraction of the ways the job search has changed.

The result is that employers are forced to manage a deluge of applicants for every job. The sheer volume of people sending in their resumes for jobs – often numbering in the thousands of applicants per position – is too great for overworked recruiters and hiring authorities to manage effectively. Enter ATS and AI. If you apply for a job online it will be filtered and ranked by an ATS, powered by AI or not. In the name of efficiency (and keeping their bosses off their collective backs), recruiters will usually do a quick sort of applicants, pick the five to ten top-ranked resumes, and advance them to the hiring manager, leaving hundreds, if not thousands, of applications unreviewed.

So how do you rise to the top? It’s to your advantage to maximize the human aspects of your job search. Before everybody started staring at screens all day every day, everything was person to person. Let’s call it “Job Search Classic.” You can’t game the digital system, but you can own the human elements and put as much, if not more, energy into those areas as you do filling out endless online job applications.

Some quick tips to consider:

• Make sure your resume contains the essential keywords pertaining to your career path. But this, alone, isn’t enough. To get a leg up, you need to also:

• Leverage your human network in person. Spending an hour with someone face-to-face is worth more than 20 emails or texts.

• Send hand-written thank you notes to recruiters and hiring managers by snail mail after an interview.

• Network! Cultivating professional relationships increases your visibility and potential opportunities. 

• If you’re a student, take advantage of your school’s career center. It’s full of people who know lots of other people, and where employers post jobs looking specifically for individuals with a similar profile.

• Be mindful of your professional reputation. You have one whether you realize it or not, so nurture it.

• When you can help somebody else with their job search (e.g., somebody asks you for a referral), do it. What goes around comes around.

• Plan for the short-term, like meeting with professional contacts to advance your job search, and the long-term, like remembering to send “Happy Birthday” greetings to people in your network.

• Join professional organizations and volunteer.

• Go to job fairs, those booths aren’t powered by AI. People are in them and they want to talk to you. Give them a resume. Trust me, the recruiters and hiring managers wouldn’t be there unless they had a job to fill.

Philip Roufail contributed to this article.

Scott Singer is the President and Founder of Insider Career Strategies Resume Writing & Career Coaching, a firm dedicated to guiding job seekers and companies through the job search and hiring process. Insider Career Strategies provides resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, career coaching services, and outplacement services. You can email Scott Singer at scott.singer@insidercs.com, or via the website, www.insidercs.com.