Jobhunters Flood Recruiters With AI-Generated CVs

About half of all job seekers are using AI tools to apply for roles, inundating employers and recruiters with low-quality applications in an already squeezed labour market. From a report: Candidates are turning increasingly to generative AI — the type used in chatbot products such as ChatGPT and Gemini to produce conversational passages of text — to assist them in writing their CVs, cover letters and completing assessments. Estimates from employers and recruiters who spoke to the Financial Times, as well as multiple published surveys, have suggested the figure is as high as 50 per cent of applicants.

A “barrage” of AI-powered applications had led to more than double the number of candidates per job while the “barrier to entry is lower,” said Khyati Sundaram, chief executive of Applied, a recruitment platform. “We’re definitely seeing higher volume and lower quality, which means it is harder to sift through,” she added. “A candidate can copy and paste any application question into ChatGPT, and then can copy and paste that back into that application form.”

In recent months, recruiters have received more applications for each job because labour markets on both sides of the Atlantic have weakened. Employers need to fill fewer vacancies, and more people are job-hunting after being made redundant. Longer-term trends, such as the rise of online job boards that make openings visible to a broader pool of potential candidates and make applying easy, have already boosted the number of applications. About 46 per cent of job hunters are using generative AI to search and apply for posts, according to a survey of 2,500 UK workers from HR start-up Beamery. In a separate poll of 5,000 global job seekers by creative platform Canva, 45 per cent had used generative AI to build or improve their CVs.