AI Has Ruined the Job Market

A few years ago, Ken Schumacher was working for a technology company. Part of his job involved assessing potential hires: hopping on a Zoom call, giving an applicant an engineering test (kind of like a crossword puzzle with code instead of words), and going on “mute for an hour” as the applicant struggled through it.Except many of the candidates weren’t struggling. The firm’s exercises were getting posted on sites such as Glassdoor. “All these savvy 23-year-olds would, of course, practice the problem three times, come to me, and crush it,” Schumacher told me. “Now the bigger problem is everyone’s using AI to write their resume.” They’re also using AI-powered chatbots and teleprompters to help them get to the next round. It’s become “really, really hard for anyone to figure out who’s real and who’s fake,” Schumacher said. (This turned out to be its own market opportunity—he now runs a start-up using AI to detect AI cheating by job candidates.)The problem might be particularly acute in software engineering. But the same dystopian phenomenon is contorting the whole labor market. AI has Tinderized hiring. Workers are applying to hundreds of positions and never hearing back; companies are receiving thousands of resumes and struggling to respond. More than that, AI has Amazoned hiring. It has scrubbed the uniqueness out of applications, flooded the market with same-same-seeming offerings, increased the number of frauds, and replaced personal discretion with brute algorithmic assessment.People had once hoped that Silicon Valley might not only smooth out the logistics of getting a job but also make the process fairer. Unbiased tools would replace alma-mater networks. Digital portals would accept applications from anyone, anywhere. Workers would get free access to templates, practice exams, and advice. “Technology in general tends to improve the efficiency of job matching,” Mitchell Hoffman, a labor economist at UC Santa Barbara, told me. But AI in particular seems to destro