The Quiet Automation Arms Race Between HR Departments and Job Seekers

When LinkedIn was launched in 2003, there were already other job searching websites available on the market – Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs, to name a few. But LinkedIn was different; it sought to become the first professional career development website that was designed like a social media platform. Since then, LinkedIn has become one of the largest job posting platforms in the world and has surpassed even giants like Monster in terms of total market share. 

One of LinkedIn’s competitive advantages has been the social element of the platform. There is a personal component to the job search on LinkedIn, relative to other platforms. From an employer’s perspective, LinkedIn offers a detailed lens into potential candidates that a resume or cover letter just can’t capture on its own. From a job seeker’s perspective, LinkedIn allows you to find current employees of the company, engage with them and create a strong rapport before a screening phone call or interview even takes place. 

Employers Begin to Automate

Over the last decade, the increase in technology has shifted the dynamics on LinkedIn – as well as the other major job search platforms – to be less personalized and more of a numbers game. Whereas this is natural for a growing platform, some of the shifts come from the rise in web tools servicing employers by automating the process of screening applications. 

Application tools such as hireEZ, Zoho Recruit and Greenhouse offer a variety of widgets that systematically take the personalized touch out of the screening process. One of the main functionalities that these tools offer is resume parsing, meaning there is an automated tool reviewing resumes and discarding or rejecting them based on missing keywords, phrases or other requirements that the employer marked as important. This can filter out many qualified candidates who just didn’t hit the right keywords and demoralize a job seeker who spent a meaningful amount of time on a job application only to be rejected before a human ever reviewed it. 

Candidate automatic screening and social media profile scanning are two other functionalities that these platforms incorporate. And these are just some of the ways employers automatically filter out candidates for open job positions without human involvement. All of these types of automation tools ultimately disadvantage job seekers.

Revenge of the Job Seekers

For years, the power dynamic shifted toward employers, but in the last 3-4 years, tools directed toward automating the tasks of job seekers have emerged. Many people know about ChatGPT, and some job hunters use it or a similar alternative to write resumes and cover letters. But this is just the beginning. 

Tools have been developed to automate the job application process itself. At first, basic browser extensions became available that could autofill some of the more straightforward answers as the user filled out the job applications in real time. Next, LazyApply came onto the scene, offering a fully automated process without the user having to navigate to each website or job application manually. 

The most recent and advanced tool to enter the job application automation space is ApplyGenie, which allows users to apply to hundreds of jobs after only a few basic inputs and offers advanced question-answering and job criteria-matching functionality. ApplyGenie also allows users to try the platform for free, lowering the cost to zero for job seekers to leverage automation.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Tools like these continue to gain popularity, raising questions around the future dynamic between job seekers and hiring teams. As rapid technological development continues to happen in real time, a transformation toward automation for both sides is inevitable. 

The real question to ask is whether the change will be positive or negative. There could be a world in which an advanced two-sided job matching marketplace offers high-accuracy job matches, benefiting both parties with advanced algorithms delivering near-perfect employee-employer fits. Depending on your perspective, this could be seen as dystopian or convenient! Hypothetically, automation should be a good thing because it can make lives easier, but one worrying concern will be whether automation disconnects us from one another.