Brace Yourself: AI Is Reshaping the Tech Job Market… and It’s Just Getting Started

Not that long ago, posting a job opening for a tech role would bring in 20 to 50 applications. Most of them —more or less— relevant. Today, the same job post might get 500 applications in just 24 hours.

And it’s not because there’s suddenly five times more talent available.

What we’re seeing is a flood of résumés.

A tsunami.

Many of them AI-generated, matching the job description almost perfectly. Or at least, they look like they do.

In theory, that should make hiring easier. In practice, it’s a nightmare.

Most of these résumés weren’t written by the candidates themselves. They were generated by tools like ChatGPT, Rezi, MyPerfectResume, and the like. Many copy-paste the job requirements word-for-word. Some are sent automatically, without the candidate even reading the posting. Others are flat-out fake profiles, or stolen identities.

Hays reported last year (2024) that 40% of candidates had already used AI to build their résumé. And they’re predicting that, within five years, 80% of all CVs will be AI-generated.

In this new landscape, posting a job on LinkedIn or generic job boards has become unreliable at best. Companies are flooded with hundreds of applications — many of them completely off-target. Meanwhile, genuinely talented candidates get lost in the noise.

The whole system —already flawed— feels like it’s on the edge of collapse.

At Manfred, we’ve spent years betting on a more transparent, more human approach to hiring. But what we’ve seen in recent months is forcing us to rethink a lot of things.

Because this isn’t just a temporary shift. It’s a deep, structural change in how we look for work — and how we look for talent.

ChatGPT writes your résumé — so you don’t have to

AI was supposed to help us save time and boost our chances of landing better jobs. And to be fair, it is doing that — to an extent. But it's also creating some weird side effects: candidates who no longer write their résumés at all, but generate a new one for every job posting. Or worse: they hand over their job search to bots entirely.

These days, all it takes is pasting a job description into ChatGPT and asking it to craft a résumé that fits like a glove. The result? Hundreds of résumés that look virtually identical. Same structure. Same buzzwords. Tailored to match the job ad perfectly — but with zero real context or experience behind them.

It’s alarmingly easy to cheat your way past traditional ATS filters with a prompt like:

“I’m going to give you a real job posting. Please generate a résumé that ticks off at least 95% of the required qualifications so the candidate has a high chance of getting shortlisted. Also, make sure it’s optimized for AI-driven ATS systems.”

And more and more people are taking this even further — paying for autonomous agents that find job listings and apply to them automatically, with zero human involvement.

Just recently, Pau Ramón (ex-CTO at RedBooth and co-founder of Factorial) shared this automation using n8n to run a job search bot: https://handinger.com/blog/soham-bot-automating-job-search-with-handinger-and-n8n/

The same workflow could be extended to generate custom résumés for each position. Just add a few extra nodes.

This has created a paradox: the tools that promised to set us apart are now making everyone look the same.

From the hiring side, it’s harder than ever to tell who’s genuinely interested, who actually fits the role — or even who’s read the job description before applying.

And to be clear: using AI to help with your application isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It can be helpful — when it’s used thoughtfully. But what we’re seeing is the opposite: lazy, mass-produced, fully automated applications. Zero filter. Zero intention. Zero effort. Just shooting in the dark, at scale.

The consequences are already showing: overwhelmed recruiters, slower hiring processes, and rising frustration on both sides of the table.

Companies are drowning in noise — struggling to find actual talent among the noise of AI-generated lookalikes. And legit candidates feel invisible, buried under a pile of clones.

Even skilled professionals with great experience are starting to suspect that it’s no longer enough to be good at your job. Now you also have to outsmart the algorithms, write like a prompt engineer, and compete with bots.

It’s a vicious cycle: the less effective traditional applications become, the more people turn to automation. And the more automated things get, the less trust there is in the whole system.

Overwhelmed Recruiters: The CV Tsunami

For years, tech hiring was all about scarcity: too few people, too many jobs. Simple. But now? The game has changed. It’s not about how many applications you get — it’s about how many actually matter.

We’ve seen job ads drowning in hundreds of CVs within hours, even when the role is super specific — with clear requirements like “must have this experience” or “must live in this city.”

And the pattern? Always the same: CVs that look perfect on paper, but fall apart as soon as someone actually reads them. Candidates who don’t even know which company they’re applying to. People on the other side of the planet throwing their hat in the ring for on-site gigs, despite the listing spelling out loud and clear: no relocation, no visa support.

This shift has created a perfect storm for recruiters. What used to take a couple of weeks now drags on for months — because sifting through a mountain of irrelevant profiles is a nightmare. And it’s not just slowing things down — it’s making recruiters lose faith in the whole system.

More and more companies are telling us: “Open job posts on LinkedIn? Not worth it anymore.” Why waste hours sorting through 500 CVs when 490 of them are just noise? Instead, they’re leaning on niche communities, trusted referrals, handpicked databases, or recruiters they actually know.

LinkedIn — once the holy grail of tech talent hunting — is losing its magic. Its superpower, reach, has become a double-edged sword. The more eyes on a job, the more noise it attracts in a world where hitting ‘apply’ costs zero effort.

So yeah, talent scarcity is still real — but now it’s buried behind a wall of automation, bots, and zero real intent.

AI vs. AI: The Recruiter’s Side of the Story

If candidates are using AI to blast out hundreds of “filter-passing” applications, companies have responded with the same weapon: automating the hiring process.

It’s no longer unusual to apply for a job and find yourself chatting with a bot, recording a video interview without a single human watching, or solving gamified logic tests. Platforms like HireVue, TestGorilla, or Metaview are now offering AI-powered tools to screen, assess, and rank candidates before a human even sees their CV. Some companies have gone all in — leaving the first stages of the process entirely in the hands of algorithms.

Sure, this can speed things up. But it also brings a new kind of mess: a hiring process where AI fights AI, and no human steps in until it’s too late. If ever. And when things go wrong, they really go wrong:

Meanwhile, candidates aren’t just using AI to write their CVs anymore. Now they’re using it to prep for interviews, generate avatar-based videos, or even complete technical tests in real time with the help of copilots and other tools. Some platforms are already building in countermeasures to detect this kind of trickery — but it’s a constant arms race.

The result? Processes that feel cold and mechanical. Decisions driven by opaque metrics. And candidate experiences that sometimes border on the surreal. Imagine talking to a camera, answering questions from an AI, with no clue if anyone — anyone — will ever watch the footage.

On the company side, relying blindly on automated rankings — without understanding how those rankings are built — can mean rejecting great candidates without ever knowing it.

What started as a fix for volume is now creating a new distortion. And we’re sliding into a world where neither side — company nor candidate — really knows who they’re talking to anymore.

Fake it 'til you hire it: bots, ghost candidates, and identity heists

In this brave new world of automated hiring, we’re not just seeing more volume and less intent—we’re also facing something far more dangerous: the rise of fake candidates, fabricated identities, and AI-generated personas built from scratch.

It’s already happening in the US. CVs that look a little too polished. LinkedIn profiles with barely any connections. Video interviews where—oh, what a coincidence—the camera “isn’t working today.” And when questions start getting answered with robotic, copy-paste-level vagueness, it’s not just a red flag—it’s a full-on boss fight.

Behind some of these applications, there’s no real person at all. Just a Frankenstein identity stitched together to trick the early stages of the process and land remote jobs under false pretenses.

And it’s not a fringe problem. Recruiters across Silicon Valley are sounding the alarm.

Emi Chiba, HR Tech analyst at Gartner, put it plainly:

“The number of candidates using fake identities keeps growing. Without action, we could be looking at one in four applicants being fraudulent in just a few years.”

This isn’t just a tech issue—it’s a legal and reputational minefield. Hiring someone who isn’t who they say they are can lead to data leaks, IP theft, compliance nightmares, and security breaches that make your infosec team break into cold sweats.

Traditional checks—like a quick skim of LinkedIn or a casual reference call—just don’t cut it anymore.

Some companies are starting to fight back with biometric ID checks and third-party verification platforms. But these tools, while useful, can also backfire—introducing friction and suspicion into the process for legit candidates if handled poorly.

The bottom line? The floodgates are open. And if we keep running traditional hiring processes in a world where anyone can fake everything, the consequences could hit harder—and faster—than we think.

So... what now? Ways out of a broken system

This isn’t just a temporary glitch.
What we’re seeing is a structural failure of the traditional recruitment model —one we’ve been warning about for months. Posting an open role and waiting for good candidates to show up? That ship has sailed.

And the answer isn’t just “more filters”, “more tests”, or “more AI”.

Saturation, fraud, and automation-without-intent are pushing companies to rethink their whole talent strategy from the ground up. A few ideas are already on the table:

• Reduce exposure: post only in curated or trusted spaces —tech communities, vetted talent pools, strong referral networks.
• Flip the process: instead of opening the floodgates, go outbound. Be intentional about who you reach out to.
• Validate before getting excited: short take-home tasks, human screening calls, basic identity checks… before anyone wastes time (or hope).
• Evaluate context, not just keywords: read between the lines. Look for signal in the noise. Don’t get fooled by a CV polished by ChatGPT.
  

But tech alone won’t fix this. The real challenge is to bring back intention —from both candidates and companies. Rebuild hiring as a more human, more honest, more focused process.

This doesn’t mean going full artisanal with 6-week timelines. It means designing smarter flows. More conversational. More transparent. Where people know why they’re applying, and hiring teams know what they’re actually looking for.

Because if we keep running this as a bot-vs-bot arms race… The real talent —the ones worth fighting for— will be the ones paying the price.

Manfred’s take

At Manfred, we’ve been saying it for years: traditional recruiting is broken. What we didn’t expect was how fast it would collapse.

The rise of generative AI didn’t break the system —it just pulled the curtain back. It exposed what we already knew: that many hiring processes were inefficient, impersonal, and obsessed with volume over value. That both candidates and companies had started playing a game where everyone loses —more automation, less context; more CVs, fewer actual conversations.

That’s why, from day one, we chose to do things differently. No automated filters. No cookie-cutter interviews. No empty promises.

We talk to real people. We get to know real companies. We take the time to understand what they’re looking for —and what they have to offer. And we walk with them through the entire process, making sure no one hides behind a clever prompt.

That doesn’t mean we’re anti-tech. Far from it. We use AI to speed things up, summarize insights, and detect patterns. But the key is balance: tech should serve human judgment —not replace it.

In a world where posting a job on LinkedIn might actually hurt more than help, a growing number of companies come to us looking for something different: a curated, quiet, human process.
And many candidates tell us they’re no longer sure whether that offer they just got was written by a recruiter... or by a bot trained on recruiter-speak.

Our position is clear: The future of hiring means blending the best of both worlds —human and machine. It’s about bringing back intention, cultural fit, and real conversations. It’s about asking the only question that really matters:

Who’s behind this profile? What’s this company really looking for?

Because that’s how we cut through the noise. That’s how this still makes sense.

The End of Job Postings on LinkedIn?

For years, posting a job ad was the default move when hiring. Today? More and more companies are thinking twice. Not because of a lack of candidates —but because of too much noise, too little signal, and a growing distrust in the system.

This isn’t a trend. This isn’t “just AI doing AI things”.

It’s the collapse of a model that ran out of steam. A model where the CV lost all credibility, the main channels got flooded, and the connection between companies and candidates got so blurry that you don’t even know if you’re talking to a person anymore.

Is this the end of public job offers in tech? Maybe —at least the way we used to know them.

What’s coming —what’s already here— is a shift. Towards tighter processes. Curated spaces. Human-first interactions. Where real conversations, referrals, context and trust replace generic CVs, mindless “apply” clicks, and robotic interviews.

We’ve also created a set of tips and best practices to help you adapt your hiring process to this new AI-infused reality.

Because we believe there’s a better way to do this. And because both companies and professionals deserve to take back control —and bring a bit of common sense back into hiring.

This is about talent —not traffic. Real experience —not keywords. People —not prompts.