How AI changes your job search

71% of American employees oppose the use of AI in deciding who gets hired.

66% of the same demographic wouldn’t even apply to a job, when AI makes those decisions.

41% of people don’t even want AI making decisions on who gets interviewed.

At the same time, 83% of all employers, including 99% of Fortune 500 companies, are using Artificial Intelligence in their hiring process.

It seems, that until ChatGPT went live in November of 2022, everyone viewed AI as something between a myth, contributing to Hollywood scripts; and a part of a far away future, which won’t affect us anytime soon. After all, everyone expected flying cars over 20 years ago, and even driverless technology has hit a wall.  Ford and Volkswagen even dropped their driverless taxis dreams, after investing a ridiculous sum of money in the effort. Ford alone will lose $2.7 billion investment in Argo AI. Others aren’t doing much better. Even Elon Musk’s unapologetic exaggerations to create a hype around those technologies caused DOJ to criminally investigate it, besides numerous lawsuits.

Why the fears then? How many copywriters and editors lost their jobs to AI? No doubt, it was less than endless numbers of telephone operators, who lost their cushy, often just above minimum wage jobs of hitting 2-3 buttons on the phone, to do what automated phone systems have done for decades now. When Microsoft created their .net framework to welcome the new millennium, programmers of the world rejoiced. There was no longer a need to write your own Active X controllers, building COM objects, and clumsily attempting to connect it all to an MTS server. Automatic n-tier architecture was in full effect, albeit attached to a high price tag. Everyone rushed to learn to use the autocomplete options, abandoning ASP and VBScript. The 90s tag of a ‘point and click developer’ became a way of life, instead of an insult. The MS object-oriented developers stuck up their noses and learned C#. Countless foreign programmers were given H-1 visas to learn how to use the easier systems, as technology grew faster, than colleges were able to produce Computer Science graduates.

How about DevOps? When companies rushed to send all data to the cloud, abandoning expensive and costly server farms, and decided to automate everything, it began the CI/CD fever instantly. Before too long, all digitally driven firms were craving Jenkins implementations, growing productivity, market capitalization, and a range of services offered. Despite the MBS and derivatives crisis of 2008, DevOps lifted the economy out of the Great Recession before it did substantial damage, as the Great Depression of 1930s.

Even going as far back, as almost 25 years ago, the .com bubble burst didn’t just destroy $5 trillion of investor funds. It created the strongest economy every nation has ever had. Countless new jobs, opportunities for investment, and unbelievable stock market gains were some of the results of the initially failed effort. Isn’t it the same every time then? Shouldn’t people rejoice at the new opportunities, instead of rejecting changes?

The main difference between all previous technological advances, even as revolutionary, as moving off of mainframe into a client-server environment, is AI’s ability to think for people. Well, perhaps the world isn’t approaching a Terminator-style apocalypse, but AI certainly makes decisions for people in the hiring process. When it comes to optional, or leisure activities, AI is a helpful tool. Anyone who’s ever spent 40 minutes talking to a friend about the type of food they should have for dinner, before heading out to a restaurant, will see a value in being told where to go eat. When it comes to job search, AI seems to only reject people’s applications, whether it’s called ATS, or a more elaborate system. Sending hundreds of resumes over months of search, especially for people accustomed to receiving multiple offers within days, based on their in-demand skills and valuable experience, has become a shocking new feature of the job search landscape. After all, the US economy is doing so well, shouldn’t there be more demand for people, instead of constant rejections and lack of feedback?

AI is also known to discriminate. While the society has embraced the measure of equality based on age, gender, race, and other factors, despite recent SCOTUS decisions, AI’s algorithms aren’t refined enough to offer the desired, yet often imaginary equality, only targeting what it sees as the best course of action. As long as almost 20 years ago, I, Robot spoke of machine saving a human with the greatest chance of survival, not the little girl, as Will Smith instructed it to do. Are we willing to let machines make decisions for us, when it comes to our essential activity – our work? Won’t it make us into robots of sorts, perhaps not so different from Bruce Willis’ Surrogates, when people don’t do much, but just experience life through their robotic representatives?

There are still many unanswered questions around AI. One thing is certain. From efficiency and automation to AI’s more avant-garde advances, artificial intelligence is here to stay. People may not have widespread robot servers at home anytime soon, but AI has become an advanced arm of industrialization’s job specialization. Its advances won’t stop, or even slow down. Just as going to Dice or Monster in 1999 to look for a job, instead of the New York Times’ classified section seemed adventurous and unexpected, even odd; learning how to use AI in hiring to your advantage has become a necessity, not a job search option, or a perceived imperfection. The best way not to allow AI to turn people into robots, or take their decision-making ability away, as technology advances, is for people to advance with it. At the end of the day, progress, technological or human, will not be stopped.