A recruiter recently told me that she received over 340 applications for a single position on a single Monday. Sounds good at first. Only not if 280 of them were obviously generated with AI. Not because the documents were fundamentally bad. On the contrary: they read well, competently and accurately. Not a single sentence was weird. There was no wording that was surprising. And not a single typo. And if so, it was so precise that it seemed more like calculation. The more she read, the more she felt: This application could just as easily have gone out to hundreds of other companies. Maybe she even was? Welcome to the new application reality.
A fundamental break in the system
What is happening right now is no small shift. It is a fundamental break in the system. Applicants use AI tools to create tailored documents in minutes. Maybe for dozens of positions at the same time. The effort drops to zero. The number of applications is exploding. And the quality? This can be assessed technically, but this is increasingly done mechanically. In the end, AI fights against AI. Applications optimized for algorithms and systems that filter algorithms. In between there are two people who actually want the same thing: they are looking for each other. I think we should start to ask ourselves where this is leading society and whether HR departments that are increasingly automating to cope with the masses will not end up automating themselves to a certain extent. But that’s a topic for another column.
But can we blame the applicants for their behavior? You do what is rational. You increase your chances through quantity. And they learned it from a system we built ourselves. For years, companies have opted for a simple confirmation of receipt – “Thank you, your application has arrived.” – sometimes it took several weeks, if there was ever an answer at all. I once experienced being rejected almost five years after I applied. I had long since forgotten about the application itself. Anyone who experiences something like this again and again draws conclusions. Maybe no one on the other side cares? AI mass application is the logical consequence of this experience and a counterweight to a long history of disregard.
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The connection with employer attractiveness
This is where things get interesting, and it is precisely this connection that is (still) almost completely ignored in the current debate. Dealing with AI applications has long since become an employer branding signal. Because the employer brand is not created in the image film or on the careers page. It arises in the process, in the interaction between people. What applicants experience during the application phase – response time, tone, appreciation or lack thereof – is the actual brand message. And employers who don’t deliver here undermine their employer brand. No matter how strong it is on paper.
Rejected candidates talk about their experiences, as all people do. Negative experiences usually spread faster and further than positive ones. An old marketing rule can be used as a guide here: “A satisfied customer tells three others, a dissatisfied customer tells ten others.” This can also be applied to recruiting, although there is much more emotion involved here. Experiences are shared, on Kununu, on LinkedIn, with family, friends and elsewhere. As the number of applications increases and the corresponding number of rejections increases, this effect can increase noticeably and, above all, exponentially.
Organizations that also announce that they will reject AI-generated applications across the board (yes, those now exist too) are making a double fallacy. Because it can hardly be determined reliably. And the message that comes across scares off the very people you actually want to win over. Regardless of whether they used AI to write a well-thought-out application – or not. How we deal with this situation is a reflection of the company culture. Does an employer react with control and distrust or with adaptability and pragmatism? Applicants notice this.
Paper is patient, skills are not
The really relevant question is not whether this person wrote their cover letter themselves. Instead, the question is whether this person can do the job. Does she have the skills we actually need?
Skill-based recruiting is not a new idea, but it takes on considerable urgency in this context. For companies, it means designing selection processes in such a way that relevant skills become visible. For example, through structured conversations, specific tasks, or practical insights. For employees, it means positioning and applying where their actual strengths lie, and not where an AI tool quickly produces a document.
The classic cover letter was never a reliable predictor of performance anyway. The CV in PDF rarely tells the relevant story. Anyone who now uses the AI wave as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink this process can turn it into a real advantage.
Exit from the “AI upgrade negative spiral”
There is no one-size-fits-all exit solution. But there are approaches that can point the way. Getting rid of the cover letter and replacing it with specific tasks or short assessments is one of them. Consistent skill-based hiring is another. This is not achieved in passing, but rather brings about a change.
Active sourcing is often dismissed as too complex and expensive. There’s something to that too. But standing still is rarely the cheaper option. The negative spiral of AI applications and AI screening is getting faster rather than stopping. At least in the near future. If you want to get out, you can start right now.
What to do now
In the end, the AI application wave is just the mirror that applicants hold up to us. What we see in this is linked to the question of how seriously we take our own employer identity. Not as a glossy promise. But as a lived attitude in the first contact, in the process and in every answer that someone gets or doesn’t get.
Employers who only optimize for efficiency risk the most valuable thing they have: the identity that differentiates them from all other companies. As an organization with attitude, with character, with an identity that people trust and want to consciously choose. The question is therefore not whether applicants use AI. But whether your own employer identity is still strong enough to create close human bonds in an automated world. Because one thing will remain the same for the time being: without people there is no organization.
