A story made the rounds recently about an AI powered app that let a single job seeker submit five thousand job applications in only a few hours, an idea that would have sounded like science fiction a few years ago. 

The actual success rate of those applications was extremely low, but the job seeker considered the tool effective anyway, since it generated roughly the same number of interviews as their previous manual, one by one application process had, just with far less personal effort involved. Recruiters quoted in the same story were far less impressed, viewing it less as a legitimate efficiency tool and more as a spamming service flooding their inboxes with poorly matched candidates.

The honest take on this is simple: bring it on. Technology gets used by everyone, everywhere, across work and life in general, so there is little genuine sense in telling job seekers not to use tools they honestly believe will help their chances. If we resisted every new piece of technology on principle, we would still be filling out paper applications by hand and mailing them in via Australia Post.

The real caveat, though, is using that technology well rather than carelessly or lazily. There are genuinely useful applications of AI in a job search that go far beyond simply mass submitting applications and hoping something sticks. Using an AI tool to quickly learn fifty relevant facts about a company you are genuinely interested in, for example, can meaningfully sharpen how you present yourself in an interview or cover letter.

Similarly, software that compares your CV directly against a specific job description can help you understand and close genuine gaps before you apply, improving your actual chances of reaching interview stage rather than simply increasing your raw application count.



And if some job seekers do choose to send out five thousand applications regardless, so be it. If anything, it is a useful reminder for recruiters and employers to keep refining their own use of technology, so that the genuinely best candidates, not simply the most prolific applicants, continue to be the ones who actually get found and hired.