Resume Slop, or Being Unemployed in 2025

I was going to save this article for my weekly “what I’ve been reading” post but I’m too exhausted and equally pissed off, which means this deserves its own post.

The résumé is dying, and AI is holding the smoking gun

Full disclosure, I was laid off from my position with a tech startup last year. I’ve worked in Tech my entire life, I’ve been laid off before, unfortunately it comes with the terriftory.

As I said I’ve been laid off before but I’ve never experienced a job hellscape like the one everyone is experiencing now. I’ve applied to hundreds, then thousands of jobs and didn’t hear a word from anyone. I’ve been in leadership roles for over a decade with my last position being at the Director level. I have a solid resume.

Employers are drowning in AI-generated job applications, with LinkedIn now processing 11,000 submissions per minute—a 45 percent surge from last year, according to new data reported by The New York Times.

This is one of the major reasons looking for work in 2025 feels like shoving bamboo shoots under your fingernails. You can find a brand new job posting on LinkedIn and it will already have hundred of applicants. It’s hard to feel sorry for these employers having to sift through massive amounts of AI generated resumes when they were the ones that trained potential employees to act this way.

The flood of ChatGPT-crafted résumés and bot-submitted applications has created an arms race between job seekers and employers, with both sides deploying increasingly sophisticated AI tools in a bot-versus-bot standoff that is quickly spiraling out of control.

We truly live in the stupidest timeline.

• Step one: employers complain that they have too many resumes to sort through.
• Step two: employers start using AI tools to sort through resumes faster looking for keywords related to the role.
• Step three: consumer AI tools become widely available which allows them to create resumes customized to each role and inserting the key words the employer is looking for.
• Step four: employers complain that they have too many resumes to sort through.

The frustration has reached a point where AI companies themselves are backing away from their own technology during the hiring process. Anthropic recently advised job seekers not to use LLMs on their applications

Pot, Kettle, black.

Ironically, LinkedIn has stepped into the middle of the crisis by providing even more AI, with new tools that aim to help both candidates and recruiters narrow their focus.

LinkedIn has become virtually unusable. They recommend using AI everywhere. Use our AI to rewrite your resume. Use our AI to help you prepare for your interview. Use our AI to help you reclaim your will to live.

Instead, the future of hiring may require abandoning the résumé altogether in favor of methods that AI can’t easily replicate—live problem-solving sessions, portfolio reviews, or trial work periods, just to name a few ideas.

Tech companies in particular are already notorious for assigning take home work during the interview process. My partner works for herself and was shocked when she discovered this practice was normal. “Well they at least pay you for the work you’re doing right?” Nope. Cue even more shock and disgust.

So I guess the solution to this self own of using AI is to have even more job candidates do work that they’re not being compensated for. Capitalism at its finest.

I don’t know what the answer is. I do know that we’re all starting to see the very real results of the impact of AI. Thousands of jobs lost, some never to come back, and those that are still employed anxious if they’ll be next on the chopping block.