How ‘AI Auto Apply’ companies are misleading you?

There are a bunch of platforms that mushroomed in the market under the name of AI Auto Applying, claiming to increase your chances of landing a job by 5X, 10X, and 20X. While these claims may seem appealing and logical, you are being misled into something you may not want at all. You’re being tricked and hallucinated by them. Here’s how.

Let’s deep dive.

1. These AI Auto Apply platforms primarily rely on Greenhouse and Lever ATS-based one-page job applications. However, they conveniently ignore Workday, iCIMS, and other platforms simply because they can’t apply using AI. Instead, they come up with a fancier marketing tactic that they’re applying to selected roles in emerging and top startup companies, conveniently omitting the fact that they are ignoring the roles in many large high-tech companies or large organizations because they use lengthier application tracking systems.
2. Now, let’s look at the market share of Greenhouse and Lever used by the Employers in the US. According to this report (https://www.appsruntheworld.com/top-10-hcm-software-vendors-in-applicant-tracking-market-segment/), these two platforms are not even in the top 10 of ATS platforms and collectively cater to less than 10% of all companies in the US as their customers. This means all the customers of these AI Auto Apply platforms are essentially competing for the same 10% of the jobs they conveniently pick just because they are Greenhouse and Lever-based applications. Another interesting fact is that Workday boasts 50% of the Fortune 500 companies as its clients, and the other 50% of these Fortune 500 companies mostly use Oracle Taleo, SAP SuccessFactors, iCIMS, or their in-house platforms. None of them are supported by AI AutoApply services.
3. I have spoken to multiple customers who have tried these AI AutoApply platforms initially, and here is what I understood. Firstly, they will only apply to old jobs that are at least 1 week old since they got posted, which essentially means you are already behind in the stack of applications by the time these platforms apply on your behalf.

All of these drawbacks are compensated with their seamless and fancy UI/UX designs, making you feel that they have handpicked jobs for you based on some AI recommendations. But the truth is they are only picking jobs that they can apply to(10%) and ignoring the 90% of jobs out there in the market that they cannot apply to. This makes you miss all those jobs but still tricks you into thinking they have selected some coveted jobs, but only from the 10% remaining pool.

Not only that, they are making your chances skewed even for that 10% of applications because they are making all their customers compete for the same set of 10% of jobs, making it a bigger rat race than it already is.

None of the platforms show you the details they filled in the job applications because they are also not very confident in the efficacy and accuracy of the AI AutoApply. The subpar reviews of these platforms in Trustpilot are also reflective of my opinions.

Some other pointers that I would like to bring to your attention are: No application tracking system has a monopoly over job applications, and there are at least 20 ATS systems, making it very difficult for AI to AutoApply across all these platforms, at least today and near foreseeable future. Thus, it is important to have a human assistant who will supervise and apply on your behalf irrespective of the platform, be it Workday, iCIMS, Lever, or any other.

While AI progressed leaps and bounds in terms of Generative AI use cases like Intelligent Chatbots, Text-to-Voice, and Text-to-Video, but it is still not there yet for end-to-end automation with Multimodality and Interoperability. The services out there right now are premature. It is also not necessary that AI is forcefully fit as the complete solution for everything, but it surely is a disruptive technology that accelerates or complements work in almost all use cases. We too are using AI as well, but only where it is reliable and effective. We are using AI to generate covers and AI Resumes based on the job description and to answer questions in the applications based on their professional background.

As I conclude I also want you to redirect to this study by MIT reported in Bloomberg, where there are many jobs where humans are cheaper than AI (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-22/humans-still-cheaper-than-ai-in-vast-majority-of-jobs-mit-finds).

And as things stand today, Applying for jobs is one such particular case. In case you want to hire a human career assistant to fill job applications in your job hunt, check out www.scale.jobs