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You’re fast asleep, snoring, dreaming happily that you’ve quit work, you’re somewhere warm, siestas, great books, cocktails at sunset. Suddenly though, something jolts you awake. Good morning, reality! Now you remember. Reality is that you’re unemployed and your redundancy dollars are going down while your living costs go up. Buying groceries brings on anxiety attacks. Ahead again today: drudgery, scanning jobs ads, LinkedIn to Seek and back again, writing new cover letters, tweaking your résumé, sending out a fresh round of applications to add to the dozens you’ve submitted over months. Coffee. Despair. Coffee.
But then you remember something else: your personal AI job-hunting agent – I’ll call “her” Mavis – has been busy since before dawn. Think of Mavis as a PA: While you were dreaming of sunset cocktails, Mavis scraped job boards for newly posted career opportunities deeply aligned with your unique experience, skills and proven track record, dug into your digital files to pull up your résumé and cover-letter template, then tailored them for each fresh application. Relax, go out and grab a coffee (if you can afford to); when you’re ready, Mavis’s work on your behalf will be waiting in your inbox, ready for you to check over and send off.
Don’t take for granted, though, that a human being will be sitting in an office somewhere waiting to read your application.
Mavis, meet Bob.
Bob is going to take care of things at the employer’s end. Bob, as I’m going to call “him”, is one of a growing number of AI recruitment tools.
Bob and its peers don’t, as we understand the term, actually read. Nevertheless, they can make decisions about job applications and act upon those decisions on behalf of hiring managers and recruiters.
These tools, variously described as chatbots, AI agents or AI co-pilots (an “AI companion and hiring hero” is how one recruitment AI company cheerily describes its product), can, among their many superpowers, shortlist candidates and advance them to the next step in the process – or, simply, click, bingo, eliminate them. It’s not cold, it’s not brutal, it’s just business (and no, AI did not write that sentence, I did!).
If the human beings that Bob rejects are lucky, it has also been configured to send out an automated “thanks but no thanks” reply to their applications. If they’re lucky. “I used to think that the agony of waiting for a yes/no response was bad,” one jobseeker tells me, “but now I know that receiving an automated AI rejection to the application you spent two hours carefully crafting – literally 30 seconds after submitting it – is truly soul-destroying. Like, WTF – could it not just pause and pretend?”
“Applicant tracking systems” (ATS), which collect and sort job applications and track candidates through the stages of a hiring process, have been around for more than a decade, largely in a clunky supporting role to human HR staff. Increasingly, however, employers are adopting more sophisticated AI-powered recruitment tools, which take on tasks once performed by human recruiters. These more “intelligent” tools can drive and connect almost every step in the hiring process, from researching, analysing and shortlisting candidates and identifying potential applicants beyond those who have applied directly, to conducting preliminary screening “robo-interviews” and psychometric tests, carrying out background and reference checks, answering applicants’ questions and scheduling interviews.
This dehumanised combat zone is not the future, it is now. About 80 per cent of Australian companies report using AI technology at moderate or higher levels in recruitment, according to the 2025 Australian Responsible AI Index. The World Economic Forum put the figure in March 2025 at 90 per cent of companies worldwide.
In the opposite corner, fighting fire with fire, many if not most job-hunters now use generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to draft and/or cross-check job applications. But in tacit recognition that the hiring process has become too machine-mediated for ordinary humans to negotiate unaided, the savviest of jobseekers, especially in the tech sphere, are pioneering new ways to navigate the employment market. They’re using what’s called “agentic AI” to build personal AI job-hunting agents like Mavis to automate multiple elements of the dismal process.
In my research for this article, I come across Abhijay Arora Vuyyuru, a San Francisco-based AI specialist employed by Alphabet, owners of Google, which wants to “democratise access to career knowledge”. Via a WhatsApp call, he describes to me how such an agent can start looking for and applying for jobs early every morning while the jobseeker hits the snooze button. He thinks that, within five years, every jobseeker will have one. “It most probably would be talking to an AI recruitment agent of the company – they’d exchange notes.”
I chat with a friend, a senior HR leader, and tell her that I’m working on a story about job-hunting in the age of AI. She sighs. “Recruitment will become the bots just botting each other soon, little robots yelling at each other,” she says.
I first wrote about job-hunting for Good Weekend in 2023. Then, the overwhelming story I heard was that older jobseekers face issues including ageism, income security, under-employment and a soul-eroding sense of irrelevance. None of that has changed. Only now, there is a pile-on of new factors. As the employment market starts to wobble, Ever more sophisticated AI-powered recruitment systems are contributing to the challenges and stress all job-hunters experience, not just older ones. As New York Magazine noted in an article earlier this year, “The job search has become a humiliation ritual.”
Recruiter Stephen Coldicutt says the automation process has left many candidates lost and demoralised. “It can be heartless,” says Coldicutt, associate director of Sydney-based The Safe Step, which specialises in the health, safety and environment sphere.
And recruiters widely acknowledge that the systems can make poor decisions: algorithms can determine an excellent candidate is not a sufficiently close match for a role and eliminate them before he or she has a chance to get near a human. Anna Whitlam, CEO of WhitlamCo executive search and advisory firm in Melbourne, offers the example of a senior corporate affairs leader, “a no-brainer candidate”, who applied for a job but was immediately rejected by an automated system. “Time and time again what you will hear is a senior candidate not even getting an interview,” Whitlam says.
Jobseekers have long talked about the “ATS black hole” – applications that disappear into the ether, applicants left forever wondering where they went wrong. But there are deeper concerns: experts are sounding the alarm about what happens when one of life’s most pivotal processes is increasingly controlled by opaque systems few people understand.
Amanda Bowler realised when she was 40 that her arms weren’t going to let her keep working as a hairdresser until she retired and, in 2018, she started a psychology degree. “I really love people and the mind and behaviour and how it all works,” Bowler says via Zoom from the granny flat behind a friend’s house in the central Victorian town of Trentham, where she’s living temporarily. Unprompted, another friend of Bowler’s tells me that she’s “one of the most energetic, driven, resilient, adaptable, vibrant, empathetic, generous and smart women I know”.
Bowler finished her honours year in psychology last year. Before embarking on the postgraduate study required for clinical practice, she decided to test the job market for roles that might put her degree to use in areas including aged care, research and program delivery, hospital administration, disability support and child protection casework. She estimates that over the past six months she has submitted 50 job applications. “Basically, crickets. I have not had one face-to-face interview.”
Bowler would like to think that she made the right decision to go back to study, but frequently feels she’s on a path to nowhere. “I’m willing to work hard. I have 30 years of business management and ownership behind me and build rapport with nearly everyone I meet. I keep thinking that surely organisations will see my transferable skills! I just need someone to look outside the box and see that I have so much to offer; I just need an opportunity to talk to a real person.”
Bowler is 48. She has a HECS debt of about $44,000, a meagre super balance and nowhere permanent to call home. While she looks for work, she’s surviving on friends’ love, loyal hairdressing clients and Airbnb cleaning work. “I have watched as her bubble, which she desperately tries to keep inflated, has started to shrivel,” Bowler’s friend tells me.
In such a dehumanising job market, there will be casualties: the technologically unsophisticated, the anxious, the sensitive or the timid struggle. Older workers who pre-date the LinkedIn-buzzword-optimised, keyword-dense professional identity frequently find themselves in unwanted early retirement or the driver’s seat of an Uber. And AI systems are not generally friendly towards people who have had varied career and life experiences and built a wide array of skills rather than a specific, highly honed few that can be encapsulated in corporate-speak, or those like Bowler, who might be trying to launch into a new industry. “If organisations are using AI to screen the first volume of applications, and are looking for keywords, I am the square peg in a round hole,” says Bowler.
Think of it as a giant game of word-matching: AI recruitment systems scan at a granular level for keyword and terminology matches between a position description and an applicant’s experience. If, for example, a job ad for an aged-care worker asks for someone with experience in “case management”, “holistic health plans” and “person-centred care”, and an applicant like Bowler describes broadly similar experience using different language, a human recruiter reading her application might recognise her aptitude for the role. But the AI system has no imagination, no interest in nuance and debatable judgment. Bowler’s application is likely to be screened out because she has not used precise keywords and terminology.
“The person who’s the absolute diamond in the rough is sitting ranked number 221, they’re never going to get seen,” says John Baker, a former executive search leader who now coaches senior jobseekers. “I don’t think AI is at a point where it would identify that person.”
Recruiters can also instruct the systems to prioritise candidates who have one particular credential or experience in a particular niche or sector and downgrade those who don’t. For example, a car company looking for a CFO could tell an AI recruitment system that it is only interested in people who have worked for Toyota and Subaru; someone who might match every other requirement for the role but who has only worked at Hyundai won’t get a look in. Such is the opacity of the AI systems that applicants will never know why. Transparency has always been limited in the job application process but at least in the past, decisions were made by humans and potentially explainable.
“It’s really hard to get a handle on how [the AI systems] are being used because everyone uses them differently, even if they use the same tool, it might be operating the process in a different way,” says Dr Natalie Sheard, a lawyer and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Melbourne, whose research has included extensive interviews with employers. “They might configure it in a different way to suit their organisation. It’s really complicated technology. What came out of my research was that employers didn’t know how these systems worked. The recruiters themselves could work it day to day, but they might not understand the technology.”
The AI effect overlays the issues that have always faced job-hunters – including common discourtesy. Claudia*, 42, is living with her mother in Tasmania and working in an unstable government role while looking for senior roles to match her international marketing experience. She tells me that she has applied for more than 100 jobs over the past two years – with some breaks for sanity. “I just hit a wall last year – I was really angry from the rejection; I just thought, ‘This cannot be happening.’ ” Last year, Claudia had a 2am interview scheduled for a position with a “scrappy” overseas company. “I got online, made sure I was made up and looked alert and alive and, at that ungodly hour, the person didn’t join the call – for a job I didn’t even want!”
Others face ageism and the searing issue of finding relevance and meaning in life when there’s no job to provide it. Cameron McDonald, 63, has not been able to find work since his position as a senior business development specialist with a Canberra consultancy was made redundant in 2022. He says he wasn’t actively chasing work, but when he was approached via his LinkedIn profile to put his hat in the ring for a handful of roles, he submitted applications. He got through to the interview stage for two of the positions but was eventually eliminated. McDonald blames ageism. “The people who got the job, I could see, were 10 to 15 years younger than me,” he says. “It didn’t make me feel too good; the most upsetting thing was the fact that I knew that I had a hell of a lot to offer.”
Although financially secure enough not to work, McDonald thought a little pocket money might be handy and, in late 2025, he applied for a service position at Bunnings. He reached the second stage – a recorded one-way video interview, often called a robo-interview. These increasingly common, torturous sessions require candidates to talk to their blank screen recording video responses to a series of questions, with the footage later reviewed by recruiters, AI software or both. One jobseeker tells me that he felt he always looked flustered during the interviews as his eyes were forced to dart between the question and his computer’s camera.
“I do not agree with them,” says Sydney recruiter Stephen Coldicutt. “I don’t think it’s great for the candidate at all, they don’t allow people to be natural.”
Certainly for McDonald, it was an awkward experience. “I didn’t do very well at all, obviously, because I didn’t get through; I felt uncomfortable.” He knows he was enormously over-qualified for the job but still, he was “pissed off”. He says he hates to sound like an “old fart” but he looks around his local Bunnings and “Gen Z people, they look like they are asleep”.
His issues might or might not have had anything to do with the AI hiring process, but experts worry that automated systems make it harder to detect and challenge existing forms of discrimination. The opacity of the technology is a “massive problem”, says Sheard. “The headline is – there are serious risks of discrimination when employers use AI in hiring. You could put anything into that back end: you could put in that you don’t want a woman, or you don’t want anyone over a certain age.” Sheard points out a US discrimination lawsuit where a company had to pay out $US365,000 [about $515,000] in 2023 after configuring its AI to reject women 55 or over and men 60 or over.
And in what Sheard says is an important new study, researchers at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab have found evidence that when large numbers of employers use the same AI hiring systems, the same algorithms can produce repeated outcomes and biases across the labour market, potentially disadvantaging the same kinds of candidates across multiple employers.
Vendors of AI hiring technology counter that the problem is not AI itself but how it is designed and deployed, and that human recruiters can bring their own prejudices to the hiring process. I ask Elle Green, Asia-Pacific head of marketing for the AI hiring platform SmartRecruiters, which is used by organisations including Qantas and the NSW government, about embedded biases in the technology. “That is a definite concern,” Green says. “It’s an area that we certainly haven’t solved for yet as an industry.”
‘I just hit a wall last year – I was really angry from the rejection; I just thought, “This cannot be happening.” ’
Claudia*, 42, has applied for more than 100 jobs in two years
But she adds that not all AI hiring processes are equal; “good AI”, she says, should be transparent and can be trained to remove bias. “Hiring managers are often the blocker when it comes to ageism, for example.”
Green adds that good AI systems offer employers a range of benefits, including attracting a “broader, better-match” candidate pool and speeding up high-volume and repetitive parts of the hiring process such as sorting a large array of applicants and coordinating interviews, allowing recruiters and managers to spend more time on interviews and decision-making: “It’s actually uplifting the recruiter’s human, softer skills.” She also says that well-designed AI systems can go beyond simple keyword matching to identify a candidate’s transferable and related skills – “inferred skills” – that a recruiter scanning a résumé might overlook.
Antony Nardone, founder and director of FourQuarters Recruitment, says the company is using AI as much as possible to make processes more efficient, particularly those related to sorting and filtering candidates. “What we’re also seeing is our clients are investing heavily in using AI tools.” Processes that once took days, he says, can now be completed in minutes.
But AI is a double-edged sword. Recruiters face a new challenge: determining the authenticity of applicants, Nardone says. “It’s harder to distinguish because our candidates are utilising AI themselves for their own applications. AI is still not the perfect tool … it still requires the human element.”
When I ask Phoebe* during our Zoom conversation how she’s feeling about her job search, she pauses to hold back tears, then turns her head away from her screen. She’s swallowing tears. “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry when I was talking to you,” she says. “But it’s really hard to keep going. I won’t lie, you just feel like such a loser.” Since her role as a senior corporate affairs leader for a major multinational company was made redundant at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Perth-based Phoebe, 53, has found herself in a similar situation to that facing Claudia in Tasmania: she has not been able to find a role to match her international experience and seniority. She has held several roles in the years since, including as the head of an industry association, and now as a corporate affairs consultant, but has earned less than half her previous salary.
Phoebe does a quick count for me while I wait; she lifts her head from a spreadsheet and says she has applied for more than 50 roles since 2023 and had nine interviews. Frequently she doesn’t get a response to her applications, niente, nada, the “ATS black hole”. She applied for a role with the major AI company Anthropic. She received no response. The AI company that can’t get its AI right to send a courteous AI reply.
Phoebe has concluded that the AI systems screen her out early because of her substantial experience and salary expectations and the fact that she has applied for roles in industries other than the one in which she has mostly worked. In such applications, it’s harder for her to include all the keywords listed in job ads. She shrugs: “I thought my skill set was industry-agnostic.”
In any case, wearily resigned to the process, Phoebe uses the mainstream generative AI tool Gemini to help with her applications. “I use it as a thought-starter, or like my study buddy – I ask it loads of questions, like, ‘What are the main challenges in this sector’ or ‘Who are the main stakeholders across this industry?’ ” She also uses AI to tailor her master résumé to specific roles, identify gaps and match keywords between the position description and her application. Aware of AI’s fallibility, she fact-checks anything it feeds her and spends considerable time writing cover letters. It’s an approach that recruiter Stephen Coldicutt would applaud. He believes candidates should do 90 per cent of the work themselves, especially on cover letters which should, he says, “be telling a story”.
Phoebe’s approach might help her stand out amid what recruiters describe as a deluge of AI-written applications; LinkedIn data shows that since late 2022, Australian applicants per role have nearly doubled. “It’s a sea of sameness, you see the same résumé produced by Claude or ChatGPT a hundred thousand times a day, using the same language and listing the same skills,” says Rob Dunderdale, former KPMG Australia head of talent attraction.
But AI specialist Abhijay Arora Vuyyuru does not believe the future of job-hunting lies in ever greater torrents of applications written by Claude or ChatGPT washing into recruiters’ inboxes. Instead, it’s something else altogether.
Enter Mavis, your personal AI job-hunting agent.
“The shift we are seeing is from just a simple prompt that you’d give to ChatGPT to something more complicated where you’re creating an automation that runs at a given time,” says Vuyyuru, who works on AI products at Alphabet-owned YouTube. He became interested in how a job search could be assisted with agentic AI – systems that can plan, act and use tools with some autonomy – after graduating in 2022 from Harvard Business School into what he describes as a “brutal” job market. Frustrated by the time he spent applying for internships, out of curiosity he later built a personal job-hunting agent which can work across a range of job-hunting tasks, from scraping job boards to tailoring résumés.
“I didn’t want anybody else going through that pain,” says Vuyyuru, who writes a Substack newsletter, AI Action Letter and has more than 600,000 followers on Instagram. While initially Vuyyuru imagined his audience was people with sophisticated tech skills, off-the-shelf software including workflow and data-gathering tools are increasingly opening up automation to everyone – “no coding background required”. He believes that, within the next few years, those looking for work who don’t have a personal AI agent will be at a disadvantage because people who do “will be so much more proficient in applying for jobs”.
But Vuyyuru’s predictions don’t stop there. “AI agents are going to be everywhere; it’ll be an interesting space.” He says communication between employers’ AI agents and job-seekers’ AI agents will be “big”.
An absurd future is upon us. Think of it as a case of “I’ll get my AI agent to talk to your AI agent.”
Matt* comes on to my computer screen with a broad smile on his face. I tell him that he looks like he just got a call to say he got the job (he didn’t). “Every day is a wonderful opportunity to meet or exceed customer expectations while delivering outstanding value,” he says. I do a double take, then realise he’s poking fun at management speak.
Until late last year when Brisbane-based Matt, 51, stepped away from work to devote time to his neurodivergent daughter, he had spent nearly two decades in executive positions as an operations expert across a range of companies. He embarked on the process of returning to the workforce about three months ago. The experience, he says, has been “horrible”.
Matt’s big smile fades. He has applied for about 200 jobs and, in some cases, had AI rejections to applications within 30 seconds of submitting them; he’s had to provide his date of birth and refused to do robo-interviews and been ghosted by recruiters. He has developed some strong opinions about younger members of the recruitment industry. “Their understanding is really single- or two-dimensional at best,” he says. “They go, ‘Oh, we spoke to the client and the client said they want XYZ, do you have XYZ on your CV?’ If you don’t have XYZ and you’re not matchy-matchy, you’re not the right person.”
Matt says he can pay the bills for several more months, but the story is more loaded than that. “Financially it’s not bad; it’s the mental stability and … [thinking], ‘I’m not meeting my commitment to my family,’ and that’s really screwing with my psyche.” His wife works but tensions are emerging between them. “As a bloke you’re supposed to be the provider, you’re supposed to be looking after your family,” he says. “It has been quite challenging to the point of like, sometimes it feels better if I’m not here … I’ll just twitch the car off the cliff.”
Each of them just wants the chance to be seen and heard … In this new automated job market, that seems almost impossible.
His comment is a grave reminder of the humanity at the heart of job-seeking. Life stressors run alongside the process, emotions run high, important life decisions go on hold, things go nowhere. One woman I speak to for this story, a lawyer who has been searching for a new job for nearly a year, wants to try to get pregnant. She turns 40 later this year, she can see the clock, but she and her husband’s credit cards are maxed out. Any idea of a baby is on hold. Claudia in Tasmania is increasingly fearful for her government job – “major downsizing” is coming. She would like to buy her own home but her ongoing uncertainty around employment means she can’t even consider it. “It’s definitely not how I thought my life would be,” she says.
Natalie Sheard, the University of Melbourne academic, has interviewed a number of jobseekers for her research. “It brings up a lot of emotions in people,” she says. “It’s like you’re being excluded from society. I think someone actually said, ‘I just want to participate in society, I want to contribute.’ ”
The creeping encroachment of increasingly powerful AI recruitment systems adds a new layer of agony. All this brisk, automated efficiency, hundreds or thousands of human hopefuls sorted, filed, rejected, processed. … There will be a price to pay, on both a societal and individual level.
Ironically, all the job-hunters I’ve interviewed who are dealing with AI recruitment systems say that relationships, human contact, lie at the heart of their work – why they love it, why they’re good at it. “The way I operate, relationships are at the core,” Matt tells me. Amanda Bowler, who as a hairdresser spent her days listening to her clients’ stories with kindness and empathy (who hasn’t poured their heart out to their hairdresser?); Phoebe, whose corporate affairs work relies on her ability to form relationships and collaborate with stakeholders to solve problems or advance opportunities.
Each of them just wants the chance to be seen and heard. Hello! Look over here! I’m here! Listen to what I can tell you! In this new automated job market, that seems almost impossible.
If there is a small shaft of light, it’s that the experts I speak to tell me that the more AI systems are used, the more humans will be needed. For a start, recruiters and career coaches agree that intense networking with other human beings, the a-coffee-date-a-week approach, is still the best way to get a job. “Self-advocacy and personalising your approach to a job search is actually quite a game-changer and takes you out of being part of the mass application pool,” says Jannine Fraser, group CEO of Melbourne-headquartered career transition and coaching specialist Directioneering. Fraser says that if a job-hunter has been out genuinely connecting with people – industry contacts, potential employers, recruiters – they might already have met someone in some position of influence before any job hits the market. “You’ve already had a conversation.”
Conversely, as AI makes it easier for people to misrepresent themselves in their job hunt, humans in positions of authority will be needed to identify the authentic candidates. “This may sound a little bit counter-intuitive, but human relationships will become more and more important,” Abhijay Arora Vuyyuru says. “I would think that a lot of hiring is going to happen in person; a lot of these AI systems are getting so good that [an employer] would want to test whether a person is actually able to think for themselves or has just leveraged AI for their application.”
Rob Dunderdale adds: “If we’ve got AI producing the CV and AI marking the CV, everybody’s going to come out with a five-star rating.” How, he asks, do recruiters and hirers work out where the top talent is, who has the experience a company wants rather than just an AI-manufactured résumé?
Dunderdale is one of many who believes the answer might partly lie in even further AI advances – more precise, more insightful tools that can assess candidates fairly and transparently against an organisation’s values, overlaying a human’s core skills and the transferability of those skills, how they like to work and, even, good grief, who they are as a human. ”I would love to see death to the CV. I think the CV now has had its day,” Dunderdale says. “It’s telling me what you’ve done in the past. It’s not telling me anything about your values, it’s not telling me anything about your potential. It’s not telling me anything about your core skills and the skills that are adjacent to those skills.”
Just before I’m due to submit this article, I get an email from Amanda Bowler. Finally, she found someone to really see her, see past her résumé. Her application made it through to the second round of a process for a role in child protection. A video interview with a human being followed. “I was offered a position,” she wrote. “After all the hard work looking for a career path, something finally came. I was so excited! But then, incredibly, I heard that I’ve been offered a Commonwealth Supported Place! It will save me so much money. … I turned the job down and I’m going back to uni to do my masters.”
*Some names have been changed.
Lifeline: 13 11 14.
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