Can gaming AI hiring programs provide help to land a job? Skilled weighs in

In 2026’s bleak job market, it looks like job seekers are doing every little thing they will to land a job, and even simply an interview. 

On social media, some folks have marketed their ethically questionable techniques, akin to hiding key phrases from the job posting in white on their resume or cowl letter to trick the applicant monitoring programs (ATS) into shifting their utility to the following spherical. 

Others are utilizing automation to bulk apply to jobs — even for these they’re not certified for.

On the extra tech savvy aspect, job hunters are hiding strains of code of their purposes so the AI robotically provides them a job interview. 

But why do job candidates really feel the necessity to make use of these techniques, and do they even work?

The actuality of making use of for jobs

Avery Swartz, CEO of Camp Tech and an AI educator, says whereas the act of working a system could be debated as being unethical, it has turn out to be the truth of making use of for jobs in a troublesome job market that usually makes use of AI in numerous phases of hiring.

“Broadly speaking, there is a lot of artificial intelligence being used on all sides of the hiring process, and many recruiters and employers are using AI at various stages,” Swartz explains. “They’re literally using it to draft job postings. They’re using it to screen candidates. It’s a big thing and they can be using really sophisticated systems.”

Swartz says the effectiveness of those hacks that job seekers are hoping will assist them “manipulate” the hiring course of all is dependent upon the kind of AI an employer makes use of. Some programs will decide it up whereas others received’t.

“There is software that could just be as simple as someone just manually putting a whole bunch of job applications into ChatGPT and asking that system to rank them. It completely depends on what type of system an employer is using and that would determine where these hacks would or wouldn’t work, in terms of putting text in white or adding information in the code of a document.”

Flooding the market

An typically used tactic to assist folks land job interviews is to take a amount over high quality method to making use of for jobs — flooding the market with a whole lot of purposes. Swartz says persons are utilizing AI like ChatGPT or Claude to use for a whole lot of jobs in a brief time period, even simply in a day. 

“It’s literally just doing it at scale. So you’re using some sort of automation tool that is helping you do that. In theory, a human could manually just sit there and just hit the submit button over and over again, but that means that they’re probably using an automation tool. Whether it’s technically artificial intelligence or if it’s just machine automation is on a case by case basis.”

To Swartz, “it very quickly becomes a race to the bottom of robots talking to robots” and “it’s a cycle that just keeps going around and around.”

Since the percentages of you standing out among the many numerous those who mass apply to jobs are slim, you apply to much more jobs, and the cycle simply retains repeating. 

Breaking the cycle

Swartz does hiring for her firm Camp Tech. She says the one strategy to break the demoralizing cycle of AI hindered job purposes isn’t to try to recreation the AI, however to get exterior of the loop — be extra human. 

After going via the official job utility course of — sending in your resume and canopy letter — candidates ought to community.

“We are social creatures. Work your network, your working relationships, try to get informational interviews with people by getting someone to introduce you to someone. That is often how a lot of hiring really happens,” she elaborates.

Swartz reminds job seekers to rise above simply the fray, “because it can be very, very difficult to stand out when everyone is blasting hundreds of applications.”

But if you must hack the system with a view to get there, she wouldn’t blame you, as a result of typically determined occasions name for determined measures. 

“Hiring has always been awful, but now it is especially awful by layering on this, this top layer of technology and AI that just really exacerbates what was already a really fraught process.”