AI in hiring is spiraling out of control: fake job ads and automated filters are breaking the labor market

The problem of AI in hiring has outgrown isolated fraud stories. The same technology now helps scammers create fake job listings and has also become part of real selection processes, where a candidate may never meet a living person. That hurts both sides of the market at once. Job seekers lose time, hope and a sense of footing, while employers risk missing a strong specialist who failed to get past an automated filter or didn't manage to impress a templated system.

In letters the Guardian published in response to Victoria Turk's piece on the rise of AI-driven recruitment fraud, readers describe a broader problem. AI today, they say, isn't only used to promise nonexistent roles and extract data from people looking for work. It increasingly shows up in real hiring as well: in automated replies, initial screening, résumé sorting and communication with candidates. As a result, good specialists may never make it to an interview, and companies lose exactly the people they were trying to find. The more opaque the decision chain, the harder it is to tell why an application was ignored and where exactly it was filtered out.

One letter writer, who researches prospective donors for organizations, says he knows AI's strengths from his own work but tries to turn to it only once other tools are exhausted. His argument is simple: with twenty years of experience, he can produce a report with the kind of nuance and insight that only human understanding provides. That, he says, is what employers pay for. The point matters for recruiting too. When a candidate writes with AI and the company evaluates that text with AI as well, the process loses the substantive signal that usually separates a profile that merely checks the boxes from one that is genuinely valuable.

Automation promises recruiters speed and savings, especially when a single opening draws a flood of applications. But speed also brings a new surface for abuse. Fake recruiters can generate convincing job listings at scale, send plausible messages and mimic the language of real companies. For someone urgently looking for work, these signals are hard to verify, because they're acting under pressure of time and money. In the worst case, a person ends up sending a résumé, personal data and even completing a test assignment for a company that doesn't exist. The more the real hiring market gets used to impersonal emails, bots and templated stages, the easier it is for scammers to blend into that background and look legitimate.

There's less visible damage, too. Even where no fraud is involved, overreliance on AI changes the logic of selection. The system starts rewarding not necessarily the best experience, but the ability to format a résumé for the algorithm, pick the right keywords or generate an answer that's easy to screen. Candidates with real expertise but without perfect digital packaging lose out. So do employers: instead of a strong hire, they get whoever adapted best to the mechanics of the filter. That's especially dangerous in professions that value context, judgment, empathy and unconventional thinking.

The main takeaway from this discussion is that AI in hiring should remain an assistive tool, not a replacement for trust and human judgment. Companies need verifiable communication channels, transparent selection stages and human involvement in key decisions. Job seekers need healthy skepticism toward offers that seem too polished and automated messages that can't be verified. Otherwise, the labor market will gradually turn into an exchange of templates between machines, where the job seeker's hope and the employer's chance of finding the right person are equally easy to lose.