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Using AI in hiring is increasingly common, and its popularity has created new challenges for employers and job-seekers.
On top of facing unprecedented challenges — nearly half of the event organizer respondents to Convene’s recent pulse survey have had to alter their event program or model in response to the current administration’s policies and activities — some event professionals also are navigating the job market, whether that’s looking to hire new team members or find new roles for themselves. First the good news: The long-term forecast is sunny, as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected 7 percent growth in event planning jobs by 2033. Unfortunately, the current labor market is likely to be a challenge for anyone looking to make a change.
JobScan’s “State of the Job Search in 2025” report describes the market as “tough.” About one-third of the 442 people the company surveyed had been looking for a job for more than six months, and 44 percent reported that they had not landed a single interview in the past month. Hiring managers and recruiters are also frustrated as they scramble to fill open positions from a never-ending supply of applications. According to HR solutions provider Goodtime’s “2025 Hiring Insights Report,” time-to-hire has increased for about three out of five companies.
Whether you’re looking to fill an open role on your team or hunting for a job yourself, the process is likely taking longer than it would have in the past. Although there are a number of factors contributing to protracted hiring processes, the impact of generative AI is unique to the current moment. Employers are using AI-enabled software programs to pinpoint candidates with particular competencies and skills among a sea of applicants, while job-seekers are leveraging AI assistants to mass-apply to scores — hundreds — of remote positions at once. The result is a signal-to-noise problem that affects everyone.
Recruiters Increasingly Rely on AI Filters to Fill Roles
“In today’s landscape, where applicants can use automated tools to blast their resume to hundreds of employers, it’s harder to stand out,” Daniel Head, CEO of Head Global, a Chapel Hill, North Carolina–based career services and recruitment agency, told Convene. Head has experience both as a career coach and advisor and is a talent specialist for companies looking to grow their headcount.
“The job market has been worse in history, or even in the last 30 years, but what is different about right now is that the job market is really tough in very certain specialized sectors. Everybody is competing for those same jobs,” Head said. An abundance of qualified applicants is driving employers to rely on technology more than ever in the hiring process. “The applicant tracking systems are more sophisticated now, and recruiters are more reliant on that aspect of the process.”
Most applicant tracking systems offer AI-powered filtering and sorting options to rank applicants based on keywords that the recruiter specifies. This saves time on the fulfillment side, but it means that the vast majority of applications for a role will never cross a human’s desk. It’s easy to understand how we arrived here: When a recruiter gets 150 resumes for a role, it’s a simple matter to review them all. When the number of applicants balloons to 1,500, that lone recruiter is going to need some help sorting through the pile.
Of course, many of these same applications are themselves AI-generated. “It’s just a different type of search. The volume that people can apply for is huge,” Head said. “Even 20 years ago when the job market was horrible, people could legitimately only apply for a certain number of jobs per day because they are hashing out their cover letters and their materials at a snail’s pace.”
How Applicants Are Using AI to Mass-Apply to Positions
AI-enabled programs like the aptly named LazyApply will crunch through a job description and resume uploaded by a user then spit a cover letter and a new resume tailored specifically to the employer’s criteria. JobCopilot goes one step further and proactively applies for up to 50 jobs per day that match users’ specified preferences from more than 300,000 companies worldwide. These tools aren’t cheap — LazyApply’s top-tier plan costs $1,000 per year and JobCopilot is priced at $12.90 per week — but in a tight job market, many applicants feel their job search amounts to a numbers game.
Ultimately, the problem with AI application assistants isn’t cost but output. No matter how sophisticated its algorithm, a generative AI bot cannot stand in for a human with true on-the-job knowledge. “Yes, AI will help you match those keywords in the job description. But it’s not just about the keywords, it’s how you frame your own impact,” Head said. “It’s about using those words in ways that match your own experience. People will be able to tell if you’re just recycling job description language that anybody could use. To be competitive in today’s market, you have to offer a differentiator. AI is going to strip the differentiation out it.”
Generative AI assistants like ChatGPT are notorious for writing circuitous, stilted prose, not to mention “hallucinating” facts out of thin air. Head said that he can easily spot an AI-drafted message because “it can feel very formal or generic, because that is what AI will do.” He works with clients individually and in groups to teach them how to strike the right balance of authenticity and clarity — without using AI. “Rather than going along with whatever the AI spits out, we teach them about tailoring their messages to reflect their actual experience and their career goals in their own voice.”
Using AI to automate every step of the job search is risky, but there are smart ways to leverage this technology to find a new role. “You can use AI to think through what are the key aspects that make me different or brainstorm about the transferable skills that you’re bringing to this job — which you then write about yourself in your cover letter,” Head said. AI chatbots are also useful for keyword analysis of job descriptions, generating mock interview questions, or even giving discouraged job-seekers a timely pep talk.
As long as AI isn’t driving the entire process, it’s a net positive for both candidates and employers. And, of course, in-person business events continue to have an outsized role to play in landing jobs. “Job searching is all about connection, and that’s why 80 percent of jobs come from networking,” Head said. “That’s because you are making a human connection with another person.”
Kate Mulcrone is Convene’s digital managing editor.