How to (Try to) Get a Job Now - The Atlantic

Ah, the grand paradox of the AI job market: it's never been easier to apply, and never been harder to actually get hired. The Atlantic has kindly spelled this out for us, as if we hadn't noticed while firing off a hundred tailor-made resumes into the void. The culprit? Algorithmic monoculture — a fancy term for 'every company using the same broken AI screener,' so if one rejects you, they all do. Cheating detection software is also on the rise, because apparently the solution to AI-generated applications is more AI, not a functioning job market.

Let's savour that phrase: 'algorithmic monoculture.' It sounds like a gardening problem, but it's actually a labour market collapse dressed up in academic jargon. The study the article cites found that identical AI screening tools are being deployed across industries, meaning a single blacklist effectively spans the entire economy. So congratulations: you can now spam 200 jobs in an afternoon, but each submission is being read by the same soulless algorithm that doesn't know a good candidate from a well-formatted PDF.

What's truly marvellous is how everyone — employers, platforms, and applicants — is playing the same losing game. Applicants use AI to cheat the screening; employers deploy AI to catch the cheats; the screening itself is AI. It's a closed loop of mutual suspicion, where no one trusts anyone and the only winner is the company selling the screening software. The Atlantic's advice on how to 'try' to get a job now might as well be: 'Pray the algorithm likes your font choice.'