For some job seekers, AI-powered “resume spammers” are a good fit

These bots send out job applications in high volume for a fee. Reporter Aki Ito at Business Insider tried a few and reported the results.

Initial jobless claims fell slightly last week to 210,000, a decline of 2,000 from the week prior. Although falling claims tend to be a sign of a strong labor market, applying for a new position in any labor market can be a tough, tedious process.

To make applying for a job a little easier, some job seekers have turned to artificial intelligence for help. With so-called resume spammer bots, customers can plug in their resume and profile, which the AI-powered software will use to find and apply for positions.

“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Aki Ito, a reporter at Business Insider, who tried out a few of these resume spammer bots to see what would happen. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kai Ryssdal: So, at the risk of being pejorative, these resume spammers, what are they, for the uninitiated?

Aki Ito: I don’t think that’s pejorative. That’s exactly what they are. They are these bots, you know. They’re these software services that automatically apply to jobs for you.

Ryssdal: And they just blast out hundreds of applications to whatever kind of category of job you say you’re looking for?

Ito: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Depending on the service, the volume is very different. Some will apply to maybe like a few dozen a week. There is one I tried that applied to almost 1,000 a day. Depending on how much volume you actually want to put out into the universe, you would use a different service.

Ryssdal: Talk to me about [return on investment] here. How many hits did you get on however many you sent out?

Ito: Sure. So the different bots I used sent out a total of about 120 applications. And I think I got, like, six or seven interview requests as a result, which is, you know, a 5% or 6% success rate, which I think is very good. Actually, I was surprised by how many employers actually got back to me.

Ryssdal: The companies that you got a nibble from, did they have any idea that you had used AI?

Ito: I mean, most of them didn’t, for sure. All of them didn’t. None of them said, like, “Oh, I knew you applied with a bot.”

Ryssdal: We should point out here for, you know, transparency’s sake, companies all over the place use AI in the recruitment process, including the company that owns “Marketplace.” So, it’s a little bit, you know, sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.

Ito: Yeah, it is. But when I spoke to recruiters, they were like, we don’t use as much AI as you might imagine. I think recruiters don’t use all of the features that applicant-tracking systems actually offer. But you’re absolutely right that companies use a lot of different kinds of services, a lot of different kinds of software to try to automate the process of picking the right candidates.

Ryssdal: So this was all fun and games, in air quotes, for the sake of journalism. Would you use one of these for real?

Ito: You know, going into the reporting process for this story, I definitely would have said absolutely not. When I first started hearing about these services, I thought it was crazy. And I was like, there’s no way that anyone would trust our current state of AI for something as important as applying for a job. But coming out of the process, especially given how many responses I got from employers, I think I actually might. And I say that with a few caveats. There was a service called Massive that allowed for a little bit more control. You could vet which jobs you would actually apply to, and they employed a human check after the bot did the work, where a human would actually look over the application and make sure that there weren’t inconsistencies with the profile that you filled out. So, I’d probably use something more like that. And then second of all, I’m 14 years into my career now. So, I think for people who are more experienced in their careers, it probably makes more sense to use networking, right, to use your connections to get your next job, just because these aren’t entry-level roles anymore. But for somebody coming straight out of college or just a few years into their career, I think these services would actually be pretty good. I think they’d be helpful.