Why human connections are once again a hiring advantage in the age of AI, and other trends in jobs and skills this month

Write me a CV for an entry-level marketing role. Make it confident but personable. Highlight my adaptability, communication skills and ability to work in a fast-paced environment. Keep it concise, use active language and tailor it to the job description.

In seconds, a polished application appears.

But what happens in an application process where thousands of candidates are using exactly the same prompt?

With generative AI enabling candidates to create tailored applications in minutes, recruiters are confronting an application arms race – one in which both sides are using AI.

The result could be an unexpected shift in hiring, with recruitment turning back to the power of referrals. As applications become harder to distinguish, who you know may start to matter more than how well you prompt.

AI-generated applications are not necessarily a problem in themselves.

In 2024, the Financial Times reported that recruiters were actively encouraging candidates to use AI to boost their chances of making it through the screening process. At the time, almost 90% of companies said they were using some form of AI in recruitment.

But widespread access to similar tools creates a new overload problem

Recent data shows that candidates across the UK, Ireland and Germany are submitting nearly three times as many applications per role as they did in 2021, with 78% saying they use AI to tailor their applications.

For recruiters, the job is evolving. It is no longer just about finding candidates with the right qualifications, but identifying the signals that still matter when everyone has access to the same tools.

As inboxes fill with “cheap talk” – CVs and cover letters that are increasingly difficult to distinguish – personal recommendations can offer something AI cannot: a vote of confidence from someone who already knows the candidate.

As AI lowers the barrier to entry, the application itself may carry less weight.

A CV can show what someone says they can do, but a referral can offer a different kind of signal. As Judd Kessler, professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Financial Times: “the signalling value for the letter of recommendation comes from the fact that the person was willing to send it”.

Referrals can also reduce the cost and time of hiring. Research shows that referred workers often have better employment outcomes, including lower turnover, higher productivity or stronger retention.

The pressure is particularly visible among early-career workers, with The Economic Times reporting that some fresh graduates and young professionals in India are offering their first month’s salary in exchange for a successful job referral.

Technology may make it easier to apply without making it easier to be considered. In that sense, AI could simply shift inequality rather than remove it.

Referrals can improve matching between employers and candidates, but they can also contribute to immobility, inequality and inefficiency, suggests research in The University of Chicago Press Journals, when labour-market opportunities circulate mainly through existing social connections.

This creates a new tension in the AI-enabled labour market. As professional networks are shaped by class, gender, geography, education and family background, bias can simply move from the application process into the networks that surround it.

AI itself does not eliminate bias, either. It can reproduce patterns embedded in historical data or make decisions harder for candidates to understand and challenge. A Stanford-led study of 4 million applications to 1,700 positions found that 26% of Black applicants and 15% of Asian applicants applied for positions where one widely used AI tool discriminated against their racial group.

But if networks become the most effective way to bypass AI-generated noise, access to opportunity may increasingly depend on the networks people already have.

The challenge, then, is not to choose between technology and human judgement, but rather to find a balance between them. Recent research comparing manual recruiter searches, AI matching and a hybrid approach found that AI-only matching produced fewer gender-fair candidate lists than human recruitment, while the hybrid approach produced the fairest outcomes.

It is less about hiring returning entirely to human judgement and more about employers combining automation with meaningful oversight to reach candidates beyond existing networks.

The application arms race is unfolding alongside a broader squeeze on pathways into employment.

Entry-level roles are becoming more demanding. Employers increasingly expect junior workers to arrive with experience that the role itself was once intended to provide. PwC’s AI Jobs Barometer finds that the most AI-exposed entry-level roles in the US are seven times more likely to require skills traditionally associated with more senior positions.

The result is a “seniorization” of entry-level work, with roles that once served as stepping stones into careers increasingly demanding more experience from the outset.

At the same time, companies are becoming more selective about junior hiring. A recent survey from Oliver Wyman and the New York Stock Exchange found that 43% of CEOs plan to deprioritize hiring for junior roles in the next year, up from 17% last year.

Remote work may be adding another barrier. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that fully or largely remote roles are adding another layer to the bottleneck facing entry-level workers, while managers report that distributed teams make it harder to train and mentor inexperienced hires.

At a time when getting onto the career ladder is more complex than ever, the question is whether emerging hiring practices will open the door to more talent – or simply reward those who already have a foot inside.

Entry-level jobs are shrinking in the UK. More than a third of British employers have reduced entry-level roles for younger workers over the past year, while 60% of larger firms say AI and automation have reduced the number of jobs available. (Reuters)

South Korea’s AI boom is reshaping career ambitions. Semiconductor jobs are attracting growing numbers of young South Koreans, with some university programmes now receiving more applications than medical schools as lucrative salaries and bonuses boost the appeal of chipmaking careers. (Financial Times)

Bill Gates warns of a turbulent AI transition. The Microsoft co-founder says entry- and mid-level roles are particularly exposed as AI advances, and urges governments to prepare now through regulation, retraining and stronger social safety nets. (Wall Street Journal)