Greenhouse CEO says job seekers are paying $20 to apply for every job on the hiring platform and spamming bosses—he calls it the AI doom loop

Job seekers are exhausted. Tired of shooting résumés into the void and getting ghosted, many have started paying for AI tools that blast their application out to every open role they can find. But according to Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait, employers are just as miserable—and he’s got a name for the hiring nightmare: an AI doom loop. 

“This is the first time when really both sides have been unhappy,” Chait told Fortune. “The market just isn’t working for either side.”

Job seekers, he says, are “piling more and more job applications into the black hole and not getting any progress.” It doesn’t matter how many they send—they “just don’t get anywhere.” 

So they’ve turned to AI tools that make the process less painful. “You can go search on Google, and there are tools that advertise, use AI to automatically apply to every Greenhouse job,” the jobs board boss said. “Someone goes and buys that tool, it’s like 20 bucks, and now they can just shoot out job applications willy-nilly to as many jobs as they want.”

On the other side of the inbox, recruiters are drowning. There are currently 175,000 live jobs on Greenhouse’s platform—and on average, for every job ad posted, around 254 job seekers are applying, pushing applications per recruiter up by 412%.

“They’ll often get hundreds or thousands of applications in just a day or two, and they’re not able to keep up with it,” Chait said. Worse, because so many of those applications are AI-generated, “they........

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