AI isn't the enemy. Slop is.

Let me say something that might surprise you, coming from a founder whose product runs on AI: AI is not breaking recruitment. Slop is. And there is a difference.

Hike runs on AI. But we are a career intelligence company, not an AI company, and that distinction is the whole point. We believe in what technology can do for people. But right now, the way AI is being deployed in hiring is creating a crisis for candidates and employers alike. We are not here to pile on. We are here to name the problem precisely, because getting that right is the only path to fixing it.

The Flattening

I hear it on almost every call with hiring managers. They have started using a phrase I have borrowed, and I give them full credit for it: "AI flattening."

Here is what it means. Everyone is using the same models. So CVs started to look the same, sound the same. It has gone beyond similar themes. Different people are now described with exactly the same sentences. Paragraph after paragraph, candidate after candidate, indistinguishable from one another.

"When everyone uses the same tools, everyone sounds exactly the same. Your unique voice, your hard earned experience, and your character are entirely erased."

The counterintuitive truth is this: the problem with AI generated CVs is not that they are too good. They are hollow and identical. Employers cannot trust them. And when the interview finally happens, the person sitting across the table does not match the document. The CV became a fiction. A well formatted, keyword optimised, utterly unreliable fiction.

When anyone can generate a passable track in seconds, the few real artists get buried under infinite competent noise. Recruitment is having that exact moment right now.

Generic AI has turned the CV into disposable marketing, while the genuine human behind it has become the scarce and valuable thing. The data confirms the scale of it: 58% of candidates are now using AI in their job search, and 26% are mass applying (Capterra). Meanwhile, 49% of hiring managers are now auto dismissing CVs they suspect are AI written (JobCannon). And Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait has a name for what is happening: the "AI doom loop", a perfect description of a system spinning faster while going nowhere.

The Noise

On top of the flattening, there is a volume problem of staggering proportions. And the two together have created a crisis.

"Ten years ago, a human probably saw your CV. Today the average role gets 250+ applications, so we built ATS systems to filter them. But those systems are stupid. They are keyword matchers. AI came along and instead of fixing this, we made it worse. It is an arms race of volume, and the people who lose are the ones who do not fit the exact keyword pattern."

The numbers are almost impossible to process: Workday processed 173 million applications in the first half of 2024 alone, up 31% year on year, growing roughly four times faster than jobs are being created (Workday). Over 11,000 applications hit LinkedIn every single minute. Less than 1% of applications are genuinely right for any given role. The rest is noise.

And what is the industry's response? Build better sieves to filter the slop. Faster sorting algorithms. More automated screening. But building faster sorting algorithms will not fix a broken system. It just automates the same failure at greater speed.

And here is what guts me. The most interesting candidates, the adaptable, the resilient, the ones who have actually navigated complexity and come out sharper, are the most likely to be filtered out. Because they do not fit the exact keyword pattern. They have taken winding paths. They have changed industries. They have built things in unconventional ways. The system that was supposed to find the best people is systematically eliminating them.

AI is being used to automate the broken process, not to fix it. Nobody is using it to cut through the fog, let alone bring honesty for both candidate and employer.

The Silence

Twenty years in this industry. I have seen a lot. But I have never seen candidates treated with less basic professional respect than they are right now.

The ghosting. The transactional black hole. The utter silence after you have spent hours, sometimes days, on an application. It grinds brilliant professionals down and makes them question their own ability. And I want to say this clearly:

"It isn't you. It is a broken system."

I sat recently with a senior executive who had been out of work for eighteen months. When we stopped looking at his CV and started talking about the actual impact he had made in his career, the real stuff, the human stuff, he broke down in tears. He had forgotten how good he was. A broken system had done that to him.

61% of candidates are now ghosted after interview. For underrepresented candidates, that figure rises to 66% (Greenhouse). 66% of people in active job searches report burnout. Business Insider described applying for a job in 2025 as "the statistical equivalent of hurling your resume into a black hole".

Monster now tracks a phenomenon it calls "doomjobbing", because the experience of job searching has become so demoralising it feels like doom.

Silence itself has become a form of feedback. Negative feedback that companies never intended to give, but are giving every single day.

The opposite of this misery is not always a dream job offer. Sometimes it is simply being treated like a human being. Not the dream, but the dignity of being treated like a person on the way to it.

What We're Building at Hike

We do not need to reject AI to fix recruitment. We need to flip how we use it.

Right now, AI is the author. It writes the CV, generates the cover letter, produces an output that sounds nothing like the person submitting it. At Hike, AI is the inquisitive career guide, genuinely interested in the person and armed with technology that draws the truth out rather than manufacturing a version of it.

Our approach is to use AI to verify and articulate reality rather than to generate fiction. That means candidates answer in their own words. It sounds like them, not a model. We surface the real person, the experience, the thinking, the actual capability, rather than optimising a document for keyword matching.

Verified human evidence is the only asset left

Value always flows to whatever is scarce, hard to fake, and actually real. In a world drowning in AI generated content, human authenticity has become the scarcest thing of all.

"The winners in this next era will not be the people who prompt the best. They'll be the ones who can prove exactly who they are. Human truth is about to become the most valuable asset you own."

Think about what it means to receive a handwritten job application in a world of digital forms. It signals intent. It signals effort. It signals that this is a real person who genuinely wants this role. The digital equivalent of that is verified, human and authentic. That is what Hike is building.

Candidate first is the employer play

Most recruitment technology drives efficiency for companies. The result is more noise. Hike's vision is to create intelligence for candidates first and then for companies. Human first intelligence that compounds, the way the current noise never can.

Being fiercely on the candidate's side is not a soft choice. It is what finally gives employers a signal they can actually trust. And that is how we answer the noise problem: when employers can rely on verified human evidence, they lean less on blunt keyword sieves that filter out the best people. When candidates can present who they genuinely are, not a polished fiction, employers get something they have been unable to buy: reliable insight into who is actually in front of them.

Rather than helping candidates game the filters, we help them present verified evidence of who they are, so the best matches rise to the top naturally.

From transaction to relationship

The long game is putting the person, not the profile, back into recruitment. Fewer inputs, but better personalised inputs. Fixing the signal upstream, not downstream. The vision we are working toward is a lifelong career guidance layer: a career guide that helps people navigate their entire working life, not just their next application.

Where We Are Today

Hike's Career Intelligence Platform is live in beta right now, with more than 200 users experiencing it for free. We are at the beginning of something that changes the game. This is not a finished product. It is a working proof of concept for a fundamentally different approach, and the early signal is giving us real confidence.

What we keep seeing is this. When you give people the right questions and the space to answer in their own voice, what comes out is extraordinary. Real careers. Real capability. Real human beings who had been flattened into identical documents, suddenly visible again.

"Candidates were never meant to climb their career journey alone."

AI isn't the enemy. Slop is. And Hike is the people first antidote.

If you are tired of hurling your CV into the black hole, come and try the beta. We would love to help you be seen for who you really are.