Hundreds of applicants. Why is your team still covering the role?

Applying for a job has become easier. Finding the person who can do it has not.

A vacant role creates work long before anyone has time to look at the applications. Customers still need answers. Projects still have deadlines. In a small business, that work lands with the founder, the hiring manager or colleagues who already have full days of their own.

Then the advert attracts hundreds of applicants. It should feel as though help is on its way. Instead, somebody has to work through the responses while the vacancy continues to pull time from the team.

I have spent more than 20 years helping businesses make hires. The problem I see now is that application volume can give a false sense of progress. A full inbox tells you how many people clicked apply. It says remarkably little about how close you are to finding someone who can do the work.

More applications, less to go on

The effort needed to apply has fallen dramatically. That helps people access opportunities, but it also means an application is a weaker signal of genuine fit or interest than it once was. A manager may face a large pile of applications from people who have never really examined what the role involves, alongside strong candidates who have.

AI has changed what that pile looks like. Used well, it can help someone explain relevant experience they struggle to put into words. Used generically, it produces confident, polished descriptions that obscure the differences between applicants. The candidate sees a better version of their CV. The hiring manager sees many CVs using similar claims to describe very different people.

In CV-Library's April 2026 survey of nearly 500 recruiters, 81% said AI had made CVs more standardised and less distinctive. Another 79% said AI-generated CVs had surged over the previous year. These are reports of recruiters' experiences, not proof that every AI-assisted application is alike. They do help explain why more material to review does not necessarily mean more clarity.

There is an understandable response on both sides. Candidates use tools to improve their chances of getting seen. Employers use tools to manage the number of applications. Candidates adapt to what they believe those systems reward. Each decision makes sense in isolation, but together they can produce a process increasingly good at generating and sorting applications, while leaving the hardest question unanswered: what could this person actually do here?

The cost is measured in the work that waits

Hiring teams often measure speed through applications processed and time to shortlist. A manager experiences the delay differently. It is the customer issue they are still handling, the project that keeps slipping, the hours a colleague spends covering a second role and the decision they cannot make confidently from what is in front of them.

Even a relevant CV can leave a great deal unresolved. A job title tells you the environment someone worked in; it rarely shows which decisions were theirs. A polished achievement may describe a team result without showing the individual's contribution. To find out, the manager must arrange more calls, ask more basic questions and compare accounts that sounded much clearer on paper.

That is the opportunity cost of today's hiring process. Time spent discovering whether the applications mean what they appear to mean is time your team cannot spend on the work the new person was meant to take on.

This trend is unlikely to reverse by asking candidates to abandon useful tools or employers to stop managing volume. The tools are becoming ordinary. The question is whether we use them only to move more applications through the system, or to learn more about the people behind them.

Taking analogue insight digital

In headhunting, some of the most valuable information arrived after the formal account of someone's career. A person would describe a difficult situation and then dismiss the interesting part as “just doing my job”. One more question could reveal the choice they made, the people they brought with them and what changed because of their work.

If someone says they “kept a team on track”, I want to know what was threatening to knock it off track. What did they notice? What was theirs to decide? What would have happened if they had done nothing? The answers may show experience that matters greatly to a particular employer, or reveal that the fit is less strong than the CV suggests. Either way, the manager has a more grounded starting point for the decision.

I think of this as the difference between a CV and a PV: a personal value story. A CV records roles and responsibilities. A PV gives the context needed to understand someone's contribution, judgement and results in relation to the work ahead. It does not claim that every person can do every job. It helps both sides see the relevant evidence more clearly.

The opportunity now is to make that kind of curiosity part of a digital hiring process. Before assessing candidates, clarify what the new hire needs to accomplish. Then ask questions that bring out specific, relevant experience and show employers enough of the story to decide whom they should meet. Technology should help gather that context across many applicants, while leaving the hiring decision with people.

That is what we are working towards at Hike. We want candidates to be recognised for what they have actually contributed, and employers to spend less time decoding polished claims before they can make a good decision. The goal is to help a team find the right person sooner and get back to its own work.

When a vacancy attracts hundreds of applicants, the number worth watching is not the total at the top of the inbox. It is how quickly you can understand who might do the job well enough to have a worthwhile conversation.