Overuse of AI in hiring is a mistake
Searching for your first job out of college has never been easy. I remember pouring over the Chicago Tribune every Sunday morning, circling ads for entry-level human resources positions, typing up cover letters, going to Kinko’s to make copies of my resume on white linen paper, and heading to the U.S. Post Office to mail them off. Then, the waiting game began.
If you were lucky, you’d hear back in a week or two either by phone if the employer wanted to set up an interview or by mail if you were being rejected. Fortunately, in the late 1980s, “ghosting” wasn’t a thing yet in the employment arena. Even if the news was bad, at least there was communication letting you know where you stood.
Fast forward to 2026. The process of landing a job has completely changed, and not for the better. A recent article in the New York Times titled, “Clicking into a Void,” describes in disturbing detail (from my HR vantage point) what today’s college grads face when applying for their first jobs. Gen Z jobseekers described the process as “lonely, opaque, and impersonal, in which it is hard to tell whether one is being rejected by a hiring manager or an A.I. screener.”
Normally, I’m an advocate for AI because I witness daily the many ways it’s streamlining, expediting, simplifying, advancing, and improving the work being done in my organization and others. But I’ve become increasingly concerned with how employers are electing to take the human element out of their processes.
While I understand that decisions to tap into tech options are often made for necessary financial reasons, I would argue that something is lost when a process as vital as recruiting and selecting talent is left to machines. Leaving a bad taste in the mouths of our nation’s future workforce is troubling. As the leader of an association that represents employers, I’m concerned.
If you work for an organization that still uses old school employment practices, or if you don’t have any young jobseekers in your family, you may not have encountered AI’s impact on hiring yet. To get you up to speed, here are some of the experiences reported by current jobseekers.
• Applying online to hundreds of job postings with no response of any kind.
• Receiving electronic rejections (for positions that required time-consuming submissions) just minutes after applying.
• Being asked to submit video answers to interview questions instead of participating in a traditional screening call and two-way conservation.
• Showing up for a Zoom interview expecting a recruiter or hiring manager and instead being met by an AI agent.
Again, I acknowledge that tapping into the power of AI is not only prudent, but necessary to compete in today’s marketplace. But if leaders are not careful in deciding where, when, and how it should be utilized, their organizations may suffer unexpected consequences.
Being an eager adopter of AI and having ample tech resources may not be all it’s cracked up to be — especially when it comes to attracting the best talent coming out of colleges and universities today.
My advice? Be careful to keep the human in human resources.
Mary Lynn Fayoumi is president and CEO of HR Source in Downers Grove.