Good luck getting a job in future without leaning on AI

Saturday, 22 March 2025

AI promises to relieve people of many mundane tasks, including perhaps firing out CVs in search of work.

ANALYSIS: Even people with no interest in computing might be not able to ignore the impact that artificial intelligence is starting to have on the gruelling task of applying for jobs and getting hired.

Savvy job candidates are starting to use AI tools to tailor their CVs and cover letters to match the requirements and nuances of particular vacancies and employers.

And perhaps unbeknown to candidates, some employers are beginning to use AI to screen applicants for interviewing.

But that may just be the beginning.

Auckland-based online recruitment start-up Zeil has released what it describes as a “career agent” that can provide career advice and coach people through responding to common interview questions.

Zeil product manage Wi Bian Goh believes down the track, many people are likely to use such an AI agent to help manage their career and indeed a myriad of other tasks.

“I think having ‘AI in your pocket’ with regard to recruitment and to just life in general will be normal within the next 10 years,” he forecasts.

“Everybody's going to have some sort of agent with them to help them do stuff, whether its the mundane or to supercharge their presence when it comes to job searching and applications.”

But sooner or later many of the platforms that companies use to manage their applicants will also have AI capability, he says.

“Being able to then use AI on their side, to then interact with AI on the other side, is something that will be very interesting in the next five or 10 years. I don't think it's too far away.”

The logical end-game may be that people’s AI career assistants would scan the web for possible career opportunities – either advertised or unadvertised – and if authorised automatically apply for jobs and enter into early discussions with an ‘employer’.

But it not might be “a real person” they would be dealing with. Instead, it might be another AI intermediary that the employer was using to scan the internet for candidates and to field applications.

Wi Bian Goh: “Everybody's going to have some sort of agent with them to help them do stuff.”

Job-hunting in the 21st Century could then become a case of ‘bots talking to bots’, and if the algorithms hit it off, proposing an interview to both the candidate and employer.

That sort of development promises to get rid of a lot of the wasted time and hassle in searching for and applying for new career opportunities, but there could be some complex ethical implications.

The use of AI by employers to search for and screen candidates raises the obvious risk of injustices.

Candidates who didn’t suit their computer algorithms might find themselves increasingly shut out of the jobs market.

But AI might be preferable to blunter, less intelligent tools that recruiters already use to screen and filter out candidates.

“AI tools can handle screening in a much more efficient way that is a lot more flexible and true to employers’ actual culture,” Bian Goh says.

And the use of AI in recruitment could have a beneficial effect in removing human biases.

Come from an ethnic minority, or look a bit different?

Trained correctly, the employer’s AI tool shouldn’t care about irrelevancies.

Instead, AI agents used by employers could help by identifying non-obvious characteristics and quirks in people’s personal and work histories that had previously led others to become successful in similar roles.

As an example, Bian Goh agrees that some employers might give too little weight in the hiring process to assessing whether candidates had been promoted in roles by their former employers.

The risk is then that they might overestimate the likely potential of candidates who had reached senior positions solely through regular job-hopping.

But if there was evidence in firms’ HR databases that hadn’t tended to work out, for example because of such recruits not staying for long or not doing well enough to earn bonuses, their AI hiring agent might be able to spot that danger and compensate accordingly.

Often, even in the world of information technology, the future can unfold much more slowly than anticipated.

The advent of cloud accounting software services such as Xero nearly 20 years ago raised the opportunity for small businesses to benchmark their performance and habits against their peers and use a wealth of data to gain insights that could improve the overall productivity of businesses.

But arguably that process still hasn’t got underway in earnest.

Seek and Trade Me — the big two names in the online job-advertising market — wouldn’t be interviewed on what they were doing in the field of AI, or how they envisaged the future.

They may view the work they are doing as secret squirrel, or they may not have got far off the starting blocks.

Bian Goh believes Zeil is “kind of in a unique position” in having a more rounded AI offering.

AI tools are only as useful as the data they are training on, and privacy and the natural inclination of commercial businesses not to share data is a barrier in a wide range of more far-reaching applications.

So the idea of being able to completely outsource the legwork involved in career development may be a bit of dream for while.

But already, job candidates who aren’t at least running their cover letters through some sort of AI engine for suggestions may be missing a trick, and the disadvantage faced by the uninitiated is only likely to grow.