What has actually changed

The direct change is that producing an application now costs minutes rather than hours. Finding roles, tailoring documents and submitting are all substantially automated.

When the cost of an action falls by an order of magnitude, the volume rises accordingly. That is the change everything else follows from.

It is worth being precise about what became cheap, though, because it was not all of it. Producing and submitting became cheap; being suitable, being credible and being remembered did not, and the whole set of second-order effects comes from that gap widening.

More applications per posting means less attention per application. Screening becomes more automated in response, and the initial filter becomes stricter and more literal.

For candidates that means clear, checkable evidence against stated requirements matters more, and a well-written narrative matters less at the first gate than it used to.

Some employers have gone further and simply stopped advertising certain roles. If a posting reliably produces eight hundred applications of which most are automated, filling the role through a network becomes the cheaper option — which shrinks the open market precisely for the people who depend on it.

• Higher volume per posting
• More automated first-stage screening
• More weight on explicit requirement evidence
• More scrutiny of applications that look generated
• More roles filled before they are meaningfully advertised

A CV and cover letter used to indicate effort and care as well as content. Now they indicate content, and even that is harder to trust when the text was generated.

Employers respond by weighting things that are harder to produce: work samples, referrals, structured assessments, and conversations. The document becomes an entry ticket rather than the evidence.

This is the same pattern that plays out whenever a signal becomes cheap to produce. The signal is not improved, it is replaced, and the replacement is always something more expensive — which is why hiring processes have got longer rather than shorter despite the screening being faster.

Discovery improved substantially. It is far easier to find relevant roles across many sources than it was, and far easier to keep track of a search.

Screening automation also means more applications actually get read, which is a real improvement over a human reading the first fifty of four hundred.

The quieter gain is in who can compete at all. Writing a strong application in a second language, or in a professional register nobody ever taught you, used to be a barrier that had nothing to do with capability — and a substantial part of that barrier has simply gone.

Several things are clearly in motion without having landed. Whether employers converge on work samples as the standard first filter, whether the open application recovers or keeps shrinking, and whether screening automation is regulated in the way other automated decisions have been.

Verified credentials are another open question. If there were a cheap, trustworthy way to confirm that someone holds a qualification or did the job they claim, much of the current problem would dissolve — and several attempts at this exist without any of them having won.

It is worth holding these lightly. The confident predictions made when the first screening systems arrived mostly did not happen, and the same restraint is warranted now about anything described as inevitable.

Employers still hire people they believe can do the work and want to work with. Referrals still outperform cold applications by a wide margin. Being genuinely well suited to a role still matters more than how the application was produced.

Agents changed the logistics of a job search considerably and its substance very little. Treating them as a way to do the logistics faster is the use that holds up.

Which suggests a fairly unglamorous strategy: let the tools handle everything mechanical, and put the recovered time into the things that were always decisive — being genuinely good at the work, being visible to people who hire, and being able to explain both.