AI hiring is here. It’s making companies — and job seekers — miserable
Research on tens of thousands of job applications shows AI-generated cover letters led to lower hiring rates and reduced starting wages as companies lost confidence in application materials.
As America’s labor market slows, AI-led interviews and auto-generated cover letters are dramatically changing the process of getting a job. And maybe not for the better.
More than half of the organizations surveyed by the Society for Human Resource Management used AI to recruit workers in 2025. And an estimated third of ChatGPT users reportedly leaned on the OpenAI chatbot to help with their job search.
However, recent research found that when job seekers use AI during the process, applicants are less likely to be hired. Meanwhile, companies are fielding an increased volume of applications.
“The ability (for companies) to select the best worker today may be worse due to AI,” said Anaïs Galdin, a Dartmouth researcher who co-authored a study looking at how large language models (LLMs) have impacted cover letters.
Galdin and her co-author, Jesse Silbert at Princeton, analyzed cover letters for tens of thousands of job applications on Freelancer.com, a jobs listing site.
The researchers found that after the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022, the letters all got longer and better-written, but companies stopped putting so much stock in them. That made it harder to distinguish a qualified hire from the rest of the applicant pool, and the rate of hiring dropped as did the average starting wage.