Katie Tanner, a human resource consultant in Utah, knew the job would be popular: It was fully remote, was at a tech company and required only three years of experience.
But she was still shocked by the response on LinkedIn. After 12 hours, 400 applications had been submitted. By 24, there were 600. A few days later, there were more than 1,200, at which point she removed the post. Three months later, she’s still whittling down candidates.
“It’s crazy,” she said. “You just get inundated.”
The number of applications submitted on LinkedIn has surged more than 45 percent in the past year. The platform is clocking an average of 11,000 applications per minute, and generative artificial intelligence tools are contributing to the deluge.
With a simple prompt, ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI, will insert every keyword from a job description into a résumé. Some candidates are going a step further, paying for A.I. agents that can autonomously find jobs and apply on their behalf. Recruiters say it’s getting harder to tell who is genuinely qualified or interested, and many of the résumés look suspiciously similar.
“It’s an ‘applicant tsunami’ that’s just going to get bigger,” said Hung Lee, a former recruiter who writes a widely read newsletter about the industry.
Enter the A.I. arms race. One popular method for navigating the surge? Automatic chat or video interviews, sometimes conducted by A.I. Chipotle’s chief executive, Scott Boatwright, said at a conference this month that its A.I. chatbot screening and scheduling tool (named Ava Cado) had reduced hiring time by 75 percent.
HireVue, a popular A.I. video interview platform, offers recruiters an option to have A.I. assess responses and rank candidates.
But candidates can also use A.I. to cheat in these interviews, and some companies have added more automated skill assessments early in the hiring process. For example, HireVue offers A.I.-powered games to gauge abilities like pattern recognition and working memory, and a virtual “tryout” that tests emotional intelligence or skills like counting change. Sometimes, Lee said, “we end up with an A.I. versus A.I. type of situation.”
Applicants using fake identities pose another problem. In January, the Justice Department announced indictments in a scheme to place North Korean nationals in IT roles working remotely at U.S. companies. Emi Chiba, a human resource technology analyst at Gartner, told DealBook that reports of candidates who used fake identities had been “growing and growing and growing.”
A report that Ms. Chiba published with other Gartner analysts in April ballparked that by 2028, about one in four job applicants could be made up. Among its recommendations was that companies deploy more sophisticated identity-verification software.
Some recruiters say posting isn’t worth it. To address the problem, LinkedIn recently added tools to help both candidates and recruiters narrow their focus, including an A.I. agent, introduced in October, that can write follow-up messages, conduct screening chats with candidates, suggest top applicants and search for potential hires using natural language.
A feature that shows potential applicants how well their qualifications match up with a job description, which LinkedIn introduced to premium subscribers in January, reduced the rate at which they apply to “low match” jobs by 10 percent, according to the company.
Hazards abound. Concerns that using A.I. in hiring can introduce bias have led to lawsuits and a patchwork of state legislation. The European Union’s A.I. Act classifies hiring under its high-risk category, with the most stringent restrictions, and while no U.S. federal law specifically addresses A.I. use in hiring, general antidiscrimination laws can potentially come into play if the result of any process is discrimination.
“You’re not allowed to discriminate, and of course most employers are trying not to discriminate, but easier said than done,” said Marcia Goodman, a partner at Mayer Brown who primarily represents employers.
Is this a perpetual cycle? The problem is less that candidates are using A.I. — a skill many employers say they want — than it is that they’re being sloppy. Alexa Marciano, the managing director of Syndicatebleu, a recruiting agency, said job seekers were reacting to recruiters’ use of automated screening. “It’s really frustrating for the candidates because they spend all this time creating very catered cover letters, very catered résumés,” she said.
Jeremy Schifeling, a career coach who regularly conducts technology-focused job-search training at universities, said he could see this back-and-forth going on for a while. “As students get more desperate, they say, ‘Well, I have no choice but to up the ante with these paid tools to automate everything.’ And I’m sure the recruiters are going to raise the bar again.”
He argues the endgame will be authenticity from both sides. But, he said, “I do think that a lot of people are going to waste a lot of time, a lot of processing power, a lot of money until we reach that realization.”
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
E.U. talks with Iran yield no breakthrough. An effort by European officials to avert an escalation between Iran and Israel failed to break ground as the countries continued to trade fire. President Trump has said he could take up to two weeks to decide whether to join Israel in striking Iran.
Trump sends mixed signals over immigration raids. The president acknowledged last week that his policies were hurting some industries that rely on immigrant labor. But the Department of Homeland Security reversed guidance that had paused raids at farms and hotels, The Washington Post reported.
The Fed holds rates steady. Jay Powell, its chair, signaled that the Federal Reserve would continue to wait to see how Trump’s policies affected the economy before cutting interest rates. Trump has raised pressure on the central bank to cut rates, and called Powell “a real dummy” after the policy announcement.
The C.E.O. who doesn’t mind if you have 97 direct reports
When Bill Anderson took over as the C.E.O. of Bayer in 2023, it faced a trifecta of big problems — expensive lawsuits, expiring drug patents, a mountain of debt — that had sent its stock price plummeting.
His first big move? Cut the bosses.
The strategy, coined “Dynamic Shared Ownership,” envisions replacing traditional corporate hierarchy with thousands of self-managing teams that band together for 90-day work cycles. Since introducing it in July 2023, Bayer has cut about 11,000 jobs, Anderson said in a call with analysts last month.
We invited Anderson to discuss how D.S.O. is playing out, two years in, with Aimee Groth, an expert in decentralized organizations. Groth documented Zappos’s effort to flatten its org chart in her 2017 book, “The Kingdom of Happiness,” and has been following the movement ever since, including briefly as a consultant. Their conversation has been edited and condensed.
Groth: Many large companies are flattening hierarchies to cut costs. Bayer aims to save over $2 billion by 2026. What makes this more than just an efficiency play?
Anderson: Most corporate change programs take out heads but not the work. That’s why companies end up doing them every few years. They eliminate a layer — usually just one — and leave everything else the same. People are back two years later because the work still has to get done.
What we’re doing is taking out five layers of management. But that’s just surface-level stuff. We’re also replacing things like the annual budget process. Instead of spending three to five months a year doing this big bureaucratic exercise, people now spend one day every 90 days asking: How did we do in the last 90? What are the most important objectives for the next 90? Do we have the right team? Do we need to add or move people? Then we work for 89 days and do it again. That’s one reason we call it Dynamic Shared Ownership — every 90 days, 10 to 15 percent of people shift what they’re doing.
What’s working so far? Any examples that stand out?
In contraception, we had lost the business of one of the largest health care providers in the world. The local team said: “We’ve got to win it back.” They made all the resource and structural decisions — brought in a contract reimbursement specialist, added a medical liaison to speak with academic medical centers. None of it went through any management layers. Aside from compliance, all those decisions happened at the edge. In most companies, those decisions would go up 10 layers.
This requires managers to shift from directing to coaching. At Zappos, that was a major source of tension. How are you supporting that transition?
This is one of the top five things I’ve learned in my 35 years in business: If you want to change behavior — what people call “culture” — you have to change the mechanics.
Most companies say, “Let’s empower managers,” then send them to training. Change the span of control instead. A few years ago, Bayer had a 5-to-1 span of control. [On average, managers had five direct reports.] Today we’re at 14.6 to 1. With that kind of span, you can’t micromanage anymore — it changes behavior by design. We now have managers with 30, 50, even 97 direct reports. That’s a completely different job — you need entirely new tools.
We’re scrapping legacy H.R. systems. Job grading based on hierarchy doesn’t make sense anymore. You’ve got Ph.D.s and lab techs operating at the same level — not because they’re the same in title, but because it’s not about hierarchy anymore, it’s about contribution.
We’re moving to peer assessment. If you’ve got 97 direct reports, you can’t rate them all yourself. You need structured input from the team.
Are you tracking any unconventional metrics or leading indicators — like psychological safety or decision speed?
We focus on hard metrics. How long does it take to file a drug? How long to launch it? In one recent case, we cut filing time in half. In consumer health, we’ve reduced product development timelines by 70 percent.
A few years ago, I would’ve said that was impossible. But when you create flat organizations, you can move that fast.
Quiz: Ping. Ping. Ping …
Microsoft this week published a report that suggests workdays are expanding and becoming more chaotic. Using aggregated and anonymous data from the company’s suite of office software, it found, for example, that edits in PowerPoint spiked 122 percent in the final 10 minutes before a meeting and that meetings starting after 8 p.m. were up 16 percent from a year earlier as of February.
How many times a day, on average, were the most active 20 percent of employees interrupted by a meeting, an email or a chat during an eight-hour workday, according to Microsoft’s research?
A. 16 times, or every 30 minutes
B. 120 times, or every four minutes
C. 275 times, or every two minutes
D. 1,000 times, or every 29 seconds
Thanks for reading! We’ll see you Monday.
We’d like your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected].
Quiz answer: C.
Sarah Kessler is the weekend edition editor of the DealBook newsletter and writes features on business.
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