Inundated with AI-generated resumes, ruthless employers are ghosting applicants and even rescinding job offers after they’ve been accepted, SFGate reports, deepening the nightmare that recent grads experience when entering the job market.
In a June 2026 report, the resume service Resume Builder surveyed 1,000 people between the ages of 20 and 28 who graduated with a bachelor’s degree within the past year. Some 34 percent of them said they had a job offer that was yanked out of their hands after it was accepted. Of that contingent, 13 percent said it happened to them multiple times.
Radio silence from employers was even more common. A whopping 68 percent of the young jobseekers were ghosted after the interview, and 65 percent believed that AI led to cuts in the entry-level jobs in their field.
Employers ghosting applicants isn’t new. But “today, it’s totally out of control,” Stacie Haller, chief career adviser at Resume Builder, told SFGate. Recruiters are being overwhelmed by the “spray and pray” tactics of applicants, she said, in which they send out hundreds if not thousands of AI-generated resumes and hope for the best.
“People are getting desperate,” Haller acknowledged, but this approach is also “the quickest way to get depressed.”
Many companies that overhired during the pandemic, which are now trying to integrate AI, she added, may have no idea of how many employees they need.
Entering what is one of the worst job markets in decades, you almost can’t blame recent grads for blasting out AI-generated resumes. But recruiters, in turn, are using faulty AI tools to filter through the garbage. Internal documents at Google revealed, for example, that its internal AI systems are wrongly throwing out the applications of qualified candidates. Many job postings are themselves AI generated. Some employers are also using AI to screen candidates and conduct interviews. Job seekers, aware of this AI-dominated paradigm, are tailoring their resumes to please AI tools.
In sum, it’s AI warfare on all sides.
Still, some basic human decency — such as not taking back job offers and ghosting applicants — would be nice.
“Having an offer withdrawn without explanation is unacceptable, and experiencing it more than once is incredibly discouraging,” Haller wrote in the Resume Builder report, as quoted by SFGate. “For someone new to the workforce, that letdown can feel even more crushing than being ghosted during the interview.”
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