Job Boards are a Junkyard Now
Why recruiters are drowning in AI-generated garbage
A recruiter on Reddit recently asked a simple question: How many applications are you getting for a single Senior Software Engineer role?
The answers were staggering: 400 in the first 24 hours. 1,200 in a few days. 1,800 before the posting was shut down.
These numbers aren't a sign of a healthy market. They are a signal of a broken system. The "why" behind this flood was perfectly articulated in a separate thread from another recruiter who had hit their breaking point. The title was: "Increasing number of spam applicants from job boards."
The comments sections of both threads painted the same picture of a system in chaos.
"Yep, job boards are a junkyard right now. I’ve seen the same resume template show up 12 times in one morning, same typos, same fake certs, all from random IPs."
"1000+ [applications] and like 95% are shit, without even having must have skills."
"Our ATS is awful so it’s manual trying to work through... IT reqs kill my team."
The AI Arms Race
What's happening here is a classic technological arms race. For years, the conventional wisdom for job seekers was to tailor their resume for every application to get past the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) keyword filters. This was a tedious, manual process.
Now, AI tools make it frictionless. A candidate can generate a hundred bespoke resumes in an afternoon and auto-apply to every relevant job posting in the country. From the candidate's perspective, in a tough market, this "spray and pray" approach is a logical strategy to maximize their odds.
But for the recruiter on the receiving end, the result is a massive signal-to-noise problem. Their primary channel for finding candidates—the public job board—has been rendered almost unusable. Their job has shifted from "evaluating talent" to "detecting spam."
The Flawed Defenses
The threads also revealed the current, often inadequate, workarounds recruiters are forced to use.
Manual Triage: This is the default. Recruiters spend hours sifting through resumes, looking for subtle red flags. As one user detailed, they've become forensic investigators, checking for "no linkedin, broken LinkedIn," "VOIP phone numbers," and "inconsistent or illogical information between resume and LinkedIn." This is a brutal, soul-crushing use of a skilled professional's time.
Abandoning the Channel: A common piece of advice was to give up on job boards entirely and shift to manual, outbound sourcing on LinkedIn or relying on referrals. This is a valid strategy, but as one of the original posters pointed out, it's not a viable solution when you need to fill high-volume roles.
This isn't a story about recruiters being lazy. It's a story about a system being overwhelmed. Their existing tools, the traditional ATS platforms, were designed for a different era. They are a castle wall built for arrows, and the enemy has just invented gunpowder.
The Opportunity in the Chaos
A system that could act as an "AI firewall," sitting in front of the ATS to filter out the 95% of noise so recruiters can focus on the 5% of signal, seems like an obvious next step.
But what would that product actually look like? What's the specific blueprint for an MVP that could win in this crowded and complex space? And what are the hidden risks—especially around AI bias and trust—that explain why this opportunity still exists?
Next week's premium brief, "Builder Brief: From 1,000 Applications to 50 Real Ones - The AI Screening Opportunity," is the complete analysis of those exact questions. It's a full product teardown of the space, including:
A detailed breakdown of the competitive landscape.
A specific, buildable product blueprint for an "AI Firewall."
A validation plan you could execute in 30 days.
Upgrade to get the full brief →
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P.S. If you're a recruiter who has waded through a junkyard of applications, I'd love to hear your story. The most painful submission gets a free annual subscription. Misery loves company, and I love market research.