A few years ago it was relatively easy to land a tech interview with a recruiter. Most often, the situation was so uneven that you would receive a flood of cold emails and messages from them - on LinkedIn, in your inbox, wherever - and you would ignore them. Because why bother, when you are so in demand? You could land an interview any time you want, right?

Well, for better or worse, those days are gone.

AI has completely changed the landscape, and there’s hardly an area it hasn’t touched. Tech interviews are no exception. Applicants are now spamming recruiters just as much as recruiters once spammed candidates.

The latest Talent Trends Report from Ashby shows that the average number of applications per role has tripled since 2021:

Put it simply, the bar to get noticed has gone up. As a result, resumes are polished to perfection, keywords harvested, formats optimized - suddenly everyone’s “mission-driven,” “impact-oriented,” and “passionate about innovation” (whatever that means). Meanwhile, recruiters are drowning in near-identical submissions - often dozens or hundreds per role.

Data from Gem’s Recruiting Benchmarks Report shows that hiring cycles are taking longer, with more interviews required per candidate:

The picture becomes even clearer when we look at how much effort it takes to actually land a job today (source: theinterviewguys):

• Job seekers need 32 to 200 applications to get a single offer, with most data pointing to 100+ applications for a typical searcher - while referred candidates need less than 10.
• Online applications rarely succeed, with only 0.1–2% converting to offers, compared to 30% for referrals and a 5× higher chance for sourced candidates.
• 85% of jobs are filled through connections and 44% of hires come from candidates already in company databases.

Again and again, I’ve been asking this question to my friends and people I know: what will happen to the interviewing process? How can we make sure our resumes stand out in a sea of applications?

Most responses so far point to the same thing - network with people directly, write thoughtful, personalized messages about why you’re interested in their work, or share an insight about one of their challenges.

Sure, that’s fair advice. And the data above is also confirming that. But what happens when time passes and everyone starts adopting the “personal approach” with their polished resumes?

Personally, I believe companies will start announcing specific “interview slots” and accept only candidates who can attend in person. A candidate will likely have a few minutes to introduce themselves, walk through their resume, answer a few quick questions - essentially, pass a vibe check. If all goes well, they’ll hear back later about the rest. But this first step of filtering will happen live, face-to-face.

If you think about it, the process starts to look a lot like casting - a job audition, and our presence, communication, and ability to connect will matter just as much as our experience on paper. It’s not necessarily a bad thing - maybe it’s even a return to something more human, ending up right back where we began: looking each other in the eye to decide if there’s a fit.

After all, when AI can write your resume, polish your answers, and even simulate your tone, the only thing left to evaluate might be the one thing it still can’t fake: you.

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Thanks to Tornike Onoprishvili for reading drafts of this.