Source: Financial Times
The flood of AI-assisted job applications is forcing major employers like L’Oréal to abandon scalable screening processes and return to labor-intensive in-person assessments—a costly inversion that reveals how generative AI is breaking the very efficiency gains it promised to unlock. This signals a broader pattern where AI tools democratize access to opportunities (anyone can now submit polished applications) while simultaneously destroying the signal-to-noise ratio that made initial screening possible. The trend exposes a fragile assumption underlying much AI adoption: that the technology solves human problems rather than simply shifting bottlenecks downstream, now requiring companies to spend more human attention on earlier pipeline stages.