old-fashioned human – As generative AI helps job seekers churn out near-identical applications, recruitment leaders say hiring teams are drowning in volume—and the differentiator is increasingly old-school, direct human connection.
A recruitment leader says the quickest way to get noticed in an AI-saturated hiring market might be the least digital thing imaginable.
James Reed, CEO of Reed Recruitment, described how generative AI has flooded employers with applications that look almost the same. He pointed to what he considers a simple fix: connect with a real person.
“Some very old-fashioned things still work,” Reed said this week on the BBC’s “Big Boss Interview” podcast. “If you write to someone and put it in a postbox with a stamp on it, and it lands on their desk, they’ll look at it.”
Reed’s comments land at a moment when both job seekers and hiring teams are moving faster—just not necessarily smarter. Candidates can tailor CVs and cover letters in seconds using tools like ChatGPT. Employers, meanwhile, increasingly rely on AI to screen the growing number of applications.
Reed said that speed has flipped the process into a loop where technology replaces people. “At the moment, you have very frequently a situation where you have sort of AI talking to AI and no person is any wiser,” he said.
His recruitment firm, he said, is seeing the consequences at street level. The applications are arriving in huge numbers, and many “pretty much look the same,” because people have used ChatGPT to get help with their CVs, generating similar outputs for different candidates.
That uniformity, Reed said, is changing what hiring managers can realistically do. The flood of applications means managers struggle to review everything. and that cuts into the value of spending time personalizing an application. “People just aren’t seeing the benefits of the investment in time of personalizing it. because the companies are so overwhelmed with applications. ” he said.
The scale of the pressure is also showing up in survey data. LinkedIn’s Talent Research 2026 survey found that the number of applicants per open role in the US has doubled since the spring of 2022.
The same research points to mounting strain on both sides of the market. It found that 65% of the 19,113 workers surveyed said finding a job had become more challenging over the past year. At the same time, 93% of the 6,554 recruiters surveyed said they planned to increase their use of AI in hiring in 2026.
The recruiter’s view matches a broader description from the hiring-software industry. Daniel Chait. CEO of hiring software company Greenhouse. previously described the dynamic to Business Insider as an “AI doom loop”: job seekers can apply to more roles more quickly. while recruiters face a growing pile of applications and struggle to find the right person through the noise.
Reed’s push back is about breaking the loop with direct, human contact. Instead of relying only on online portals, he encouraged applicants to find a way to connect with people personally.
“It’s an important point that it’s about connecting with people in the end,” Reed said, adding that technology has “automated things very effectively, but also almost too effectively.”
His advice lines up with a shift that some recruiters have described elsewhere: less emphasis on AI-polished résumés. and more weight on work trials. skills-based assessments. or direct outreach—changes that move the decision away from a flood of similar applications and toward something harder to automate.
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