Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership
With record applications (up 45%), mostly from AI agents, 20% of employers are considering pay to apply. “Pay to apply” is a process for discouraging the shotgunning of applications by charging a small application fee to candidates. And incidentally, the “AI agents” driving this massive increase in resumes aren’t people. But instead, they are AI-driven software tools.
For about $13 per week, an automated robot will send out 50 resumes for a candidate each and every day. Because of their increasing popularity, during the next year, I predict that these agents will double the number of spam resumes that companies receive. And the current number of spam resumes is already creating a crisis in recruiting.
It’s important to note that this article argues against the currently common but ineffective practice of trying to spot and then sort out spammed resumes after they are received. Instead, I suggest discouraging spam submissions so they can’t burden your recruiters and ATS system.
If you’re curious, the five most effective ways for discouraging applications are: pay to apply, limiting the number of applications per month, emphasizing employee referrals, bypassing the “quick apply” feature on major job boards, and adding an “I am not a robot” verification process.
Do You Know The Tremendous Costs Of Spammed Applications Will Get Everyone’s Attention?
If you’re not familiar with the term, a spammed resume is a candidate’s generic resume sent out by an AI agent to dozens or even hundreds of companies. Based on what the algorithm of the AI agent determines (often inaccurately) to be a rough fit.
Unfortunately, the decision on where to send the resumes often shows little regard for three critical hiring factors. 1) Whether the applicant is fully qualified, 2) whether they are a good fit, and 3) whether the candidate is interested in the company.
Because these resumes will seldom fit these three important criteria, few of the candidates who have used AI agents to submit their resumes will actually have any real chance of being interviewed. So these “little chance” resumes will clog your ATS and candidate assessment process. Unfortunately, they will generate the following costly consequences:
- Your candidate rankings will no longer be reliable – the record volume will cause your internal candidate ranking mistakes to skyrocket.
- Your best candidates will feel ignored – in the deluge of applications, most top candidates will receive few communications. And some will even feel like they have been ghosted.
- Hiring will become painfully slow – the extra volume of resumes to sort will extend your time to fill. So it will become common to lose top candidates to faster offers.
- Recruiter error rates will skyrocket – your recruiters will become overworked and stressed. And that will increase their error rates when making important decisions.
- Sorting out spammed resumes will be difficult – The process of trying to identify the spammed resumes that you have received will be incredibly difficult, time-consuming, and inaccurate.
- You will now be open to more lawsuits – because every extra application you receive will open up your company to another potential discrimination lawsuit. And a flood of resumes to put you in legal jeopardy.
- Hiring managers will become frustrated and may stop hiring – the volume will stress and frustrate many individual hiring managers to the point where some will be reluctant to hire again.
- Your employer brand will be damaged – if the candidate’s frustration spreads on social media. It will hurt your employer brand image in the short term. And your future hiring in the long term.
- You may need a new ATS– this record volume may overwhelm your current ATS.
- Your TA budget may suffer – when recruiting is stuck in this quagmire, that will damage its image among your executives. And TAs’ flailing may even lead to budget cuts.
Of course, the overall costs will be tremendous – soon, the accumulation of all these problems will hurt the quality of the candidates you hire. 62% of companies have already had to fire new-hires after discovering their skills didn’t match their AI-inflated resumes. So if you don’t act quickly, your new hires will be much less capable, and their average performance will drop significantly (quality of hire).
The Five Most Effective Approaches For Preventing Spammed Applications
The remainder of this article highlights the 5 most effective solutions for limiting the volume of spam applications/resumes sent to your company.
Reducing applications solution #1 – The “pay to apply” approach
If you’re not familiar with the “pay-to-apply” model. When companies charge a small fee (often called a processing fee) of between $10 and $25 for each application, an individual candidate submits to your company. In some cases, the fee is returned if the candidate actually receives an interview.
For those who are shocked or taken aback by the introduction of money into the hiring process. You should realize that injecting money into the hiring process is not new; for example, during the 1990s, the pay-to-apply model was used by several US airlines (including Northwest) to reduce their flood of applications and to generate revenue. And this practice is still used today by many police and fire departments. They use it to help defray the cost of candidate assessment.
Although many question whether the pay-to-apply model is ethical. It is legal in most jurisdictions (with the exception of California). Also, remember that early in this century, it was not unusual for tech companies to pay interviewed candidates for their time away from work. During the last decade, huge amounts have been spent on employee referral bonuses and sign-on bonuses for new hires.
And outside of recruiting, large hospital chains like Kaiser have found that introducing a small $10 fee was enough to measurably reduce the use of voluntary healthcare services. Unfortunately, today, the pay-to-apply approach has gotten a bad name because it has been one of the elements of most job search scams.
The goals of a “pay-to-apply” process
The foundation goal is to improve the performance and the capabilities of your company’s workforce through better hiring. And that goal can be accomplished by minimizing the inaccurate and time-consuming task of sorting through spammed resumes after they are received. A third goal is to minimize the number of nonserious candidates that submit resumes “just to test the waters.” A fourth goal of the fee is to cause each candidate to narrow down their interest and job search to one specific job that is the best fit for them. The final goal is to provide your company with a competitive advantage. This process would reduce the volume of your applications to a manageable level. At the same time, your talent competitors would still be flooded with spammed applications.
The pay-to-apply approach makes potential candidates take your job more seriously. Because after paying money, they now have “skin in the game.”
The pay-to-play model works because…
It turns out that even a small amount of money is enough to discourage AI agents from sending even one resume to a company that requires payment first, because most AI agents don’t have the capability to make payments. However, if they could. And the agent was to send multiple resumes to a company for several different jobs. The payment amount would quickly rise to a prohibitive amount of over $50, which most wouldn’t be willing to pay. At the same time, a $10 fee wouldn’t likely have much of a negative impact on average job seekers or diverse candidates who are committed to working at your company. Most would only be sending out one or two resumes for a specific job to your company.
Finally, the money received will be a welcome supplement to your recruiting budget. The payment process administration could be relatively easy to manage if your process allows payments to be made electronically on popular credit cards or money transfer sites like PayPal or Venmo.
The remaining 2 – 5 reducing application solutions include:
Reducing applications solution #2 – Limit the number of applications that can be submitted each month
You don’t have to be a recruiter to realize that when a company places a fixed limit on the number of applications (i.e., 2) that it can receive from a candidate during a one-month period. This restriction would take away much of the value offered by spamming AI agents. But to be effective, this restriction on applications would have to be reinforced by a penalty. Like one that would automatically eliminate all submitted resumes from a candidate who violated your restriction on too many or AI-generated resumes.
Reducing applications solution #3 – Reduce your spam application volume by emphasizing employee referrals
Research has revealed that referred candidates have the highest probability of getting an interview and being hired of all sourcing channels. And that means that employee referral applicants are measurably superior candidates to those sent out by AI agents. That is why many companies assign a priority to assessing employee referrals. Employee referrals are also superior candidates because they have already been prescreened by one of your employees. And their application is likely to be targeted specifically to your company. Fortunately, there is almost no chance an employee referral would be a spammed application.
Reducing applications solution #4 – Limit postings on job boards that offer “easy apply” features
Today, several large job boards (LinkedIn’s Easy Apply and Indeed’s Quick Apply come to mind) offer applicants an in-house AI agent that, with one click, can send out multiple job applications to the jobs on that job board. As a result, some argue that a company can reduce the number of its spammed job applications that it receives. They can do this by not posting their open jobs on a job board with these embedded AI agent features. Or by proactively not making your open jobs eligible for this one-click, easy-to-apply feature.
Reducing applications solution #5 – Require applicants to complete the “I am not a robot” feature
Long ago, even non-recruiting websites realized they needed a “sign-up feature” prohibiting robotic web crawlers from completing an application process. So by adding one of these “I’m not a robot” checkbox features (Google has a dominant one, reCAPTCHA), the software program judges the visitor’s actions before and after checking the checkbox to determine if the visitor is a person or a robot. And of course, we’ve all experienced the related multiframe “crosswalks” picture model that requires the visitor to pick out each of the frames containing certain images (i.e., a bus).
Note: You can learn more about the related topics. How to handle AI-generated and perfect resumes is covered in my companion article here.
Final Thoughts
Only in the last six months has this extremely high volume (up 45%) of spam applications become a dominant recruiting problem. But even today, 78% of companies already check for AI use.
And unfortunately, most of the corporate solutions that are currently being used have revolved around spotting AI-generated or submitted resumes by searching each received resume for a lack of personalization, the overuse of buzzwords, and overly formal language. In my experience, this “spot the AI feature” approach does not work and is extremely time-consuming.
So instead, in this article, I’ve highlighted five more effective ways to prevent most of these spam resumes from even reaching your applicant tracking system. Because a large volume of received spam and “perfect resumes” are both recruiting function killers!
Notes for the reader
This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company.
You can subscribe to Dr. Sullivan’s weekly Talent Management articles here or by following him on LinkedIn.
