The trade reached hiring.

I have spent the last stretch back in the job market, and somewhere in the middle of it I realized I was staring at the same problem I have been writing about for months, only wearing different clothes.

What set it off was a post I came across. Someone had built a small system to help a family member find and apply for jobs, and in a few weeks of looking they had turned up 71 job postings with instructions buried inside them that were written for AI rather than for a person. The idea is simple once you see it. An employer hides a line in the listing that a human reader will never notice, telling any AI that happens to be filling out the application to include a particular word or phrase. If that word shows up in the cover letter, the employer knows the candidate let a machine do the work and never actually read the posting.

I recognized it right away, because I watched the same thing play out in sales over the last several years.

When outreach became cheap to automate, everyone automated it, and the inbox every buyer opens in the morning filled up with noise. The rep who had done his homework and had a genuine reason to call got buried under a hundred messages that looked just like his and meant nothing. Buyers responded the only way they could, by ignoring almost all of it. The vendors answered that by automating harder, and the buyers answered by tuning out further, and around it went.

Hiring is now in the early part of that same spiral. Applying used to take real effort. Now a candidate can turn a resume and a job description into a hundred applications that look personal in a single afternoon, so that is what a lot of people do, and employers are drowning in it the way buyers did. The hidden instruction in the posting is simply their version of tuning out. It is a tripwire, set to catch the applications that no human ever touched.

The part I keep coming back to is that none of this was really caused by the tools. In sales, we quietly stopped teaching people how to prospect and told ourselves that more activity was the same thing as more skill. In hiring, we stopped expecting candidates to do any homework at all and decided that the sheer volume was a sign of ambition. Both times we made a trade, and both times we gave up the craft to get the convenience.

The cost arrives later, and it looks much the same in both places. A generation of sellers learned to work whatever pipeline marketing handed them, and had nothing to reach for when that pipeline dried up. Now a generation of job seekers is learning to fire applications into the void and cannot understand why none of them land. The muscle that does the real work was never built, because no one ever asked them to build it.

The hidden word in the posting is a crude instrument, but the question underneath it is a fair one. It wants to know whether a real person did the work or whether a script guessed at it, which is the same question a good buyer has always asked a seller before giving up any of their time.

Something else has changed on the other side of the table, and it tells you the people who hire have noticed too. More and more of the managers, directors and CROs I come across now say the same thing: skip the portal, send the resume straight to me, or just message me here. A few years ago that was rare. Now it is common, and it is the hiring version of a buyer handing out their direct line because the front door has stopped working.

These are not bystanders. Many of them came up in sales, and they understand exactly what the automated funnel is doing, because they watched it happen to their own pipelines. They know the talent they actually need is being shown the back door with an automated denial it never earned, screened out by the same volume problem that once buried the good reps. So they route around their own process to reach a real person, which is the same move a good candidate is making from the other direction. Both sides are quietly admitting that the system in the middle no longer works.

What still gets through

I have some confidence in the way out, because it is the one I am using right now. I stopped applying through the portals. I choose the companies I actually want to work for, I learn enough about each one to have a real point of view, I find the person who owns the decision, and I reach that person directly as someone who has obviously put in the time. It is slower and it is harder, and it is also the one approach the tripwire cannot catch, for the simple reason that there is nothing automated in it to catch.

The tools have changed again, the way they always do. The trade underneath them is the same one we made in sales, and the thing that actually decides whether you get through has not changed at all. The person who does the work still gets a response. Everyone else gets a hidden word dropped into a letter they never read.