What began as a routine job posting quickly became a case study in how artificial intelligence, economic slowdown and broken hiring systems are reshaping the modern job search — often to the detriment of both employers and applicants.
A Job Market Tightened by Slow Growth
By the end of 2025, the US employment picture had grown visibly strained. After months of layoffs and hiring freezes, particularly in construction and manufacturing, job growth stalled in December. Official labor data showed fewer new positions, but those figures masked a deeper problem: access.
Even where jobs existed, many candidates found themselves shut out of consideration. Recruiters and editors described being overwhelmed not by a lack of interest, but by an excess of applications — many of them difficult to verify, repetitive in structure, or seemingly automated. As 2025 closed, job seekers increasingly referred to the year as one of widespread frustration, warning that 2026 could prove even more challenging if conditions remained unchanged.
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An Opening Flooded With Applications
The problem came into sharp focus when tech publication The Markup posted an opening for an engineer role. According to its product director and editor, Andrew Losowsky, more than 400 applications arrived within 12 hours of the listing going live.
At first glance, many appeared legitimate. But as Losowsky read through them, patterns began to emerge that suggested something else was at work. Numerous applications followed nearly identical formats. Contact details were repeated across submissions. Links to LinkedIn profiles were broken or led nowhere, and some mailing addresses were clearly non-residential. What initially looked like enthusiasm in a competitive market soon raised doubts about authenticity.
Red Flags in the Details
The strongest indicators appeared in applicants’ written responses. Losowsky noted that many followed a “near-identical four-sentence pattern with minor variations,” suggesting automated generation rather than individual effort. Some submissions even included phrases such as “ChatGPT says,” while others mirrored the job description almost word for word.
In one extreme case, an applicant claimed to have built both the publication’s website and its Blacklight web-privacy tool — a claim that was demonstrably false. Taken together, the signals pointed to a surge of AI-assisted or fully automated applications flooding open roles, making it difficult for genuine candidates to stand out and forcing employers to sift through large volumes of unreliable material.
Pulling Back From Public Hiring Platforms
After a single day of reviewing applications, The Markup removed the listing from major job platforms such as Glassdoor and Indeed. Instead, the organization turned to internal outreach and word-of-mouth recruitment.
The shift significantly reduced the number of applicants — and with it, the volume of questionable submissions — but also narrowed the pool of potential candidates. While the approach slowed the flood of inauthentic applications “to a trickle,” it came at the cost of reach and openness.
