Here's a fun snapshot of the modern job hunt: LinkedIn now processes around 11,000 job applications per minute (up 45 percent in a single year). A huge share of those applications were written, or at least heavily polished, by AI. On the receiving end, companies use software to sort, rank, and filter that flood of résumés before a human ever looks.

So, we've built a system where machines write applications for other machines to reject. Somewhere in the middle sits you, refreshing your inbox, wondering if anyone read the cover letter you spent forty minutes on, asking Claude to “red-team it” and “make it sound like I love their products and really want to help market them.”

In 2025, 48 percent of job applicants reported getting no response at all from employers — silence, not even a rejection — up from 38 percent the year before. Josh Millet, CEO of the hiring-assessment company Criteria, traced this corporate ghosting surge directly to AI: application volume exploded because applying became nearly free, and now hiring teams are drowning, "getting less meaningful signals" from every résumé in the stack.

Think about what that means. The résumé — the document your entire college career center is organized around — is losing its signal value because everyone's is now perfectly polished. When every application reads like it was written by a professional career consultant, the polish stops being a screen.

Meanwhile, employers are getting suspicious of the shine. In one survey, 49 percent of hiring managers said they auto-dismiss résumés they suspect were AI-generated. So the tool everyone uses to get past the filter has become a reason to get filtered.

The absurdity of this is apparently lost on many recruiting managers, who pump out AI-generated job descriptions that include requirements like “AI fluency a must.”

If this sounds like an arms race with no winners, you understand it perfectly.

Here are the numbers that will change your entire strategy:

Now, hold those two pictures side by side. The front door (the formal application inbox): thousands of AI-polished applications arrive per minute, half of them vanishing into silence. The side door (the informal, human process): a human who knows your name telling another human, "you should talk to this person."

The side door isn't just less crowded. It solves the exact problem AI created. A referral is the one signal that can't be mass-generated, because it costs the referrer something — their credibility. When a real person vouches for you, they're spending their reputation currency. No chatbot can spend reputation on your behalf. And that's precisely why it works.

Even LinkedIn seems to know this. Its own CEO, Ryan Roslansky, and its Chief Economic Opportunity Officer, Aneesh Raman, wrote the book Open to Work, arguing that careers now move like climbing walls — sideways, diagonally, through people — rather than up a tidy ladder of applications. When the people running the world's biggest job board tell you the ladder is gone and you need a different strategy, believe them.

Yes, you do. You have professors who know people. Your friends' parents. Your parents' friends. Alumni from your school who will answer a message from a current student at a rate that would shock you — being asked for advice is catnip to alumni. 

What you don't have is a network of senior executives, and here's the secret: you don't need one. Research on job-finding has shown for fifty years that opportunities flow disproportionately through weak ties — acquaintances, friends-of-friends, and the person you met once. You need a wide, shallow net far more than a deep one.

And no, networking doesn't mean being the finance bro who treats every conversation like a transaction. It means being curious about people and their work, asking them real questions, and following up like a human being. That's it. That's the whole dark art. Some finance bros may be taking the dark art to extremes, but you’ll find that they land the job they want.

In Indispensable, I walk through the actual mechanics — who to reach out to, what to say, how to turn a fifteen-minute conversation into an advocate, and how to do all of it without feeling like a door-to-door salesman from the 1950s. The tactics matter, and they take more than 875 words.

But the strategy fits in one simple sentence, so here it is: while everyone else is teaching a robot to write better applications for other robots to ignore, go talk to real people.

The machines can have the front door. You take the side door.

Discover more insights in my upcoming book, Indispensable: A Student’s Guide for Thriving in the Age of AI. 

Published by Damn Gravity, Indispensable takes a practical look at how students can develop the habits, skills, and mindset they'll need to thrive as technology advances.

Order your copy today.