Greenhouse says 2,539 people apply for every 10 job openings

The number of job applications reaching the average corporate recruiter has climbed 412 percent since 2022, and roughly 2,539 people now compete for every 10 open roles, a pileup driven by candidates using artificial intelligence to apply at scale.

This is the first time when really both sides have been unhappy. The market just isn't working for either side.

The figures come from Daniel Chait, chief executive of Greenhouse, a hiring platform that employers use to post openings and screen applicants. He shared them in an interview with Fortune published Friday, and in earlier remarks reported by Fortune and Benzinga on July 27. The platform currently carries about 175,000 live jobs, with an average of 254 people applying to each one.

What the numbers show

Chait's central finding is that the crush is uneven. Across the platform's openings, about 2,539 people apply for every 10 roles, which works out to roughly 254 for a single posting, but a small group of employers absorbs a disproportionate share of that volume, leaving most companies with far thinner applicant pools than the headline ratio suggests.

The pattern tracks company fame more than the type of work, he told Fortune. It is less about the roles than about the companies, he said: a business with a well-known consumer brand or a steady presence in the news can draw tens of thousands of applications for a single opening, while a comparable job at a lesser-known firm attracts a fraction of that.

Chait singled out OpenAI as an example of the effect. Roles at the artificial intelligence company, which appears in the news almost daily, draw the kind of crowd that leaves thousands of qualified people chasing a handful of openings, with little chance of standing out. Employers with that level of visibility, he said, can receive tens of thousands of applications for one job.

Chasing the same employers

His advice to job seekers is blunt: stop applying to the companies everyone has heard of.

Instead, he said, candidates should picture the work they want and seek out less-known companies that do it. The odds improve sharply, in his account, once an applicant stops competing against the entire market for the same marquee employer, because it is the company, not the résumé, that sets the size of the crowd.

Don't just apply to, you know, OpenAI, because they're in the news every day.

That framing puts the burden less on a candidate's qualifications than on their choice of target. It is not necessarily the applicant who is the problem, Chait argued, but the concentration of interest at a small number of famous names, which is why he told Fortune the issue is more about the companies than the roles.

Chait has coined a name for the underlying dynamic. He calls it an AI doom loop, in which job seekers use cheap AI tools to blast out applications in bulk while overwhelmed recruiters lean on AI of their own to screen the same flood back out, a cycle that feeds itself.

How the loop works

Candidates can buy software that applies automatically to every Greenhouse job for about $20, he said.

Recruiting teams are absorbing the surge with roughly half the staff they once had, Chait told Forbes, after rounds of layoffs thinned their ranks. Applications per job have risen 111 percent over the same period, and a single posting can draw hundreds or thousands of submissions within a day or two, faster than recruiters can keep up.

Because so many of the applications are AI-generated, Chait said, they begin to read alike, and employers can no longer tell a genuinely interested candidate from someone whose software applied to a thousand jobs overnight.

Job seekers, for their part, keep piling applications into what he described as a black hole and getting nowhere.

Tools on both sides

Benzinga described the result as an arms race, with candidates paying small sums to apply everywhere and employers spending on AI screening to cope, each move feeding the next.

The Benzinga account cited the actress Anne Hathaway, who has warned against thank-you notes written by ChatGPT after she received messages that looked suspiciously alike during a hiring process. Anyone who thinks they are getting away with it, she said, may in fact be giving themselves away.

What Greenhouse is doing

Greenhouse has built its own responses to the pileup. A feature called My Dream Job lets a candidate flag a single role each month as a top priority, and nearly half a million such applications have been submitted since it launched. Those candidates are hired at about five times the rate of everyone else, the company said.

The company also acquired Ezra AI Labs, which runs AI voice interviews, so that every applicant can be offered one. A mandatory interview at the front of the process, Chait has argued, would discourage people from firing off thousands of applications they have no real intent to pursue, since each one would then require sitting for an interview.

The case against résumés

In an interview with Forbes, Chait argued that the résumé itself is the problem. Its design centers on credentials, he said, with the applicant's name in bold at the top, followed by education, job titles, dates and the places they have worked, an order that rewards pedigree over ability.

He pointed to a well-known study in which applicants with Black-sounding names drew 50 percent fewer interview invitations, saying résumés carry that kind of bias at scale. Hiring, he contended, has not fundamentally changed in three decades, with paper résumés simply becoming PDFs while the underlying logic held.

His proposed alternative is structured, skills-focused AI interviews, delivered at any hour and at low cost. Such interviews, he said, could reveal what a candidate can actually do rather than what a two-page document signals about where they went to school. The question he posed to Forbes was how to ensure people get the best shot at being hired.

The figures describe activity on Greenhouse's own platform rather than the broader labor market, and the company sells the AI screening and interview tools its chief executive is recommending. The 412 percent and 111 percent increases are measured against 2022, according to the account in Forbes.

For job seekers, the practical takeaway from Chait is narrow. Aim at employers outside the headlines, and treat a small number of applications seriously rather than sending out many, since the candidates who used the priority feature fared far better than those who did not. As automated applications multiply, Benzinga's report noted, human signals of genuine interest grow more valuable precisely because they are rarer.

What comes next

Whether AI interviews reshape hiring, as Chait predicts, is unsettled, and he did not say when Greenhouse's tools would be in wide use across its customers. For now, both employers and applicants are contending with a market that, by his own account, is serving neither side.