If the human beings that Bob rejects are lucky, it has also been configured to send out an automated \u201cthanks but no thanks\u201d reply to their applications. If they\u2019re lucky. \u201cI used to think that the agony of waiting for a yes\/no response was bad,\u201d one jobseeker tells me, \u201cbut now I know that receiving an automated AI rejection to the application you spent two hours carefully crafting \u2013 literally 30 seconds after submitting it \u2013 is truly soul-destroying. Like, WTF \u2013 could it not just pause and pretend?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cApplicant tracking systems\u201d (ATS), which collect and sort job applications and track candidates through the stages of a hiring process, have been around for more than a decade, largely in a clunky supporting role to human HR staff. Increasingly, however, employers are adopting more sophisticated AI-powered recruitment tools, which take on tasks once performed by human recruiters. These more \u201cintelligent\u201d tools can drive and connect almost every step in the hiring process, from researching, analysing and shortlisting candidates and identifying potential applicants beyond those who have applied directly, to conducting preliminary screening \u201crobo-interviews\u201d and psychometric tests, carrying out background and reference checks, answering applicants\u2019 questions and scheduling interviews.<\/p>\n
Related Article This dehumanised combat zone is not the future, it is now. About 80 per cent of Australian companies report using AI technology at moderate or higher levels in recruitment, according to the 2025 Australian Responsible AI Index. The World Economic Forum put the figure in March 2025 at 90 per cent of companies worldwide.<\/p>\n In the opposite corner, fighting fire with fire, many if not most job-hunters now use generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to draft and\/or cross-check job applications. But in tacit recognition that the hiring process has become too machine-mediated for ordinary humans to negotiate unaided, the savviest of jobseekers, especially in the tech sphere, are pioneering new ways to navigate the employment market. They\u2019re using what\u2019s called \u201cagentic AI\u201d to build personal AI job-hunting agents like Mavis to automate multiple elements of the dismal process.<\/p>\n In my research for this article, I come across Abhijay Arora Vuyyuru, a San Francisco-based AI specialist employed by Alphabet, owners of Google, which wants to \u201cdemocratise access to career knowledge\u201d. Via a WhatsApp call, he describes to me how such an agent can start looking for and applying for jobs early every morning while the jobseeker hits the snooze button. He thinks that, within five years, every jobseeker will have one. \u201cIt most probably would be talking to an AI recruitment agent of the company \u2013 they\u2019d exchange notes.\u201d<\/p>\n I chat with a friend, a senior HR leader, and tell her that I\u2019m working on a story about job-hunting in the age of AI. She sighs. \u201cRecruitment will become the bots just botting each other soon, little robots yelling at each other,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n I first wrote about job-hunting for Good Weekend in 2023<\/a>. Then, the overwhelming story I heard was that older jobseekers face issues including ageism, income security, under-employment and a soul-eroding sense of irrelevance. None of that has changed. Only now, there is a pile-on of new factors. As the employment market starts to wobble, Ever more sophisticated AI-powered recruitment systems are contributing to the challenges and stress all job-hunters experience, not just older ones. As New York Magazine noted in an article earlier this year, \u201cThe job search has become a humiliation ritual.\u201d<\/p>\n Recruiter Stephen Coldicutt says the automation process has left many candidates lost and demoralised. \u201cIt can be heartless,\u201d says Coldicutt, associate director of Sydney-based The Safe Step, which specialises in the health, safety and environment sphere.<\/p>\n And recruiters widely acknowledge that the systems can make poor decisions: algorithms can determine an excellent candidate is not a sufficiently close match for a role and eliminate them before he or she has a chance to get near a human. Anna Whitlam, CEO of WhitlamCo executive search and advisory firm in Melbourne, offers the example of a senior corporate affairs leader, \u201ca no-brainer candidate\u201d, who applied for a job but was immediately rejected by an automated system. \u201cTime and time again what you will hear is a senior candidate not even getting an interview,\u201d Whitlam says.<\/p>\n Jobseekers have long talked about the \u201cATS black hole\u201d \u2013 applications that disappear into the ether, applicants left forever wondering where they went wrong. But there are deeper concerns: experts are sounding the alarm about what happens when one of life\u2019s most pivotal processes is increasingly controlled by opaque systems few people understand.<\/p>\n Amanda Bowler realised when she was 40 that her arms weren\u2019t going to let her keep working as a hairdresser until she retired and, in 2018, she started a psychology degree. \u201cI really love people and the mind and behaviour and how it all works,\u201d Bowler says via Zoom from the granny flat behind a friend\u2019s house in the central Victorian town of Trentham, where she\u2019s living temporarily. Unprompted, another friend of Bowler\u2019s tells me that she\u2019s \u201cone of the most energetic, driven, resilient, adaptable, vibrant, empathetic, generous and smart women I know\u201d.<\/p>\n Bowler finished her honours year in psychology last year. Before embarking on the postgraduate study required for clinical practice, she decided to test the job market for roles that might put her degree to use<\/a> in areas including aged care, research and program delivery, hospital administration, disability support and child protection casework. She estimates that over the past six months she has submitted 50 job applications. \u201cBasically, crickets. I have not had one face-to-face interview.\u201d<\/p>\n Bowler would like to think that she made the right decision to go back to study, but frequently feels she\u2019s on a path to nowhere. \u201cI\u2019m willing to work hard. I have 30 years of business management and ownership behind me and build rapport with nearly everyone I meet. I keep thinking that surely organisations will see my transferable skills! I just need someone to look outside the box and see that I have so much to offer; I just need an opportunity to talk to a real person.\u201d<\/p>\n Bowler is 48. She has a HECS debt of about $44,000, a meagre super balance and nowhere permanent to call home. While she looks for work, she\u2019s surviving on friends\u2019 love, loyal hairdressing clients and Airbnb cleaning work. \u201cI have watched as her bubble, which she desperately tries to keep inflated, has started to shrivel,\u201d Bowler\u2019s friend tells me.<\/p>\n In such a dehumanising job market, there will be casualties:<\/a> the technologically unsophisticated, the anxious, the sensitive or the timid struggle. Older workers who pre-date the LinkedIn-buzzword-optimised, keyword-dense professional identity frequently find themselves in unwanted early retirement or the driver\u2019s seat of an Uber. And AI systems are not generally friendly towards people who have had varied career and life experiences and built a wide array of skills rather than a specific, highly honed few that can be encapsulated in corporate-speak, or those like Bowler, who might be trying to launch into a new industry. \u201cIf organisations are using AI to screen the first volume of applications, and are looking for keywords, I am the square peg in a round hole,\u201d says Bowler.<\/p>\n Think of it as a giant game of word-matching: AI recruitment systems scan at a granular level for keyword and terminology matches between a position description and an applicant\u2019s experience. If, for example, a job ad for an aged-care worker asks for someone with experience in \u201ccase management\u201d, \u201cholistic health plans\u201d and \u201cperson-centred care\u201d, and an applicant like Bowler describes broadly similar experience using different language, a human recruiter reading her application might recognise her aptitude for the role. But the AI system has no imagination, no interest in nuance and debatable judgment. Bowler\u2019s application is likely to be screened out because she has not used precise keywords and terminology.<\/p>\n \u201cThe person who\u2019s the absolute diamond in the rough is sitting ranked number 221, they\u2019re never going to get seen,\u201d says John Baker, a former executive search leader who now coaches senior jobseekers. \u201cI don\u2019t think AI is at a point where it would identify that person.\u201d<\/p>\n Recruiters can also instruct the systems to prioritise candidates who have one particular credential or experience in a particular niche or sector and downgrade those who don\u2019t. For example, a car company looking for a CFO could tell an AI recruitment system that it is only interested in people who have worked for Toyota and Subaru; someone who might match every other requirement for the role but who has only worked at Hyundai won\u2019t get a look in. Such is the opacity of the AI systems that applicants will never know why. Transparency has always been limited in the job application process but at least in the past, decisions were made by humans and potentially explainable.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really hard to get a handle on how [the AI systems] are being used because everyone uses them differently, even if they use the same tool, it might be operating the process in a different way,\u201d says Dr Natalie Sheard, a lawyer and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Melbourne, whose research has included extensive interviews with employers. \u201cThey might configure it in a different way to suit their organisation. It\u2019s really complicated technology. What came out of my research was that employers didn\u2019t know how these systems worked. The recruiters themselves could work it day to day, but they might not understand the technology.\u201d<\/p>\n The AI effect overlays the issues that have always faced job-hunters \u2013 including common discourtesy. Claudia*, 42, is living with her mother in Tasmania and working in an unstable government role while looking for senior roles to match her international marketing experience. She tells me that she has applied for more than 100 jobs over the past two years \u2013 with some breaks for sanity. \u201cI just hit a wall last year \u2013 I was really angry from the rejection; I just thought, \u2018This cannot be happening.\u2019 \u201d Last year, Claudia had a 2am interview scheduled for a position with a \u201cscrappy\u201d overseas company. \u201cI got online, made sure I was made up and looked alert and alive and, at that ungodly hour, the person didn\u2019t join the call \u2013 for a job I didn\u2019t even want!\u201d<\/p>\n Related Article Others face ageism and the searing issue of finding relevance and meaning in life when there\u2019s no job to provide it. Cameron McDonald, 63, has not been able to find work since his position as a senior business development specialist with a Canberra consultancy was made redundant in 2022. He says he wasn\u2019t actively chasing work, but when he was approached via his LinkedIn profile to put his hat in the ring for a handful of roles, he submitted applications. He got through to the interview stage for two of the positions but was eventually eliminated. McDonald blames ageism. \u201cThe people who got the job, I could see, were 10 to 15 years younger than me,\u201d he says. \u201cIt didn\u2019t make me feel too good; the most upsetting thing was the fact that I knew that I had a hell of a lot to offer.\u201d<\/p>\n Although financially secure enough not to work, McDonald thought a little pocket money might be handy and, in late 2025, he applied for a service position at Bunnings. He reached the second stage \u2013 a recorded one-way video interview, often called a robo-interview<\/a>. These increasingly common, torturous sessions require candidates to talk to their blank screen recording video responses to a series of questions, with the footage later reviewed by recruiters, AI software or both<\/a>. One jobseeker tells me that he felt he always looked flustered during the interviews as his eyes were forced to dart between the question and his computer\u2019s camera.<\/p>\n \u201cI do not agree with them,\u201d says Sydney recruiter Stephen Coldicutt. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s great for the candidate at all, they don\u2019t allow people to be natural.\u201d<\/p>\n Certainly for McDonald, it was an awkward experience. \u201cI didn\u2019t do very well at all, obviously, because I didn\u2019t get through; I felt uncomfortable.\u201d He knows he was enormously over-qualified for the job but still, he was \u201cpissed off\u201d. He says he hates to sound like an \u201cold fart\u201d but he looks around his local Bunnings and \u201cGen Z people, they look like they are asleep\u201d.<\/p>\n His issues might or might not have had anything to do with the AI hiring process, but experts worry that automated systems make it harder to detect and challenge existing forms of discrimination. The opacity of the technology is a \u201cmassive problem\u201d, says Sheard. \u201cThe headline is \u2013 there are serious risks of discrimination when employers use AI in hiring. You could put anything into that back end: you could put in that you don\u2019t want a woman, or you don\u2019t want anyone over a certain age.\u201d Sheard points out a US discrimination lawsuit where a company had to pay out $US365,000 [about $515,000] in 2023 after configuring its AI to reject women 55 or over and men 60 or over.<\/p>\n And in what Sheard says is an important new study, researchers at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab have found evidence that when large numbers of employers use the same AI hiring systems, the same algorithms can produce repeated outcomes and biases across the labour market, potentially disadvantaging the same kinds of candidates across multiple employers.<\/p>\n Vendors of AI hiring technology counter that the problem is not AI itself but how it is designed and deployed, and that human recruiters can bring their own prejudices to the hiring process. I ask Elle Green, Asia-Pacific head of marketing for the AI hiring platform SmartRecruiters, which is used by organisations including Qantas and the NSW government, about embedded biases in the technology. \u201cThat is a definite concern,\u201d Green says. \u201cIt\u2019s an area that we certainly haven\u2019t solved for yet as an industry.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018I just hit a wall last year \u2013 I was really angry from the rejection; I just thought, \u201cThis cannot be happening.\u201d \u2019<\/p>\n Claudia*, 42, has applied for more than 100 jobs in two years<\/p>\n But she adds that not all AI hiring processes are equal; \u201cgood AI\u201d, she says, should be transparent and can be trained to remove bias. \u201cHiring managers are often the blocker when it comes to ageism, for example.\u201d<\/p>\n Green adds that good AI systems offer employers a range of benefits, including attracting a \u201cbroader, better-match\u201d candidate pool and speeding up high-volume and repetitive parts of the hiring process such as sorting a large array of applicants and coordinating interviews, allowing recruiters and managers to spend more time on interviews and decision-making: \u201cIt\u2019s actually uplifting the recruiter\u2019s human, softer skills.\u201d She also says that well-designed AI systems can go beyond simple keyword matching to identify a candidate\u2019s transferable and related skills \u2013 \u201cinferred skills\u201d \u2013 that a recruiter scanning a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 might overlook.<\/p>\n Antony Nardone, founder and director of FourQuarters Recruitment, says the company is using AI as much as possible to make processes more efficient, particularly those related to sorting and filtering candidates. \u201cWhat we\u2019re also seeing is our clients are investing heavily in using AI tools.\u201d Processes that once took days, he says, can now be completed in minutes.<\/p>\n But AI is a double-edged sword. Recruiters face a new challenge: determining the authenticity of applicants, Nardone says. \u201cIt\u2019s harder to distinguish because our candidates are utilising AI themselves for their own applications. AI is still not the perfect tool \u2026 it still requires the human element.\u201d<\/p>\n When I ask Phoebe* during our Zoom conversation how she\u2019s feeling about her job search, she pauses to hold back tears, then turns her head away from her screen. She\u2019s swallowing tears. \u201cI promised myself I wouldn\u2019t cry when I was talking to you,\u201d she says. \u201cBut it\u2019s really hard to keep going. I won\u2019t lie, you just feel like such a loser.\u201d Since her role as a senior corporate affairs leader for a major multinational company was made redundant at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Perth-based Phoebe, 53, has found herself in a similar situation to that facing Claudia in Tasmania: she has not been able to find a role to match her international experience and seniority. She has held several roles in the years since, including as the head of an industry association, and now as a corporate affairs consultant, but has earned less than half her previous salary.<\/p>\n Phoebe does a quick count for me while I wait; she lifts her head from a spreadsheet and says she has applied for more than 50 roles since 2023 and had nine interviews. Frequently she doesn\u2019t get a response to her applications, niente, nada, the \u201cATS black hole\u201d. She applied for a role with the major AI company Anthropic. She received no response. The AI company that can\u2019t get its AI right to send a courteous AI reply.<\/p>\n Phoebe has concluded that the AI systems screen her out early because of her substantial experience and salary expectations and the fact that she has applied for roles in industries other than the one in which she has mostly worked. In such applications, it\u2019s harder for her to include all the keywords listed in job ads. She shrugs: \u201cI thought my skill set was industry-agnostic.\u201d<\/p>\n In any case, wearily resigned to the process, Phoebe uses the mainstream generative AI tool Gemini to help with her applications. \u201cI use it as a thought-starter, or like my study buddy \u2013 I ask it loads of questions, like, \u2018What are the main challenges in this sector\u2019 or \u2018Who are the main stakeholders across this industry?\u2019 \u201d She also uses AI to tailor her master r\u00e9sum\u00e9 to specific roles, identify gaps and match keywords between the position description and her application. Aware of AI\u2019s fallibility, she fact-checks anything it feeds her and spends considerable time writing cover letters. It\u2019s an approach that recruiter Stephen Coldicutt would applaud. He believes candidates should do 90 per cent of the work themselves, especially on cover letters which should, he says, \u201cbe telling a story\u201d.<\/p>\n Phoebe\u2019s approach might help her stand out amid what recruiters describe as a deluge of AI-written applications; LinkedIn data shows that since late 2022, Australian applicants per role have nearly doubled. \u201cIt\u2019s a sea of sameness, you see the same r\u00e9sum\u00e9 produced by Claude or ChatGPT a hundred thousand times a day, using the same language and listing the same skills,\u201d says Rob Dunderdale, former KPMG Australia head of talent attraction.<\/p>\n But AI specialist Abhijay Arora Vuyyuru does not believe the future of job-hunting lies in ever greater torrents of applications written by Claude or ChatGPT washing into recruiters\u2019 inboxes. Instead, it\u2019s something else altogether.<\/p>\n Enter Mavis, your personal AI job-hunting agent.<\/p>\n Related Article \u201cThe shift we are seeing is from just a simple prompt that you\u2019d give to ChatGPT to something more complicated where you\u2019re creating an automation that runs at a given time,\u201d says Vuyyuru, who works on AI products at Alphabet-owned YouTube. He became interested in how a job search could be assisted with agentic AI \u2013 systems that can plan, act and use tools with some autonomy \u2013 after graduating in 2022 from Harvard Business School into what he describes as a \u201cbrutal\u201d job market. Frustrated by the time he spent applying for internships, out of curiosity he later built a personal job-hunting agent which can work across a range of job-hunting tasks, from scraping job boards to tailoring r\u00e9sum\u00e9s.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t want anybody else going through that pain,\u201d says Vuyyuru, who writes a Substack newsletter, AI Action Letter and has more than 600,000 followers on Instagram. While initially Vuyyuru imagined his audience was people with sophisticated tech skills, off-the-shelf software including workflow and data-gathering tools are increasingly opening up automation to everyone \u2013 \u201cno coding background required\u201d. He believes that, within the next few years, those looking for work who don\u2019t have a personal AI agent will be at a disadvantage because people who do \u201cwill be so much more proficient in applying for jobs\u201d.<\/p>\n But Vuyyuru\u2019s predictions don\u2019t stop there. \u201cAI agents are going to be everywhere; it\u2019ll be an interesting space.\u201d He says communication between employers\u2019 AI agents and job-seekers\u2019 AI agents will be \u201cbig\u201d.<\/p>\n An absurd future is upon us. Think of it as a case of \u201cI\u2019ll get my AI agent to talk to your AI agent.\u201d<\/p>\n Matt* comes on to my computer screen with a broad smile on his face. I tell him that he looks like he just got a call to say he got the job (he didn\u2019t). \u201cEvery day is a wonderful opportunity to meet or exceed customer expectations while delivering outstanding value,\u201d he says. I do a double take, then realise he\u2019s poking fun at management speak.<\/p>\n Until late last year when Brisbane-based Matt, 51, stepped away from work to devote time to his neurodivergent daughter, he had spent nearly two decades in executive positions as an operations expert across a range of companies. He embarked on the process of returning to the workforce about three months ago. The experience, he says, has been \u201chorrible\u201d.<\/p>\n Matt\u2019s big smile fades. He has applied for about 200 jobs and, in some cases, had AI rejections to applications within 30 seconds of submitting them; he\u2019s had to provide his date of birth and refused to do robo-interviews and been ghosted by recruiters. He has developed some strong opinions about younger members of the recruitment industry. \u201cTheir understanding is really single- or two-dimensional at best,\u201d he says. \u201cThey go, \u2018Oh, we spoke to the client and the client said they want XYZ, do you have XYZ on your CV?\u2019 If you don\u2019t have XYZ and you\u2019re not matchy-matchy, you\u2019re not the right person.\u201d<\/p>\n Matt says he can pay the bills for several more months, but the story is more loaded than that. \u201cFinancially it\u2019s not bad; it\u2019s the mental stability and \u2026 [thinking], \u2018I\u2019m not meeting my commitment to my family,\u2019 and that\u2019s really screwing with my psyche.\u201d His wife works but tensions are emerging between them. \u201cAs a bloke you\u2019re supposed to be the provider, you\u2019re supposed to be looking after your family,\u201d he says. \u201cIt has been quite challenging to the point of like, sometimes it feels better if I\u2019m not here \u2026 I\u2019ll just twitch the car off the cliff.\u201d<\/p>\n Each of them just wants the chance to be seen and heard … In this new automated job market, that seems almost impossible.<\/p>\n His comment is a grave reminder of the humanity at the heart of job-seeking. Life stressors run alongside the process, emotions run high, important life decisions go on hold, things go nowhere. One woman I speak to for this story, a lawyer who has been searching for a new job for nearly a year, wants to try to get pregnant. She turns 40 later this year, she can see the clock, but she and her husband\u2019s credit cards are maxed out. Any idea of a baby is on hold. Claudia in Tasmania is increasingly fearful for her government job \u2013 \u201cmajor downsizing\u201d is coming. She would like to buy her own home but her ongoing uncertainty around employment means she can\u2019t even consider it. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely not how I thought my life would be,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Natalie Sheard, the University of Melbourne academic, has interviewed a number of jobseekers for her research. \u201cIt brings up a lot of emotions in people,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s like you\u2019re being excluded from society. I think someone actually said, \u2018I just want to participate in society, I want to contribute.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n The creeping encroachment of increasingly powerful AI recruitment systems adds a new layer of agony. All this brisk, automated efficiency, hundreds or thousands of human hopefuls sorted, filed, rejected, processed. \u2026 There will be a price to pay, on both a societal and individual level.<\/p>\n Ironically, all the job-hunters I\u2019ve interviewed who are dealing with AI recruitment systems say that relationships, human contact, lie at the heart of their work \u2013 why they love it, why they\u2019re good at it. \u201cThe way I operate, relationships are at the core,\u201d Matt tells me. Amanda Bowler, who as a hairdresser spent her days listening to her clients\u2019 stories with kindness and empathy (who hasn\u2019t poured their heart out to their hairdresser?); Phoebe, whose corporate affairs work relies on her ability to form relationships and collaborate with stakeholders to solve problems or advance opportunities.<\/p>\n Each of them just wants the chance to be seen and heard. Hello! Look over here! I\u2019m here! Listen to what I can tell you! In this new automated job market, that seems almost impossible.<\/p>\n If there is a small shaft of light, it\u2019s that the experts I speak to tell me that the more AI systems are used, the more humans will be needed. For a start, recruiters and career coaches agree that intense networking with other human beings, the a-coffee-date-a-week approach, is still the best way to get a job. \u201cSelf-advocacy and personalising your approach to a job search is actually quite a game-changer and takes you out of being part of the mass application pool,\u201d says Jannine Fraser, group CEO of Melbourne-headquartered career transition and coaching specialist Directioneering. Fraser says that if a job-hunter has been out genuinely connecting with people \u2013 industry contacts, potential employers, recruiters \u2013 they might already have met someone in some position of influence before any job hits the market. \u201cYou\u2019ve already had a conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n Related Article Conversely, as AI makes it easier for people to misrepresent themselves in their job hunt, humans in positions of authority will be needed to identify the authentic candidates. \u201cThis may sound a little bit counter-intuitive, but human relationships will become more and more important,\u201d Abhijay Arora Vuyyuru says. \u201cI would think that a lot of hiring is going to happen in person; a lot of these AI systems are getting so good that [an employer] would want to test whether a person is actually able to think for themselves or has just leveraged AI for their application.\u201d<\/p>\n Rob Dunderdale adds: \u201cIf we\u2019ve got AI producing the CV and AI marking the CV, everybody\u2019s going to come out with a five-star rating.\u201d How, he asks, do recruiters and hirers work out where the top talent is, who has the experience a company wants rather than just an AI-manufactured r\u00e9sum\u00e9<\/a>?<\/p>\n Dunderdale is one of many who believes the answer might partly lie in even further AI advances \u2013 more precise, more insightful tools that can assess candidates fairly and transparently against an organisation\u2019s values, overlaying a human\u2019s core skills and the transferability of those skills, how they like to work and, even, good grief, who they are as a human. \u201dI would love to see death to the CV. I think the CV now has had its day,\u201d Dunderdale says. \u201cIt\u2019s telling me what you\u2019ve done in the past. It\u2019s not telling me anything about your values, it\u2019s not telling me anything about your potential. It\u2019s not telling me anything about your core skills and the skills that are adjacent to those skills.\u201d<\/p>\n Just before I\u2019m due to submit this article, I get an email from Amanda Bowler. Finally, she found someone to really see her, see past her r\u00e9sum\u00e9. Her application made it through to the second round of a process for a role in child protection. A video interview with a human being followed. \u201cI was offered a position,\u201d she wrote. \u201cAfter all the hard work looking for a career path, something finally came. I was so excited! But then, incredibly, I heard that I\u2019ve been offered a Commonwealth Supported Place! It will save me so much money. \u2026 I turned the job down and I\u2019m going back to uni to do my masters.\u201d<\/p>\n *Some names have been changed.<\/p>\n Lifeline: 13 11 14.<\/p>\n![\"Early](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/22c1ce57a7ee938ff91d23ad7ce6f08c2260734a78efd8eb1c6ef69e84cf3611.jpeg\")
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In the process of looking for a new career, Amanda Bowler struggled with the role AI is playing.Simon Schluter<\/p>\n![\"\u201cYou](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/89473393b6044dc0fe336e6544626f39d2a3a691.jpeg\")
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Ever applied for a job you\u2019re perfect for and didn\u2019t even score an interview? If you\u2019re not using precise keywords and terminology, the AI used in the hiring process means employers might not even know you\u2019re there.Getty<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/bc687f450d45ca059c9f97333bcef52425e73c7a.jpeg\")
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