What to know

On social media, some people are admitting to gaming the AI hiring systems to land job interviews.

These tactics include hiding keywords in white, mass applying to jobs, and writing code to trick an employer’s applicant tracking systems (ATS).

Technology and AI educator Avery Swartz says while these hacks can be seen as unethical, it’s the reality of apply for jobs in this bleak market.

In 2026’s bleak job market, it feels like job seekers are doing everything they can to land a job, or even just an interview. 

On social media, some people have advertised their ethically questionable tactics, such as hiding keywords from the job posting in white on their resume or cover letter to trick the applicant tracking systems (ATS) into moving their application to the next round. 

Others are using automation to bulk apply to jobs — even for those they’re not qualified for.

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On the more tech savvy side, job hunters are hiding lines of code in their applications so the AI automatically gives them a job interview. 

But why do job applicants feel the need to employ these tactics, and do they even work?

The reality of applying for jobs

Avery Swartz, CEO of Camp Tech and an AI educator, says while the act of working a system can be debated as being unethical, it has become the reality of applying for jobs in a difficult job market that often uses AI in various stages of hiring.

“Broadly speaking, there is a lot of artificial intelligence being used on all sides of the hiring process, and many recruiters and employers are using AI at various stages,” Swartz explains. “They’re literally using it to draft job postings. They’re using it to screen candidates. It’s a big thing and they can be using really sophisticated systems.”

Swartz says the effectiveness of these hacks that job seekers are hoping will help them “manipulate” the hiring process all depends on the type of AI an employer uses. Some systems will pick it up while others won’t.

“There is software that could just be as simple as someone just manually putting a whole bunch of job applications into ChatGPT and asking that system to rank them. It completely depends on what type of system an employer is using and that would determine where these hacks would or wouldn’t work, in terms of putting text in white or adding information in the code of a document.”

Flooding the market

An often used tactic to help people land job interviews is to take a quantity over quality approach to applying for jobs — flooding the market with hundreds of applications. Swartz says people are using AI like ChatGPT or Claude to apply for hundreds of jobs in a short period of time, even just in an afternoon. 

“It’s literally just doing it at scale. So you’re using some sort of automation tool that is helping you do that. In theory, a human could manually just sit there and just hit the submit button over and over again, but that means that they’re probably using an automation tool. Whether it’s technically artificial intelligence or if it’s just machine automation is on a case by case basis.”

To Swartz, “it very quickly becomes a race to the bottom of robots talking to robots” and “it’s a cycle that just keeps going around and around.”

Since the odds of you standing out among the countless people that mass apply to jobs are slim, you apply to even more jobs, and the cycle just keeps repeating. 

Breaking the cycle

Swartz does hiring for her company Camp Tech. She says the only way to break the demoralizing cycle of AI hindered job applications isn’t to try and game the AI, but to get outside of the loop — be more human. 

After going through the official job application process — sending in your resume and cover letter — applicants should network.

“We are social creatures. Work your network, your working relationships, try to get informational interviews with people by getting someone to introduce you to someone. That is often how a lot of hiring really happens,” she elaborates.

Swartz reminds job seekers to rise above just the fray, “because it can be very, very difficult to stand out when everyone is blasting hundreds of applications.”

But if you have to hack the system in order to get there, she wouldn’t blame you, because sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures. 

“Hiring has always been awful, but now it is especially awful by layering on this, this top layer of technology and AI that just really exacerbates what was already a really fraught process.”