The Scoop
Frustrated and feeling hamstrung in their job searches on LinkedIn, some applicants say they have figured out a way to bust through the platform’s resume screening AI tools that they think are keeping hiring managers from seeing their credentials.
Software developers in Spain and Italy say they’ve created their own artificial intelligence bots that scan your resume, search for relevant jobs, and automatically submit hundreds to thousands of applications in the span of a few days — all while bypassing LinkedIn’s anti-bot measures.
The platform serves as a resume clearinghouse for its 1 billion members, with seven people getting jobs out of the 9,000 applications submitted every minute through its portal, according to the company. LinkedIn has deployed AI in recent years to help recruiters “find quality candidates quickly” and job seekers, who can pay $29.99 a month for Premium membership, find openings they may have otherwise overlooked, a company spokesperson said.
But some users are deploying their own AI bots to blanket LinkedIn job postings with their resumes — without forking out for Premium subscriptions — despite LinkedIn’s best efforts to block bots that scrape or automate activity on the site. It’s become a cat-and-mouse game that separates the have-nots from the have-bots: Job seekers flood employers with AI-generated applications while companies use LinkedIn’s AI to recruit and vet prospective candidates.
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Madrid-based software developer Jorge Frias said he created his own OpenAI-powered bot last year that automatically writes and submits cover letters to LinkedIn Easy Apply job openings.
To get around LinkedIn’s anti-bot measures, Frias said he made sure his bots didn’t trigger LinkedIn’s detection software by applying for too many jobs too quickly. “You just need to make the system behave like a human — a fast, 90 percentile human with an impossibly large bladder,” he said.
So far, Frias said he’s gotten away with it: “No one from LinkedIn ever contacted me about the tool.”
Initially, less than 1% of his applications turned into interviews, the same rate as before, but he didn’t care. Once the software was up and running, Frias said he “just put the program to work in the morning and stopped it after 12 hours, without futile hours on my side.” It used to take him 30 to 60 minutes to manually apply for a single position. But his job search partner submitted applications every 5 to 10 minutes during the day over about 4 months, taking breaks to avoid detection.
His “conversion rate” of applications to interviews soared after his bot retooled his resume to optimize it for “applicant tracking systems,” which is one of the AI tools recruiters use to sift through candidates. One of those applications turned into Frias’ current job at e-security company Ascertia, he said.
Italian software engineer Federico Elia, said he similarly created a bot that can apply for 1,000 jobs in two days, scanning openings and writing resumes and cover letters fitting the job descriptions.
Elia, who used his own tool to search for a job, landed 50 interviews, which the software developer said was a lot for the sector.
One 31-year-old sales rep in California said he used Elia’s bot after manually hunting for jobs on LinkedIn became too much like “trying to cast a wish into a black void.”
“Rather than negotiate from a position of weakness, I’d like to be the person with all the cards in my hand,” he said, asking not to be identified because he didn’t want recruiters to know he was benefiting from AI help. “Now I’m turning down offers every day.”
Elia said he attracted some wanted — and unwanted — attention after he posted about his LinkedIn hack on LinkedIn, getting more than 14,000 profile impressions in a month, a contract from a startup, and 50 job potential job leads from the bot itself. LinkedIn’s Trust and Safety Team also took notice, deleting his original post and every repost. The platform sent 26 identical emails saying the posts were removed for violating the site’s policies, before LinkedIn unblocked the posts and apologized for the mistake an hour later, he said.
“It would seem that initially my posts were blocked by a bot, for some strange reason, and then unblocked by a human being,” he said. A LinkedIn spokesperson told Semafor they couldn’t publicly discuss any action on members’ accounts due to data protection.
LinkedIn restricted Elia from accessing his account again this week for “repeatedly sharing content that facilitates access to tools that automate activity on LinkedIn in violation of LinkedIn’s user agreement,” according to an email seen by Semafor.