DOGE-Driven Job Applicant Boom Prompts Spike in AI Use by Recruiters

Overwhelmed recruiters are turning to AI to help sort through thousands of job applicants. Often, they’re getting thousands of applications for one open position.

While the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that national unemployment levels are low—around 4 percent—the U.S. is going through a “white-collar recession,” according to Andrew Flowers, chief economist at the recruitment platform Appcast, who discussed the phenomenon in a recent webinar.

Between layoffs at major companies like Meta and Starbucks, and the dismantling of federal agencies by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) group, the job market is flooded with professionals desperate to land a new role. Their segment of the job market, though, is showing many signs of companies taking a conservative approach to hiring because of tariffs and other economic uncertainties, Flowers says.

“For those of us with family and friends looking for work, we all know it’s hard out there,” Flowers says. “If you’re trying to find a job, the chances are going down from 30 percent to around 25 percent.”

Flowers notes that job seekers are being “less picky” about where they apply, desperate to land a role before the U.S. plunges into a recession—which is not a foregone conclusion, he adds. As a result, HR departments are being flooded with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of applications for a single position, according to Lindsey Zuloaga, chief data scientist at HireVue, an Utah-based recruitment platform.

“I had a data scientist position in the fall, and I don’t hire that often, but I had like 4,000 candidates in a week and a half. And the truth is, a lot of them weren’t qualified. They’re just desperately applying for anything,” Zuloaga says.

Flooding the zone isn’t a new job hunting tactic, and technology has made it easier to churn out a high volume of applications in a short time. But as Zuloaga notes, more applicants doesn’t necessarily mean more great applicants. Enter technology again, this time on the hiring side.

Thanks to remote work, candidates are no longer restricted to geographical areas. And while remote work gives companies access to a larger talent pool, it’s become so large that “it’s really hard to filter,” Zuloaga says. So, recruiters are turning to AI solutions to sort through these mountains of applications; in 2025, weekly AI usage for HR professionals spiked to 72 percent, compared with 58 percent last year, according to HireVue data. Zuloaga attributes the uptick in AI usage to HR professionals becoming more comfortable and trusting of the technology.

The same can’t be said for job seekers. In a recent survey of 1,000 job seekers, more than 67 percent said they were “uncomfortable” with companies using AI to make hiring decisions. And 90 percent expect companies to be upfront about using the technology during recruitment.

Despite job seekers’ negative perceptions, AI is structured to promote hiring based on a candidate’s ability to learn new skills, rather than skills they used in past roles. The research and advisory firm Gartner calls it “hiring for promise, instead of proficiency,” according to Jamie Kohn, senior director of the company’s HR practice.

“If you have a person who is eager to learn, and knows how to take a new problem and pull it apart and find a solution, they’re going to be able to learn the specific technical skills they need to do the job,” Kohn says.

Gartner’s recruitment technology measures candidate promise through games and assessments. But AI can also help identify applicant skills and strengths that aren’t mentioned in their application.

“People are not always good at being able to list out all of the skills that they have,” Kohn says. “But AI can help us say, ‘if a person has skill, they might also have this other skill.’”

Kohn says these features can also help identify jobs that are well suited for applicants who present themselves as having transferable skills, even if they don’t have direct experience in a role they’re matched with through AI. Not only does this open up opportunities for job seekers, but it can also help companies hire talent they would’ve overlooked based on applicants’ stated experience alone.

“AI is definitely helping to expand beyond just keywords and the traditional way that we’ve evaluated somebody’s fit for the job,” Kohn says. Zuloaga points out that hiring teams can use the data they collect from job seekers to place “silver medalist candidates”—applicants who almost got the job they applied for—in newly available roles. She believes it’s much easier than starting the hiring process from scratch, and allows companies to continue relationships with candidates who made a good impression.

“We’ve collected this super-valuable data when someone spent 20 or 30 minutes doing an assessment that’s way more valuable than their LinkedIn profile—so that data should be used, obviously with the consent of the candidate, to help them find something else,” Zuloaga says.

In the case of laid-off federal workers looking for opportunities in corporate America, Kohn notes their ability to work in “very complicated sets of rules and structures” and “problem solve with few resources” could make them a great asset to startups and small businesses.

“The experiences that they have are not always ones that exist in corporate America, but they do have a strong sense of leadership and service,” Kohn says.

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