“This is the first time when really both sides have been unhappy,” Chait told Fortune. “The market just isn’t working for either side.”

Job seekers, he says, are “piling more and more job applications into the black hole and not getting any progress.” It doesn’t matter how many they send—they “just don’t get anywhere.” 

So they’ve turned to AI tools that make the process less painful. “You can go search on Google, and there are tools that advertise, use AI to automatically apply to every Greenhouse job,” the jobs board boss said. “Someone goes and buys that tool, it’s like 20 bucks, and now they can just shoot out job applications willy-nilly to as many jobs as they want.”

On the other side of the inbox, recruiters are drowning. There are currently 175,000 live jobs on Greenhouse’s platform—and on average, for every job ad posted, around 254 job seekers are applying, pushing applications per recruiter up by 412%.

“They’ll often get hundreds or thousands of applications in just a day or two, and they’re not able to keep up with it,” Chait said. Worse, because so many of those applications are AI-generated, “they all start to look the same”—so candidates can no longer tell who is seriously interested from someone who has auto-applied to a thousand jobs overnight. 

It leaves employers turning to AI just to survive the flood of applications, while candidates who keep getting overlooked respond the only way they know how: applying to even more jobs.

“We’ve called that the AI doom loop,” he added. “Everyone’s using their own AI to solve their own problem, but it’s making the whole system worse,” he said.

CEOs and even Anne Hathaway are having the same issue: They can’t find good candidates because of AI

The data backs up how broken things have gotten. More than 1.2 million applications were submitted last year in the U.K. alone for fewer than 17,000 graduate roles. One young man with a master’s degree applied to thousands of positions for over six months without a single callback. And it could get even worse: Goodwill’s CEO Steve Preston has said the job center is bracing for an influx of jobless young people as AI eats into entry-level roles.

For CEO’s it means that finding the candidates they want is literally like finding a needle in a haystack.

Arvind Jain, the ex-Google engineer behind the $7.2 billion AI startup Glean, explained that his company gets thousands of job applications every single day—and he still can’t find the people he needs, because the best candidates are getting snapped up before he even has time to sift through a fifth of the applications. 

“Students think it’s hard to find jobs, but we think it’s hard to find them,” he told Fortune. 

Even the actress Anne Hathaway has run into the same wall. The Odyssey star revealed she was spammed with ChatGPT-written thank you notes after a recent hire. 

“I just want to warn you: If you’re out there thinking that you’re getting away with something, there’s a chance that you might be revealing yourself,” Hathaway said. 

Greenhouse has a fix for the doom loop—but networking and handwriting thank you notes help too

Chait agrees that the solution isn’t for everyone to just stop using AI. The cat is out of the bag, and there are simply too many people applying to too few roles for anyone to go back to doing things the old way.

But his company has launched two fixes for now: The first is a feature called “My Dream Job,” which lets a job seeker flag just one role a month, across every company on Greenhouse’s platform, as their top priority. Because it’s scarce, Chait says it forces real intent—and that intent becomes a signal employers can actually trust. Nearly half a million “dream job” applications have been submitted since launch, and Chait says those candidates get hired at roughly five times the rate of everyone else.

The second move: Greenhouse recently acquired an AI voice-interviewing company (Ezra AI Labs), which lets every applicant—not just a shortlisted few—get an interview. “Why would I send out automatic thousands of job applications if every single one of them I have to take an interview for?” Chait said. The goal is to kill the incentive to spam in the first place, while also cutting out the résumé-screening stage entirely—a step Chait says is riddled with bias and adds roughly six days to the hiring process for little real benefit.

But for desperate young workers who want to take action in their own hands, there are some ways to stand out among the millions of unemployed people fighting for a job. 

For one, the extra bit of effort it takes to handwrite a note could be an easy win, especially as one Gen Z hiring manager pointed out that they’re few and far between these days. 

Meanwhile, Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri recently told Fortune that the only reliable way to land a job anymore is to skip the applications entirely and build a relationship with someone on the inside—because, as he put it, some of the best jobs are “never published” at all.

His advice for job seekers who are young, hungry, and child-free is to get out and network at least 2 to 3 times a week: “Who you know, how you get to know them, and building your network will pay off over time.”