Few markets capture the strange new economics of artificial intelligence as vividly as the one for tech jobs in the Bay Area — where the same technology being built is now breaking the process of getting hired to build it.
What 'spray and pray' means
"Spray and pray" is old recruiting slang for firing off as many applications as possible with little targeting, hoping something lands. Software has supercharged it. A new class of auto-apply tools can submit scores of applications a day on a user's behalf, and a large majority of job seekers now use AI in some form to write or tailor their materials, according to a survey of job seekers reported by Fortune. Surveys of applicant behavior have found roughly half of job seekers now apply broadly and quickly rather than selectively, The HR Digest reported.
The logic is rational at the individual level. With employers rarely responding, applicants conclude that volume is the only lever they control.
Employers answer with their own algorithms
The volume lands on recruiters who are already overwhelmed, and their response has been to automate screening in turn. Daniel Chait, chief executive of the hiring platform Greenhouse, summed up the paradox to Fortune: it is "really hard to make a hire because we get overwhelmed with tons of applicants," even as job seekers find it "easier than ever to apply" but "harder and harder to get a job."
Most large employers now route applications through tracking systems with AI-assisted filtering — which makes its own mistakes, screening out qualified people whose resumes are formatted in ways the software cannot parse, sometimes in under a second.
A loop with no exit
Industry insiders have a name for the spiral: the AI doom loop. Applicants use AI to generate volume; employers use AI to filter it; applicants then try to game the filters. In the Fortune-cited survey, a notable share of job seekers admitted to "prompt injection" — hidden text in a resume meant to manipulate AI screeners — a tactic most common among IT applicants. Trust has eroded on both sides: many job seekers say they have lost confidence in hiring over the past year, with the figure highest among Gen Z entry-level workers, while hiring managers report rising worry about application fraud.
The California context
The Bay Area's version of this is sharpened by the broader tech downturn. The same AI wave disrupting hiring is also the stated reason for the layoffs reshaping the regional workforce, as companies trim roles while racing to hire AI engineers. For the workers caught in between — mid-career engineers, product managers, designers — the unsettling message is that neither the old job market nor the new one has an obvious place for them yet.
The irony is hard to miss. The technology sold as a productivity revolution has, at least for now, made one of the economy's most basic transactions — matching a person to a job — slower, noisier and more dispiriting for nearly everyone involved. What a workable equilibrium looks like, and which side of the screening algorithm Bay Area workers end up on, is among the region's most consequential open questions.
