AI recruiters: faster, cheaper, and still clueless

Remember the days when you'd open your inbox to find a thrilling opportunity for a Senior Java Developer role. You'd blink, look at your GitHub profile filled with Rust & JavaScript, and wonder if they even read your name, let alone your history. It was the classic "wrong stack" email. Or maybe you got the time-traveler special: a recruiter demanding 10 years of Kubernetes experience in 2018. We laughed about them, deleted them, and moved on.

Now? We've pivoted to hyper-personalized, AI-powered recruitment efficiency.¹

On the surface, sure, it looks different. The emails are shinier. They mention your experience at your last three jobs, reference a couple of obscure repos you pushed to years ago, and even summarize that one blog post you wrote. The tone is conversational, almost human. It feels personal.

But then you keep reading, and that familiar disconnect kicks in.

The AI might have correctly spotted that you know Rust, but it's pitching a role needing five years in some niche embedded framework you touched once for a weekend hack. Or it praises your "deep understanding of frontend architecture" because you have a few commits in a React project, only to suggest a backend-heavy position where you'll never touch the UI.

The tech has changed, but the problem hasn't. It's still spray-and-pray.

AI recruiting emails are really just "wrong stack" emails with a fresh coat of paint and better grammar. Instead of a recruiter manually (and badly) keyword-matching, we have an LLM doing "semantic matching." It's just as shallow because it still has zero clue what you actually enjoy or want to do next.

At least the old "wrong stack" emails were honest in their laziness. You knew where you stood. AI emails are trickier because they mimic genuine interest. They waste more of your time because you actually have to read a bit of them to realize they're still missing the point.

Handing this off to an LLM isn't optimizing talent acquisition.¹ It's just automating the process of annoying us.

Real recruiting isn't a regex match. It's a relationship. You can't prompt-engineer a genuine connection. The best recruiters know that just because I can write Python doesn't mean I want to spend my next three years maintaining a legacy Django monolith. They get the vibe. They actually talk to you.

So yeah, the volume is up and the emails are politer. But until recruiters start acting like humans again, the signal is buried under a mountain of fake empathy.