In a recent “leak” from OpenAI it was revealed who had used more than one trillion tokens on their API, and number three was Indeed.com. A popular job recruitment portal.
Disappointingly number one was DuoLingo, to that I say “No me gusta DuoLingo usar muchos Tokens. Usar gente, pendejos!”
So I thought I would have a look to see what Indeed thinks about AI, since they seem to be such a massive user of it themselves, and I found two interesting blog posts on their own website.
How Indeed Uses AI: Employer Tools and Responsible Use
September 17, 2025
https://www.indeed.com/hire/resources/howtohub/how-indeed-uses-ai
What Employers Think of Job Seekers Leveraging Gen AI Tools
July 27, 2025
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/news/job-seekers-leveraging-gen-ai-tools
So, what AI tools does Indeed provide for its corporate users? Well, there is:
- Talent Scout, which is a conversational AI agent that connects with candidates. Building a shortlist of applicants.
- There is also the AI job description generator, in case a company can’t even be bothered writing its own job ad.
- Smart Sourcing AI analyses job seekers resumes and profiles and matches that against your AI generated job ad.
- Job-based matched candidates, even more ways to find candidates using AI
- AI-generated outreach messages, because who doesn’t love a soulless automated cold message
- Candidate highlights, which specifically says that “Reviewing resumes can take time. Smart Sourcing’s candidate highlights may help you do it more quickly by highlighting key candidate qualifications at a glance. This AI-powered feature scans resumes, generating summaries of why a candidate may fit your open role.”
So they have pretty much outsourced the entire HR team into various AI agents on their platform.
You can scout new talent raw, or use AI to generate a job ad that might have something similar with the actual duties the employee would do. Then when you get applicants, use AI to weed out the chaff so that only the top 1% of 1% of people can finally speak to a human.
So, what about Job Seekers who use AI tools? What are they using it for?
Well, with Job Seekers needing to apply to between 30 and 200 jobs, it’s no wonder they are using AI to help them with:
- Drafting coverletters
- Refining existing cover letters or entire resumes to suit the job they are applying for
- Responding to recruiters messages, which after all, are likely already AI, and
- Preparing for interviews
So while the Job Seeker still needs actual experience, they use Gen-AI to create everything they need to apply for the jobs.
So, to recap the loop we have here:
- Human at a company thinks “This job requires someone to push a physical button, so we can’t outsource this to AI, better hire someone.”
- AI writes the job description
- Job Seekers uses AI to summurise the job description and create a cover letter and resume specifically tailored for “push a physical button”
- Company uses an AI to filter the list of candidates based on the AI resume based on the AI job description.
- Company uses AI to reach out to the top 5 candidates
- Job Seeker uses AI to craft a reply to the outreach
- Job Seeker uses AI to prep for hard hitting interview questions about “how to push a physical button”
- Then there is the interview, which I’ve seen many videos of people having the actual interview with an AI Agent
- Finally all that gets summurised and sent to the human at the company who just picks whoever is at the top of the list, after all, everything up to this point has been automated, so why bother injecting any reasoning or thought into it at this point.
- And now someone is hired. The system works.
But if we scroll down in the second article there is an interesting sentiment report.
So remember, all this is coming from Indeed themselves, who promote all of their AI processes that can streamline the entire hiring process, and they say of Job Seekers that use AI:
- If a resume is AI generated, the applicant might not be very creative, and it requires additional effort to ascertain if what the job seeker has said is true
- Using AI to auto-apply for jobs, well that’s seen as lazy
- Using AI to draft replies to recruiters messages, well that’s hard to ascertain the genuineness of the message, and also requires additional effort in evaluating their skills
So using AI by the companies to automate the hiring process is seen a streamlining and innovative. But using AI by the job seekers is seen as uncreative, lazy and burdensome.
AI for me, not for thee.
And don’t get me started on the whole AI eating its own tail thing.
- Company posts a Job Ad, it was originally 5 dot points of duties, but that’s “not professional” to uses AI to flesh it out a bit.
- Job Seeker sees the advertisement and uses AI to summurise it into 5 dot points.
- They write their response to the 5 dot points, but that’s “not professional” to uses AI to flesh it out a bit and submits it
- Company sees hundreds of responses, but doesn’t have time to read them all, so uses AI to summurise them all into 5 dot points.
And we have to hope that the game of telephone hasn’t warped the original requirements, all the while, every time something is fleshed out or summurised, we divert another litre of drinking water, and burn another shovel of coal.