AI didn't break the job search

AI didn't make the job search worse. It made something obvious that was always true.

I've done over 100 discovery interviews with people using AI to look for work, and I've changed my mind about what was going wrong. Earlier this year I wrote that most of what they were doing with AI wasn't working, and that I couldn't tell if the problem was the AI, the approach or something else entirely.

The thing it made obvious is that hiring starts from someone's network. A person who knows you, or knows someone who does, was how most doors opened long before any of this.

Look at the cold path now. AI drafts the application and AI sends it. On the other side, AI increasingly reads the resume and decides whether a person ever sees it. That path can now run from start to finish with nobody on either end, which makes it hard to keep pretending it's where hiring happens.

Paul Graham wrote about startup investors years ago: "Both angels and VCs get deals almost exclusively through personal introductions." Jobs work the same way. The cold application was always the long shot. AI just took the people out of it.

So the way in is the one it always was. You knock. You find a person who can open the door, and you talk to them. If you're keeping score on your search, I'd stop counting applications and start counting the people you actually reached.