Look, it’s a hard job market out there. Not only has new job creation slowed to a drip, but the positions that do exist are increasingly hidden behind labyrinthian AI screening software and bizarre HR scams.
Not to worry, because a new startup is rising to help job seekers brute force their way into one of the worst job markets, consequences be damned.
Called “Sorce” — in keeping with the startup economy’s notoriously dismal naming conventions — the new business looks to make applying for jobs as easy as hunting for a one-night stand. No joke: Sorce’s tagline is “Tinder for jobs,” and its founders claim it currently hosts some 1.6 million vacant positions and roughly 400,000 job seekers.
The whole thing works like this: exhausted job seekers upload their résumé and format their personal info. Once up and running, they’re presented with various gigs one by one, which they can swipe left to reject, or right to apply — just like a dating app. When a user swipes right, Sorce’s “AI agent” navigates to the company’s website and applies on their behalf.
“This solves the annoying problem of filling out applications and managing multiple passwords,” the company’s blog reads. “[Job] marketplaces have chicken-and-egg problems. So we hacked one side first,” the company continues in another blog, titled “What if Everyone Applied to Every Job?”
“Next, we’ll build out the employer side and the AI engine that evaluates & matches people and companies at scale,” it threatens.
Despite its cloyingly optimistic copy, reactions to Sorce on social media were almost universally negative.
“What’s next? An app that will automatically order food for you that uses AI to sense when you’re hungry?” one user seethed on X-formerly-Twitter. “Oh great, more garbage for the web,” another poster observed. “We have applicants using AI and recruiters using AI. No one is actually taking a moment to understand how to rebuild the concept of hiring.”
“Stop building ‘tinder for x,’” another user begged. “I don’t even like tinder for dating.”
A key theme many pointed out was the escalating arms race in hiring. With the mass-adoption of AI throughout all kinds of industries, companies have increasingly relied on AI to screen applicants before their information ever makes it to a human being.
This has led to something of a hiring crisis, where experienced professionals and newcomers alike bash their heads against a wall sending out hundreds of applications to no avail. Of course, this has pushed some crafty applicants to fight fire with fire, weaponizing AI to apply to jobs en masse — resulting in an AI-powered war of attrition as companies further lean on AI to weed out the spam.
In that sense, Sorce feels like less of a disruptive new idea and more like a way to profit off an increasingly untenable situation, with no end in sight.
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