You don’t need to blame “AI” (or LLMs specifically) for the rejection mess that, good old fashioned ATS (applicant tracking systems) already automated rejection either outright or due to selection priority, filtering for keywords or phrases, biasing towards certain more easily parseable document formats, and so on was already happening around 2018-2019, probably before.

And resume refinement representing and reformatting essentially the same information has always been a commonplace trick to improve your odds. My simple first pass resumes around that time must have never seen the light of human eyes because optimizing things around such systems, adjusting formatting, pushing docx versions, and so on increased my return response rate per submission for the exact same information. People just tend to forget they’ve gone through such processes or are moving positions through networking. The cold market has been abysmal for quite some time, even if you’re qualified.

Naysayers haven’t been submitting to cold options I suspect which is why the trend has always been denial. But with mass layoffs, people are having to resort to cold application processes and finally experiencing at scale how terrible the process has been.