"applications per job have more than doubled since 2022 — but are constrained in their ability to distinguish between high-quality candidates and AI slop" [doubled since 2022]
The doubling of application volume paired explicitly with inability to distinguish quality directly instantiates the structural claim: volume explosion + degraded signal = adversarial loop.
Reasoning from this article
The article frames this as an 'AI doom loop' where ease of AI-assisted applications floods hiring pipelines while AI-driven filtering cannot reliably separate strong candidates from weak ones. This is not a temporary friction but a structural inversion: the technology that was meant to improve matching (AI filtering) has instead created conditions where both candidates and recruiters must deploy AI defensively. The pattern generalizes beyond any single company or sector—it is inherent to the asymmetry between frictionless submission and opaque algorithmic gatekeeping.