AI HAS FLOODED HIRING PIPELINES. HERE’S HOW TEAMS CAN CUT THROUGH THE NOISE.
Hiring feels harder than ever. It’s tempting to blame only AI for flooding pipelines with applicants, but that explanation is incomplete.
AI didn’t break hiring, but it did expose a process that was already struggling to make decisions at scale. … And hiring teams are now feeling the aftershocks of this collision.
Long before generative tools made it easy to submit dozens of applications in minutes, roles were consolidating, entry-level paths were narrowing, and expectations were rising. Again, AI didn’t create these pressures; it accelerated them.
The result is today’s paradox: more applicants than ever, yet more stalled pipelines and slower hiring decisions.
Pipeline Congestion Is a Decision Problem, Not Just a Volume Problem
Applicant volume isn’t the only reason hiring pipelines back up. In many cases, teams stall because they haven’t clearly defined what they’re actually hiring for in the first place.
Most open roles now attract hundreds, sometimes thousands, of applicants. Business Insider reports that the average job posting receives 242 applications, nearly triple the number seen in 2017. At the same time, recruiting teams are smaller than they were pre-pandemic. But congestion alone doesn’t explain why hiring decisions grind to a halt.
What actually slows hiring is uncertainty.
“HRInsidr describes this dynamic as “ghost hiring,” when a search launches before the role, success criteria, and evaluation standards are fully aligned. Expectations shift mid-process. Interviewers assess candidates against different yardsticks. Feedback becomes subjective. And every candidate turns into a “maybe” because no one is confident about what “good” truly looks like.”
When job definitions are vague or internally inconsistent, interviews generate impressions instead of evidence. Feedback loops slow down. Candidates disengage. Recruiters are left managing overwhelming volume without clarity — an impossible task at scale.
This is where AI often gets blamed unfairly. AI may increase applicant flow, but it doesn’t create decision paralysis. That comes from unclear hiring goals, undefined success metrics, and poorly scoped roles. Without shared agreement on outcomes, responsibilities, and must-have capabilities, even the strongest screening tools can’t move a process forward.
As Nobel Prize–winning Economist Alvin Roth puts it, “Successful marketplaces have to work hard to overcome congestion.”
In hiring, that work starts with clarity. Teams that align early on what success in a role actually looks like create cleaner signals downstream — clear, observable indicators of capability, readiness, and fit that support confident hiring decisions. They screen faster, interview with more intent, and make decisions with greater confidence.
In a congested hiring market, clarity isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the difference between a moving pipeline and a stalled one. The problem is that most teams are still using outdated ways to evaluate candidates — even as the applicant pool explodes.
AI Made Applying Easier. It Didn’t Make Evaluating Easier.
AI allows candidates to present themselves extremely well, adding and optimizing skills and experience, based on a job description.
But polished resumes don’t answer the questions hiring managers actually need answered, such as:
Can this person operate with ambiguity?
Will they take ownership without constant direction?
Can they adapt as the role evolves?
When hiring teams rely on resumes to answer questions that resumes were never designed to answer, pipelines back up. Not because candidates are unqualified, but because teams lack enough decision-relevant signal to move forward with confidence.
““There’s a persistent belief that a larger applicant pool leads to better hires,” said Steve Lickus, CEO NextPlayJobs. “What actually happens is the opposite. … The process slows down, recruiters struggle to identify a real signal, and strong candidates disengage.””
This breakdown happens when applicant volume increases, but evaluation methods stay the same. Hiring teams default to resume polish and familiar credentials as shortcuts for decision-making, rather than focusing on real capability and what actually matters. In doing so, they often filter out candidates whose capability and potential far exceed what their current title or resume suggests.
Many of the best hires are people whose current title understates their actual ability. It’s important to remember that when recruiting for a role, a resume only reflects where someone has been, not how fast they’re growing.
The Fix: Better Questions, Earlier Signal
If resumes are a weak signal, the answer isn’t more screening but rather earlier, smarter screening.
“High-performing teams are shifting focus from credentials to behavior. Inc. describes this as hiring for “high agency” (i.e., people who take ownership, act without permission, and solve problems beyond their job description)”
The source further explains that people with high agency “think, act, and informally lead without being asked — and without waiting for permission.” They want to understand the boundaries of their role, not to stay within them, but to know how and when to push past them to get work done.
You don’t find that in keyword searches. You find it by asking better questions before investing hours of interview time.
Examples:
“Tell me about a time you had to figure something out without direction.”
“Tell me about something you fixed that wasn’t technically your responsibility.”
“Tell me about a goal you didn’t hit and what you learned.”
Then push deeper; ask what happened next and how others reacted. Ask what they’d do differently. Most candidates can perform through a surface-level behavioral question. Very few can maintain clarity and ownership through follow-ups, and that’s where high agency becomes unmistakable.
The earlier you surface these signals, the faster pipelines move.
When to Get Help — and Why It’s Not a Cop-Out
For many lean teams, reaching this level of evaluation consistently requires time, structure, and experience that simply aren’t always available. When hiring teams don’t have the bandwidth to design strong screens, run evidence-rich interviews, and separate real capability from noise, bringing in outside support shouldn’t be considered a shortcut but rather a strategic move that protects focus and accelerates outcomes.
The goal isn’t to hand off hiring. It’s to preserve your time for the conversations that actually matter. In a congested market, the teams that win aren’t the ones processing more resumes but the ones making better decisions, faster.
Resumes are no longer the final word in hiring. They’re the starting point. The real work begins when teams decide who to interview, what questions surface meaningful signal, and how to guide conversations toward the outcomes a role truly requires. That work takes intention, clarity, and experience — resources most lean organizations don’t have in excess.
That’s where NextPlay Jobs comes in. By combining talent intelligence with a high touch, data driven approach, we help companies cut through applicant congestion and make more confident hiring decisions for their most critical roles. If your hiring process isn’t purpose — built for today’s market, it’s time to modernize it — for the way talent actually shows up now, and for where your business is headed next.