It is often said that the best innovations start with a problem. For Serdar Aksoy, a software engineer now living in New York City, that problem was how long it took to apply for jobs.
“I’m looking for a job, but looking for a job shouldn’t be a second full-time job,” said Aksoy, who at the time was spending five to six hours a day on the job hunt. “After a while, I thought, ‘This is not something I want to do.’”
Aksoy moved to the United States from Turkey to pursue his master’s degree in computer science from Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania. Together, he and a classmate cooked up the idea for job application startup Wobo.ai.
“We thought, ‘OK, we are two software developers. We can make something better, right?’” he said.
How AI-powered job bots work
AI-powered bots that apply to jobs en masse are popping up across the internet. Wobo.ai is just one of many offerings vying for subscriptions from job seekers.
On most services, job seekers input their resumes, skills, desired roles and other parameters into the bot. The bot takes charge from there, searching for job opportunities across the internet and applying on the candidate’s behalf. The bot even generates cover letters tailored to the job description and candidate profile.
Often promoted as services that apply to jobs while you sleep, plans offer dozens to hundreds of job applications per week. Typically, these services find jobs directly from employer websites, scanning applicant tracking systems (ATS) that human resources departments use to post open positions.
Wobo.ai has a free plan that includes a resume builder, limited job search and two AI cover letters. Paid plans for AI-powered applications start at $24.99 a month, while its highest subscription tier offers tailored cover letters, 40 applications per week, and priority customer service for $53.99 per month.
Aksoy said the company had 13,000 to 14,000 active users as of April 2025. After several months of testing, they opened Wobo.ai to the masses about a year ago.
Why they don’t scan job boards like LinkedIn
The services go straight to employer sites partly because online job boards are trying to crack down on outside AI scans of their listings.
LinkedIn bans external job application bots on its platform, as AI Hawk learned the hard way. The founder of the free job application service that took off on GitHub in 2024 said LinkedIn requested that they remove all links to the platform and banned accounts of people who contributed to the project. AI Hawk recently announced a new venture with a similar mission, Laboro, but this one scans ATS instead of LinkedIn.
Meanwhile, LinkedIn is boosting its own AI offerings. In May, the company announced that it is introducing a new AI-powered job search on its platform that allows users to search for jobs using “plain language” instead of keywords. Paid subscribers of the LinkedIn Premium service, which costs $19.99 a month, can also get access to AI-powered “coaching” to prepare for interviews.
A work in progress
Take a dive into Reddit threads, and there is plenty of criticism regarding AI-driven job bots in general. Some users claim job applications didn’t match positions they were seeking, while others worry about what claims an AI-written cover letter might make on their behalf.
One post on the website by an individual who used Sonara AI said they had success after six months.
“It’s not perfect, but it definitely beats manually grinding applications after coming home from working 2 part-time jobs,” the user wrote.
JobHire.AI cofounder Artem Zakharov candidly addressed negative feedback in an interview with Straight Arrow News.
“We started to see it immediately after launch,” said Zakharov, who launched his product to the public in April 2024. “There were issues with the relevance of jobs… So, eventually, we started to add the AI features to match properly, so that we are suggesting only the highest relevance positions to them.”
“It was also about the stability of our system, and we enhanced and rebuilt it from scratch, like, three times,” Zakharov added.
The AI arms race
Zakharov got the idea for JobHire.AI while working on an AI product for recruiters and employers.
“I saw that everyone is trying to automate how candidates are assessed, and I thought that it’s a bit unfair that while companies have capabilities to, for example, process 1,000, 2,000 candidates, nobody is thinking, what’s happening on a different side,” Zakharov said.
Unbiased. Straight Facts.TM
The number of job applications rose 31% in 2024 from 2023. Meanwhile, the number of job openings rose only 7%.
The average corporate job posting attracts hundreds of applications, but the company may interview just a handful of candidates. Using what he knew from the hiring side about how AI processed applicants, Zakharov set out to build an AI program that allowed job candidates to apply at scale.
Right now, Zakharov says JobHire.AI can send out about 200 applications per candidate in one month.
“It’s not about the automation,” Zakharov said, “it’s about increasing your chances [of] getting hired.”
But automation is what saves job seekers time.
“We want the job search to be as easy as watching Netflix,” Zakharov said.
For years, the hiring side held the cards when it came to using AI.
“Many of the companies started using AI to sift resumes a long time ago, especially companies that get thousands of resumes for any role,” said Nichol Bradford, an executive-in-residence at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) who advises on human-AI collaboration.
“Now that AI tools have become so much more democratized, and especially now that we’re about to move into the era of AI agents, individuals are also using the AI tools to apply to as many jobs as possible,” Bradford said. “Right now, it’s a little bit problematic. I think it’s hard for both applicants and for hirers because we’re seeing a little bit of an AI arms race.”
Breaking through becomes harder
Even before AI job agents became prevalent, finding and hiring the right candidates was getting more difficult and competitive. A Workday analysis showed the rise in job applications far outpaced job openings in 2024. Workday Recruiting said job applications were 31% higher in the first half of 2024 than in the comparable period of 2023. Meanwhile, job openings increased only 7%.
“While companies are hiring more, they’re also receiving a flood of applications, making it harder for employers to select the right candidate and for employees to stand out,” the report reads.
Workday found that more and more employers are turning to AI to level the “hiring playing field.” However, applicants may not find the playing field level at all.
Because most employers use AI to sift through resumes, job candidates increasingly feel like they need to tailor each resume with custom keywords to get past the AI system and in front of a human recruiter.
The practice of customizing resumes has been pushed for nearly a decade, long before AI tools became mainstream. Crafting each application takes significantly more time if the job applicant isn’t using AI to do it for them.
In addition, job seekers are now seeing a larger sea of candidates competing for each position. Wider use of AI job bots may increase the number of applications per role.
“I don’t think we have a solution yet,” Bradford said. “I think both sides are not in a great position.”
Becoming human again
Now that both sides are more readily using AI in the job application process, human resources departments are searching for ways to sift through the swarm.
“In general, it’s good for the tools to be democratized,” Bradford said. “I think what organizations have to do is they have to understand and describe what they’re looking for in ways that sort of elevate the human part.”
That is the central thesis behind her role at SHRM, where she maps out how artificial intelligence and human intelligence converge within human resources.
“Companies are going to have to get better at identifying people they want to interview,” Bradford said. “What you’re going to see, at least in the interim, is more directed outreach, and then you’re also going to see applicants, the top applicants, getting more creative about the ways that they break through. You’ll see more people approaching finding roles the way people have always approached the hidden market.”
That doesn’t mean companies are fully abandoning the traditional job application process to find their next hire. But already, employers are thinking of ways to circumvent candidates’ increasingly pervasive use of AI.
One way is by making the application process more complex. Bradford said more employers are now requiring candidates to record videos and other “proof of human” steps.
And then there are steps to catch AI in action. One method is putting more CAPTCHA tests in the application process to determine if an online user is a human or a bot. Another method involves a bit more trickery.
“You’re seeing some organizations put words in their descriptions that are, sort of, make-no-sense words, and if they see the make-no-sense word in the response or the cover letter, they know it wasn’t a person, and then you get tossed out for not using effort,” Bradford said.
“It’s very smart,” Zakharov said, “and I enjoy that recruiters are also evolving in this space and finding an approach to this kind of problem or challenge that they have. It seems that it is not yet so widespread because our conversion rates [to] an interview are just growing.
“There will be more and more methods from recruiters, and we just need to learn from them,” Zakharov said.
Aksoy, of Wobo.ai, said the rise of AI bots to assist job searches is inevitable.
“I think in one year, the tools like Wobo will be more popular, and people are going to start using it more often for their job search,” Aksoy said, “because the job search is something more time-consuming, and people, they don’t have time for that.”
contributed to this report.
