‘Spraying and praying’ is ruining the Bay Area tech job market

If you have any sort of internet connection, you’ll know that the current state of the Bay Area tech industry is anything but ideal, even for seasoned employees with years of experience.

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Layoffs have been relentless and are likely to get worse. Stable jobs sound scarce, and getting one seems nearly impossible right now based on the dozens of conversations circulating on Reddit. Despite what we’ve been told, younger generations of Americans who spent years gaining skills are struggling to find gainful employment in a market plagued by ghost jobs, AI-generated hiring managers, and godforsaken blue people. 

To survive this nightmarish job market, candidates are now “spraying and praying,” as one career coach described it — or paying resume services to blast out thousands of CVs per day to game the system and land a gig. However, according to experts in the tech industry who spoke with SFGATE, this is only creating a vicious cycle of inefficiency that hurts both workers and companies. 

According to a recent survey conducted by Robert Half, a Bay Area talent and business solutions firm, over 50% of hiring managers said that AI-generated resumes are “flooding the market,” making it difficult to weed out candidates who are actually qualified for roles. To combat this torrent of resumes, 33% of hiring managers are now using AI-detection tools and spending more time training employees on how to spot ones that feel authentic.

“Many hiring managers tell us it’s becoming harder to distinguish between applicants because AI-generated resumes often use similar language, formatting and keywords,” Terah Brossart Daniels, a technology jobs expert with Robert Half, said. “Another issue is authenticity. A resume may look impressive on paper, but employers are spending more time validating whether a candidate’s experience, accomplishments and technical skills hold up throughout the interview process.”

If a resume seems too polished and uses generic language that doesn’t describe specific projects or accomplishments, that’s an immediate red flag, Daniels continued. “Real candidates tend to have a more natural voice, including unique phrasing, and lived experiences.” Resumes that are “too perfect” also raise suspicion, especially if each sentence uses precise grammar and has little variation. “Humans are naturally inconsistent,” Daniels said. “AI tends to be much more symmetrical.” 

Part of the problem is that a number of resume services that use AI have popped up online, Bryan Creely, a veteran tech recruiter and career coach, told SFGATE. These services, which all use the same prompts, ultimately churn out CVs that make every candidate look the same. When a candidate then pays a service to blast out thousands of applications per day, they might get blacklisted by recruiters, he continued. “There’s so much bad use of technology that screws people without them even realizing it,” Creely said. 

“It’s kind of ruining the job market,” he added. 

Now, in order to stand out, candidates have to completely restrategize by highlighting their impacts as opposed to listing out their daily tasks. Leaders think in dollars and cents, he said, and every single bullet point needs to show them how the candidates either generated revenue or helped their company save money. 

But even though many businesses are now using AI tools to combat the flood of AI-generated resumes, this method might be rejecting perfectly qualified candidates. It could also have serious repercussions on the labor force.

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According to a May 2026 Stanford study, 90% of U.S. companies use AI to screen and rank applicants, with many of them relying on the same third-party businesses to seek out talent. Overall, if many companies rely on one single third-party vendor to screen applicants using the same algorithm, the study explained, it could shut out thousands of applicants while shaping a homogenous workforce.

Authors of the Stanford study found that “people who submit multiple applications to positions screened by the same algorithmic hiring vendor are more likely to be rejected from every position to which they apply than would be true if the companies made decisions statistically independently from one another.” 

But correcting the hiring process is becoming more important than ever. 

In June, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said that the unemployment rate is hovering at 4.3%, amounting to millions of Americans. But the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, which aims to provide a more accurate financial picture of middle- and low-income American households — said that about six times as many people are struggling to put food on the table. The true rate of unemployment, the institute said, is a staggering 24.6%. 

According to a June news release from LISEP, these Americans are functionally unemployed, meaning that they work less than full-time despite wanting to work more, are earning poverty wages, or don’t have a job. 

According to Creely, there simply aren’t nearly as many opportunities in the tech space as there used to be. Despite the lofty promises of AI, it doesn’t seem to be guiding companies toward hiring solutions, either.

“I don’t even think employers really know what they want,” Creely said, “because the technology is so new.”