The AI Job Search Dilemma: When Technology Makes You Invisible

The search for employment, in a painful kind of irony, can feel like a full-time job.

NSW man Jacques Bergh is reluctantly familiar with this "demoralising" task. He was made redundant for the second time in his career this year and has spent nearly five months tailoring resumes and cover letters for over 100 jobs.

In that time, Bergh has only heard back twice.

"I've had two interviews where I've thought that I can get the job. But other than that, there's just no reply," Bergh told Nine.com.au. "It's absolutely mystifying and such a scary thing that you only ever get the same sort of auto-generated response from an email server."

The Redundancy Reality

Bergh, 55, was retrenched from his senior marketing job earlier this year. Redundancy isn't personal. But it can still be a devastating blow to a person's pride. And every rejection email puts Bergh back at square one.

"I'm at the point now where I have to start looking at much more junior jobs," Bergh explained. "Maybe I'm going to have to take a temporary job in the meantime... a casual job somewhere and do that while I continue my search. Because it is absolutely demoralising."

The AI Revolution in Hiring

This time, the job search is vastly different – due, in part, to applicants and employers using artificial intelligence (AI). Candidates are using AI to include every relevant keyword and skill asked for in a job ad, while many companies use it to comb through resumes and identify a handful of the "best" ones.

"Your CV has to be so much better, and I don't mean better in terms of your experience, much better in the way that you match those keywords," Bergh said. "I take the job description, I can put it in AI, it'll write me a cover letter, I go back, I fix the cover letter, and I make it a little bit more human, and then you post that. But that's available to everybody now."

Now that every single applicant looks like the perfect candidate on paper, Bergh is finding it difficult to be noticed, despite his wealth of experience. He has applied for 100 jobs and so far has only made it to the interview stage twice.

Desperate Measures

In fact, in a bid to stand out, Bergh even mailed out 3D-printed tags with a QR code that directed to his CV to several agencies. "Not so much as an email, phone call or any other form of acknowledgement," he said. "I eventually asked for it to be sent back."

The Bigger Picture

Around 268,000 Australians were retrenched in 2025, the highest number since the COVID-19 pandemic ended, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This represents a 0.2 percentage point increase on the year prior.

The job search for older workers looking for senior roles can be a little more difficult. "Ultimately sometimes it is actually impossible [for some job seekers], in that the role that they're after may not exist at this time," said Karlie Cremin, Chief executive of Dynamic Leadership Programs Australia (DLPA) and Crestcom ANZ.

"Particularly for senior roles, there is much more of a targeted search rather than advertising. Candidates do need to be a little bit flexible in terms of what their next role looks like, and it might not be the dream role."

Cremin said older job seekers also struggle with being stripped of their sense of identity in the weeks and months after redundancy. She said it is "heartbreaking" to witness. "It can just be devastating, particularly when people have one or two redundancies in a row," she added.

Finding Meaning Beyond Employment

Bergh said his period of unemployment has given him pause to re-evaluate what having a career means to him. He has been conscious of not tying his value or worth to a paying job.

"I've done a lot of thinking and soul-searching, and the job isn't the definition of me," Bergh said. "The reason I want a job is because I make a difference. Every company that I've ever worked at has been better off for having had me there."

It is still tough "watching the race and not being in it", he added. And the downside of his dual experience in redundancies is that Bergh is not keen on taking any big career risks. Instead, he is hoping for a role that can simply give him satisfaction of a job well done for the next decade or so, before he retires.

"I will not risk losing another job," he said. "I don't want to go through this again."