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AI Is Changing Job Search [Newsletter #79]

Match Humans, Not Keywords

Author

AI and the Future of Work
December 23, 2025

Hello, AI enthusiasts from around the world.

Welcome to this week's newsletter for the AI and the Future of Work podcast. 

Job hunting feels exhausting right now. Competition is intense, and thousands of people often apply for the same role. 

Even when your skills line up perfectly, the process feels less about experience and more about luck. Writing resumes and applications to satisfy algorithms and platforms adds another layer of frustration.

This week’s conversation looks at a shift already underway. AI is changing job searches from keyword guessing into real matching. That being said, this is both our opportunity and our responsibility to use AI’s potential to actively shape our careers moving forward.

Let’s dive into this week’s highlights! 🚀

🎙️ New podcast episode with Eric Cheng, Jobright Co-founder and CEO

Summarize who you are, your skills, strengths, and weaknesses, in a two-page document. It feels nearly impossible. But this sits at the core of job hunting.

Most people dislike the process. It feels broken, but we go through it because we have to. The challenge grows when a single role attracts thousands of applicants.

All those applications funnel into platforms designed to scan for keywords.

You might be the strongest candidate for a role. Still, if you miss the exact words a system expects, your application can easily be overlooked.

So is job hunting broken beyond repair? Eric Cheng doesn’t think so.

As early AI adoption accelerates, the job search experience has room to improve. With the right approach, AI could help people uncover roles and paths they never considered.

Eric is the co-founder and CEO of Jobright, an AI-powered career copilot built to help job seekers approach the process with clarity and confidence.

Today, Jobright supports more than 550,000 users and aims to lead the shift toward AI-driven job discovery.

PeopleReign CEO Dan Turchin sat down with Eric to discuss how AI can revolutionize how we apply for jobs by challenging hierarchies and slow decision making. Eric also points out a downside. When AI is used to apply at scale without intention, it can flood hiring systems. In some cases, up to 80% of candidates are fake.

To ensure AI hiring succeeds in the long term, it must be deliberately limited and thoughtfully conditioned.

This week’s conversation covers this and much more:

  • Young professionals often underestimate their options when they focus only on roles similar to past experience. 

  • AI supports career guidance by reading job market signals, spotting emerging roles, and identifying positions with growing demand.

  • Most people still search for jobs. AI shifts this model by matching people with roles based on skills, context, and potential.

  • While AI is a powerful job-seeking sidekick, human experts remain crucial, since they must verify what AI does.

  • Eric views lifelong careers in a single role as unrealistic in a fast-changing market. He encourages professionals to keep building new skills so they can re-enter the workforce with confidence.

🎧 This week's episode of AI and the Future of Work, featuring Eric Cheng, CEO and co-founder of Jobright.

Listen to the full episode to learn more about Eric’s views on AI’s impact on the future of work and why job boards might stop being intimidating.

📖 AI Fun Fact

In a competitive job market, a strong headshot makes a real difference. Still, many job seekers lack access to professional photography. Cost plays a role. Availability is another barrier.

As Krysta Escobar reports at CNBC.com, AI headshots now change how candidates present themselves and how recruiters evaluate them.

Frustration around limited access to professional photos fueled the rise of AI headshot tools such as InstaHeadshots, PhotoPacksAI, HeadshotPro, and Aragon AI. These services promise polished, professional images in minutes, often starting under $50.

This growth also raises new concerns around ethics and trust. Many candidates worry about appearing fake or misleading. Recruiters increasingly watch for AI-generated portraits with overly smooth or stylized features.

The tension between innovation and accessibility on one side, and authenticity on the other, will persist.

A recent study from the HR trade group SHRM adds more context. It found that 66 percent of HR professionals use AI to generate job descriptions, and 44 percent use AI to review or screen applicant resumes.

Source: CNBC

PeopleReign CEO Dan Turchin isn’t being cynical when he refers to our times as a post-truth era. 

AI-infused everything is an opportunity to ask about the origin of everything, from content to images, music, and art, because artifacts generated using AI are not necessarily inauthentic. But if the author does not disclose the role AI played, then we have to question the motives of the owner of that AI-generated content.

Cultivate a desire to learn the source of everything. Not because AI-generated content is necessarily fake, but because understanding the origin of what we consume teaches us something about the motivations and inclinations of the creator.

Listener Spotlight

Bharat is a data analyst based in Jersey City, New Jersey. His favorite episode is Episode 302 with Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO of Pindrop. In this conversation, Vijay shares the journey of raising more than $200 million to detect audio deepfakes.

🎧 You can listen to that excellent episode here!

As always, we love hearing from you. Want to be featured in an upcoming episode or newsletter? Comment and share how you listen and which episode has stayed with you the most.

Worth A Read 📚

Ailsa does not use AI for her assignments. Still, this marks the third time this year, across two different classes, where professors accused her of doing so.

She finds this exhausting, and her experience is not unique. Across the United States, the education system is caught in a complex cycle, where teachers increasingly rely on AI tools to detect student use of AI. A recent poll shows that more than 40 percent of teachers from sixth to twelfth grade now use AI detection software.

These tools can fail. They already have. Ailsa is one example.

Source: NPR

The problem runs deeper. Heavy reliance on detection tools has led some professors to trust AI output over student explanations. As a result, the gap between critics and supporters of AI in education continues to widen, even as this divide should be shrinking.

This NPR article explores the tension that emerges as AI becomes central to education, even as many students and educators remain unconvinced.

📣 Share your Thoughts and Leave a Review!

We want to hear what you have to say! Your feedback helps us improve and ensures we continue to deliver valuable insights to our podcast listeners. 👇

Until Next Time: Stay Curious 🤔

We want to keep you informed about the latest developments in AI. Here are a few stories from around the world worth reading:

  • 2026 might introduce a new way to sell: anti-AI, fully human marketing. But is a world without AI in marketing realistic? This article explores the question.

  • Oracle’s AI-focused rents and leases now total $248 billion. The number stands out. This piece breaks down what sits behind it and whether the strategy adds up.

  • AI is reshaping collective intelligence. Two scientists examine how humans respond as machines take on a larger role in shared thinking.

👋 That's a Wrap for This Week!

You might say you dislike looking for your next job, but at some point, you still have to do it. AI now has the potential to change that experience.

What matters is how we use these tools. When applied with intention, AI becomes a platform for growth rather than a shortcut.

This week’s conversation showed how an AI-driven future can make job seeking easier and, more importantly, more meaningful.

We hope it encourages you to rethink how your career evolves and to consider paths you may not have explored before.

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