When the Bots Start Talking to Each Other, Where Do the Humans Go?

More than a year ago, I was in my kitchen telling my husband, Jeff, how completely exhausted I had become with the job search.

I had spent the day staring at another job portal. Same questions. Same boxes. Upload the resume. Then manually enter everything that was already on the resume. I finally closed my laptop and walked away.

Jeff listened and then said something I did not particularly want to hear.

“The way you’re going about this doesn’t work anymore. Stop it. Just stop it.”

Then he explained why.

“The applications aren’t working. They’re not getting through, and the AI bots are not letting you in. Employers are inundated with applicants; they’re drowning in resumes.”

This conversation became a turning point for me, and the start of Chapter 7 of my book Redefined. Jeff told me to stop focusing so much on applications and start talking to people. Reach out to my network. Ask questions. Learn what was changing. Start a different kind of conversation.

He was right.

At the time, I took his advice mostly as a lesson for my own job search. Looking back, I think it was also an early warning about what was happening to hiring itself.

On August 16, 2026, New York Times reporter Callie Holtermann gave a name to the next stage of this phenomenon: the “bot loop.”

Holtermann described what happens when people on both sides of an interaction increasingly hand their roles over to AI. Job seekers use AI to write resumes and cover letters. Employers use AI to review those resumes and narrow the applicant pool. Each side says it needs the technology because the other side is using it.

And around we go.

AI makes it easier for candidates to apply to more jobs. Employers receive more applications, so they rely more on automation to manage them. Candidates, in turn, feel even more pressure to optimize their applications for the machines doing the screening.

Nobody necessarily set out to create this system. Everyone is responding to what is happening on the other side.

But at some point, we have to ask a very basic question:

Are we actually getting better at finding the right people?

I am not anti-AI. Far from it. I use AI. I write about AI. And I have said before that companies should stop pretending candidates are somehow going to enter the workplace and never use these tools.

In a recent BambooHR article on AI and interviewing, I argued that employers should focus on something more useful than whether a candidate used AI. They should be evaluating how that person uses it.

Can they ask a good question? Can they recognize a weak answer? Can they challenge the output? Can they add judgment, experience, and context? Can they take what AI gives them and make it better?

Those are workplace skills now.

The problem begins when AI stops supporting human judgment and starts replacing the human interaction that makes judgment possible.

Hiring is not simply a document-matching exercise.

Companies are trying to understand how someone thinks, how they communicate, whether they can solve problems, whether they can work with others, and whether they have good judgment.

Candidates are trying to understand something too. Who will I be working for? What does this organization value? Do these people communicate the way they say they do? Can I see myself here?

Those questions are difficult to answer when technology keeps inserting itself between the people making those decisions.

There is another consequence that I find especially interesting.

AI has made polished communication much easier to produce.

A candidate can create a perfect resume, a thoughtful cover letter, a professional bio, and a polished LinkedIn post in minutes. That does not make those things meaningless, but it does change what they tell us.

When polish becomes abundant, reputation, relationships, judgment, and trust become more valuable.

Someone willing to say, “I know her. I have worked with her. She is good at what she does,” carries a different kind of weight.

AI can help someone tell a story. Reputation is built when other people tell that story when you are not in the room.

That may be one of the strange ironies of this moment. The more technology enables everyone to present themselves well, the more important genuine human credibility becomes.

I learned that during my own job search.

Jeff did not tell me to find a better way to trick the bots.

He told me to talk to people.

Those conversations changed everything. They gave me information I could not get from an application portal. They created introductions. They helped me better understand where my experience fit. They eventually changed how I thought about my career altogether.

Technology still had a role. It just stopped being the whole strategy.

That is probably where hiring needs to land too.

Use AI to eliminate administrative work. Use it to organize information. Use it to help recruiters manage large applicant pools. Use it to help candidates communicate their experience. Use it to research, prepare, and think.

But when the goal is to understand another human being, eventually another human being needs to show up.

Otherwise, we risk building an extraordinarily efficient hiring system in which the candidates’ bots talk to the employers’ bots while the actual people on both sides become increasingly disconnected from one another.

More than a year ago, Jeff told me I needed to stop what I was doing and start a different kind of conversation.

Maybe that advice applies well beyond my own job search.
Maybe the way out of the bot loop is not another better bot.
Maybe it is remembering to talk to each other.