Early Careers, AI & Assessment
How to ride the tidal wave of applications
Contributors:
Susan Major
Managing Director of Early Careers & Campus, AMS
Rebecca Wettemann
CEO of HR tech market research firm Valoir
Applications per graduate role have doubled since 2022, according to AMS data. In 2022, there were an average of 47 applications per graduate position. By 2025, this had risen to 94 applications per role. With this exponential rise of candidates using AI to mass-apply for dozens of open opportunities, and with employers responding to the explosion of applications with their own AI-enabled workflows, we are at an inflexion point in early careers. With it comes an opportunity to re-think how we embrace AI to balance both improved experiences and operational efficiency.
Here’s how today’s Talent Acquisition leaders can adapt their hiring approach to strike that balance and continue to attract the talent of tomorrow.
It’s been three years since the 2022 debut of ChatGPT and the wave of generative-AI upstarts that soon entered the business arena, HR and TA leaders are facing a new reality in how they search for, recruit and retain new talent. The impact on TA and HR leaders is profound. TA is still grappling with how to recognise the challenges of transformation and turn technological potential into operational reality.
Some in the industry are uneasy with candidate use of AI in their job quest, viewing it as potentially unethical, while many others view it simply as a sign of the times, something to which we must embrace and adapt. Either way, the reality is that these new recruits fresh out of college and universities are not only using AI to write resumes and cover letters, they are using AI-powered tools to mass-apply to hundreds of jobs in minutes. And some are even using AI during job interviews and skills assessments.
Companies need to rethink the use of this world-changing technology in their recruitment processes, recognising that it comes with enormous opportunity but also potential pitfalls.
Susan Major
The numbers bear this out. According to a LinkedIn survey, nearly 73.35% of candidates admit to using AI in their job searches. Whilst graduate unemployment has risen slightly. 5.6% of recent US graduates are unemployed, up from 4.8% a year earlier and 3.9% in 2022. Showing that the market is becoming more competitive with fewer roles for them to apply to.
Employees and employers are intrigued by AI’s opportunities. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, demand for AI skills in job postings has grown from 0.5% in 2010 to 1.7% in recent years, including a rise in roles requiring associate degrees. Deloitte found that early-career individuals (with less than five years’ experience) are more optimistic about Gen AI despite concerns that it might reduce entry-level openings and learning opportunities. In the U.S, according to a recent Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis survey, nearly 37% of American adults used generative AI for work.
What’s a TA leader to do in this upside down world of AI recruiting? According to Susan Major, Managing Director of Early Careers & Campus at AMS, “companies need to rethink the use of this world-changing technology in their recruitment processes, recognising that it comes with enormous opportunity but also potential pitfalls”.
The allure of AI in early career recruiting
It’s not surprising that early careers candidates are adept at using Gen AI. After all, this generation are digital natives with handheld devices like smartphones and smart tablets in their playpen. According to Major, “they expect digital experiences wherever they go”.
“It’s not just generic digital skills. They’re specifically AI fluent and they are using AI to help their application process in lots of different ways,” she says. “For example, candidates are using AI tools to mass apply to dozens and even hundreds of jobs in a single session, often entirely automated with few details about the job itself before applying”.
“These candidates don't even need to go into a specific client’s website to submit their applications. They can literally use a program like Job Copilot to upload their resume, cover letters and skill sets to apply to these jobs. The AI agents take care of the actual specific application process,” she says.
“Sometimes, candidates don't even know what job they are applying for”, says Major, who adds that this flood of AI-fuelled applications has made it difficult for recruiters to determine if the candidate’s skills and experience are real—and even if the candidate is a real person. This creates challenges for employers, but it also creates a challenging new dynamic for candidates who are beginning to struggle to differentiate themselves in a world where resumes and applications are standardised using AI.
Last year, the UK’s Institute of Student Employers cited 140 applicants to one hire and AMS is seeing this play out this hiring season, with one major investment banking client experiencing 230 applicants to one hire. Major and her colleagues only expect this number to go up as the use of AI in everyday life increases. “This is not a problem that’s going to go away,” she says,
She adds that 57% of students are applying to as many jobs as they can, according to Bright Network, an internship and early careers platform. In an Indeed survey, 70% of job seekers in 2025 say that they're using AI to apply for finding open roles on the Internet. “We’re definitely seeing that in our client processes,” says Major.
AI enters the candidate assessment: Coaching and self-selection
It is rarer, but not uncommon, for early careers candidates to go so far as using AI in parts of the hiring process where almost no one predicted it would happen: in candidate interviews and assessments.
Before COVID and remote work, interviews and assessments would typically take place in-person in the employer’s offices. Now, recruiters are closely monitoring if candidates are reciting answers from an offscreen device during virtual job interviews, or using ChatGPT to answer questions in real-time. To address this, students need clear cut policies on AI usage within the process and Recruiters need guidance on how to react should this not be adhered to. The most progressive organizations are already designing workflows and experiences that encourage AI usage at the right moments, rather than banning it outright. Think of the calculator in a maths exam – it’s a tool and a resource.
Likewise, organizations are re-thinking how they manage and assess applicants more efficiently. More mature regional markets have been assessing early careers candidates for skills over resumes or experience for some time, and an evolution and expansion of this approach is inevitable.
Major says that “outside of the U.S, employers rely heavily on assessment methodology testing and video interviews to evaluate early career candidates—and open the hiring pool even wider to find the right candidate”. In fact, “in the UK and Europe, some employers have created school outreach and work readiness programs where they engage with students as early as 14 or 15 years of age to gain their attention and keep in touch to offer them internships and full-time roles when they eventually graduate from school and enter the workforce.”
“It is quite expensive to have masses of candidates go through the hiring process, so because the top of the funnel of candidate applicants has become so wide, employers will change how they do things and that will also improve the candidate experience,” says Major.
For example, AI tools can help candidates to “self select” better based on their skills and interests for certain career paths. An AI ‘coach’ or recruiter can point out that their skills suggest greater success in certain career paths, such as a talent for numbers could lead to data orientated roles, which should only grow in popularity in the coming decade.
“This guidance could help candidates to think about where they're going be best set up for success,” she says. “That doesn't happen a lot today and we expect to see far greater use of AI and technology enablement in this pre-apply space in the near future.”
Another hot topic is ‘conversational apply’ whereby static resumes or application forms are replaced with text or voice agents engaging directly with candidates in a bi-directional conversation and asking screening questions, and this is already emerging. Major expects this to be the typical upfront engagement approach when students apply in the future. This new method helps ensure only candidates with the right basic criteria (such as legal right to work or qualifying criteria) progress, cuts out AI indiscriminate applications and is in tune with Gen Z and Gen Alpha. It also enhances the experience since it’s interactive and can provide candidates with much greater insight.
Will assessments disappear? Think again
Overall, the role of assessment will grow in importance because modern resumes and cover letters or traditional application forms no longer distinguish between the candidates. This will lead to a greater focus on future skills for Early Careers cohorts that are aligned with an organization’s strategic skill requirements.
Assessment will need to be more agile and responsive in the future as the use of AI grows and think about different and more adaptive approaches to evaluating skills. Major expects to see more variation in assessment approaches with a focus on asking candidates to problem solve in real time. Likewise, assessment providers must transform and not rely on older, more traditional methods of testing candidates. Major is already starting to see disruption in this space with newer players making surprising headway with future focused assessment platforms underpinned by AI. Major believes the necessity to adapt how we assess early talent also creates a unique opportunity to re-think the entire assessment and selection process as something much more immersive and engaging, focused on finding and celebrating the very best applicants, rather than focusing solely on identifying and rejecting weaker applicants.
“The current job market can feel like a game or a lottery to talent entering the workforce in their late teens or early twenties”, suggests Major. There is tremendous competition for internships and now many full-time graduate positions in large corporates are filled primarily from their internship or other pipeline programs. Students need to be incredibly organised in their penultimate degree year and proactive in their job search, determined to apply and secure these opportunities.
“Due to the intense competition, candidates almost feel that the social contract has disappeared with organizations that can't communicate back to the candidate because they are struggling to get through the volume of applications or due to the sheer amount of rejections they face which is demoralising,” admits Major. This can cause frustration on the part of the early careers applicant.
“If the student doesn’t feel a sense of connection, then you can see why they may decide they will also use AI to blast out applications,” she says. “There's an opportunity for organizations to stand out here by thinking about how they will prioritize human contact in ‘moments that matter’ and how they engage with the top talent in a different and more personalized way even when using technology and AI.”
AI’s expanding role in early careers and campus recruiting and how AMS can help
AMS recognises these challenges and is actively playing its role to transform how early talent recruitment responds. AMS’ ‘Next Generation Early Careers’ solutions are designed from the bottom-up to solve these market challenges and are packaged in modules to support employers and TA Leaders no matter where they are in their own journey.
Here’s a quick overview of how it works:
Next Generation Early Careers leverages the newest iteration of AMS One, AMS’s operating system that is designed to deliver an end-to-end workflow, and integrated data flow, for Next Generation Talent Acquisition. Through this, AMS augment existing client technology in a single integrated system, assembling the precise combination of automation, assessment, and human support for their customers to realise and operationalise the AI opportunity. Clients will be able to scale and deliver their Early Careers programs with greater flexibility and efficiency, elevate candidate experience and produce more actionable insights.
A key feature of the new solution will be its ability to handle huge volumes while also providing early talent with a better experience. AMS is transforming the pre-application stage into a critical engagement opportunity that helps candidates as they prepare to make formal applications. Candidates are better informed and make better application choices, while employers feel the benefit of a more relevant applicant funnel right away.
Using new technology to provide AI candidate coaching and guidance and easier conversational apply methods, candidates will be more informed than ever on prospective career opportunities enabling informed decision-making and much greater candidate self-selection onto relevant programs. Not only does this approach prevent indiscriminate AI applications, it will encourage candidates to be more targeted in their applications and more committed to the remainder of the process. AMS’s vision is to transform Pre-Application and Application from an overwhelming and confusing picture for early talent into an informative, insightful and intuitive experience that supports them to ‘Find Their Future’. By creating a better experience for early talent, employers will also benefit from lower numbers of more relevant candidates entering the assessment phase of the hiring process.
AMS can recommend preferred assessment providers, but the model remains collaborative: some clients want AMS to provide the assessment solution, while others prefer to use their own. AMS supports both approaches, ensuring solutions align with employer needs, market expectations, and candidate experience best practices. Either way, the aim is to provide an assessment experience for candidates that is faster, integrated and immersive. “This provides candidates with ongoing insight into the future role or program with the organization,” says Major.
Rather than relying heavily on resumes—which are often sparse for students and new workers—employers will increasingly turn to AI-driven skills assessment aligned to future skills that will become important such as curiosity, resilience, creativity, adaptability, critical thinking, learning agility and of course AI fluency. Indeed, progress over time in developing capability in these key skills seems likely to be a future measure of Early Careers cohort success.
Next Generation Early Careers solutions must be a combination of location, technology, and humans and the optimal blend of it all.
Susan Major
Candidates and Hiring Managers alike will find the scheduling of in-person assessment easy and human interactions will be meaningful, with Recruiters elevated to add demonstrable value to specific important steps in the hiring process driving greater candidate connectivity and retention.
The future solutions will also redefine the balance between technology and human expertise. Major emphasizes that Next Generation Early Careers solutions must be a combination of location, technology, and humans and the optimal blend of it all. AMS has built workflows that place automation where it drives efficiency and experience—such as pre-application conversations, interactive conversational application, initial screening, query management and assessment scheduling—while deploying human specialists where they create the most value. The human oversight of technology and coordination tasks that can’t be automated will continue to be located in AMS Early Careers Admin Centers of Excellence, while on site or in-country resources will be focused on in-person key moments that matter to candidates and hiring teams and SME advice and relationships.
AI is also reshaping when and how employers engage with early talent. As mentioned earlier, in many global markets, potential employers are now connecting with students as early as age 14 or 15, guiding them via ongoing communication, work-experience programs, insight days, and internships. By the time a student reaches the graduate-hiring stage, much of the recruiting journey is already complete. Within this funnel, AI plays a critical role in pre-application education, guidance and skills creation and enabling better choices and de-selection.
AMS will also seek to turn the final step in the hiring process—offers—as the beginning of a new future for Early Career candidates by creating an engaging experience from Offer to Day-1, and beyond. Organizations supported by AMS Next Generation Early Careers solutions will be able to create a candidate journey that is personalized, engaging and day one ready, using technology to deploy a strategic plan of engagement, keep warm and work readiness interventions.
“Bearing in mind many graduate full-time offers are made a full year before a student finishes their degree this investment really impacts retention of key talent,” says Major.
The future of Next Generation Early Careers
The next few years will require new policies for this new set of technologies, as well. According to Rebecaa Wettemann, CEO of HR tech market research firm Valoir, the train has already left the station for anyone debating AI’s role in talent acquisition.
“Recruiters and HR leaders should assume that all candidates are using AI today. Trying to implement a ‘no AI’ policy is not only unenforceable, it is unrealistic and unaligned with the realities of work today, when most successful employees will be expected to use AI to augment their work,” she says.
“Recruiters should be using tools and technologies that leverage AI to their advantage and designing assessments that measure skills and attributes that AI can't effectively replicate, like real-time live evaluations with scenario solving, behavioral questions about lived experiences, and simulations that test things like reasoning and ethical judgement,” says Wettemann.
The early careers landscape is poised for disruption—and enterprises that adopt these AI-driven, end-to-end solutions will be best equipped to engage, evaluate, and hire the next generation of emerging talent.
Contact us to learn more about our Next Gen early careers solution.
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