July 07, 2025
The Hidden Costs of High Application Volume
Ask any University Recruiting leader what’s changed over the past 18 months, and you’ll likely hear the same story: application numbers are exploding. And yes, that’s in part because of the labor market. But more than that, it’s because AI has enabled a new job search behavior—one that’s easy, instant, and nearly unlimited in scale.
We often talk about this in terms of time wasted. Too many resumes, too few recruiters, and not enough hours in the day. But what we’re seeing now goes beyond wasted recruiter hours.
The real cost of surging application volume is trust, efficiency, and talent quality. And those costs are compounding.
1. When Everyone Looks Good on Paper, Nobody Stands Out
Generative AI has created a new level of uniformity in applications. Resumes and cover letters are cleaner, more tailored, and more optimized than ever—but often in the same ways.
This “conformity crisis” means the most promising candidates are harder to spot. Not because they’re less qualified, but because they’re buried under dozens (or hundreds) of AI-polished applications that look just as good at first glance.
The cost here is subtle but serious: top talent is being missed. And for teams already working with fewer requisitions, that’s not just a sourcing issue—it’s a strategic failure.
2. Wasted Time ≠ Harmless Time
Yes, recruiters are spending more hours in the weeds. But this isn’t neutral time—it’s time stolen from where recruiters drive the most value:
- Building authentic candidate relationships
- Providing feedback and elevating the candidate experience
- Partnering with hiring managers to solve complex hiring need
When volume eats that time, it erodes the human side of recruiting. That eroded experience trickles down to candidates—many of whom are now ghosted, delayed, or left with a negative impression of your brand.
3. Assessment Overload and the Risk of “Process Fatigue”
In response to volume, many teams are leaning on assessments. But the surge in usage is creating its own problem: assessment fatigue—both for recruiters trying to analyze hundreds of results and for candidates, who are increasingly burned out by what feels like impersonal, automated hiring.
And worse: the effectiveness of these assessments is threatened when bad actors use AI to game them.
In that sense, volume is not just a quantity problem. It’s a quality control risk.
4. Brand and Burnout
High application volume hurts your employer brand in two ways:
- Externally: Candidates who don’t hear back or get caught in long cycles are vocal about it. That reputational damage can ripple through campuses, social media, and peer networks.
- Internally: Talent teams are exhausted. Constantly triaging massive pipelines instead of acting strategically is demoralizing—and it’s driving recruiter turnover.
These downstream effects often don’t show up on hiring dashboards—but they’re real, and they’re costly.
5. The Real Risk: Eroding Confidence in Your Hiring System
When volume overwhelms, trust in the system itself begins to degrade. Leaders worry:
- Are we hiring the best, or just the fastest to the inbox?
- Are we truly assessing for future potential?
- Are we vulnerable to fraud or false positives?
And if your answer to those questions is “I’m not sure,” the issue is no longer just about recruiter bandwidth. It’s about institutional risk.
The Takeaway
This isn’t just about helping recruiters do more with less. It’s about protecting the integrity of your hiring decisions—and the experience candidates have with your brand.
At Veris Insights, we’re continuing to explore the ripple effects of application overload across the full recruiting ecosystem. If you’re feeling the strain, you’re not alone—and there are ways to take back control, from smarter segmentation to selective automation to reframing how we assess early-career talent in the age of AI.
Because the cost of volume isn’t just time—it’s trust. And trust, once lost, is far harder to win back.
