AI Gets You Into the Pile. People Get You Out of It. 😮

I just asked 236 job seekers and 59 career centers what’s REALLY happening with AI and the job hunt. And the answers tell one story - and it’s not the one everyone’s been telling.

1. 81% of job seekers used AI on their last application. Only 1 in 5 wrote it themselves.

2. So are they getting caught? Nope. Just 4 in 100 have EVER been called out by an employer.

3. But here's the catch: when AI wrote most or all of the application, the offer rate fell to 7% - vs. 12% when it just helped. Letting AI write it cuts your odds nearly in half.

4. So people apply harder... and that makes it worse. 51+ applications a month = a 5% offer rate. The lowest of anyone still applying.

5. Meanwhile, job seekers with ZERO human conversations last month were nearly 3x as likely to quit their search.

6. And the people who coach them already know: 89% of career centers say students are applying the wrong way. Only 1 in 9 blames the job market.

Put it all together and the whole story fits in one line:

AI gets you into the pile. People get you out of it. 🙌

Use AI to sharpen your story - and then go talk to a human. That's the playbook, and 236 job seekers just proved it with their own outcomes.

Full results (all six beats, with the charts and quotes): hub.thejobinsiders.com/pulse-2026

Career center leaders: every number on that page is yours to use in your next budget conversation. ⚡

Which of these surprised you most? Let me know in the Comments! 👇

LinkedIn Just BROKE the Alumni Tool 😭

Career center friends - I feel your pain...

LinkedIn just BROKE our beloved LinkedIn Alumni Tool. 😭 They pulled keyword search right out of it, so the one move we teach every single student - "show me alums who do the job I want" - got a LOT harder overnight.

And as someone who was on the team that built the tool, it stings for me too. 💔

But here's the good news: there's a workaround, and it's actually BETTER than the old tool ever was. 🙌 It takes about 20 seconds once you know it, and you can teach it in your very next workshop.

What Changed in the LinkedIn Alumni Tool

If you pull up any school's LinkedIn Page and click the Alumni tab today, you'll see a "People highlights" view - how many alums work in a given field, how many live in a given city, how many graduated in a given year.

What you WON'T see anymore is the search box. That box was the magic. A student could type "product marketing" or "nurse practitioner" and instantly see every alum doing that exact job.

Without it, the Alumni tab becomes something to browse, not something to search. And browsing 400,000 alums isn't a strategy - it's a time sink. 😮

(Fun fact: this isn't the first time LinkedIn has changed this tool on us. Back in 2025 I shared a fix for the last round of Alumni Tool changes. Same story, different chapter!)

The 4-Step Workaround (That's Actually Better)

Here's the whole move. Your students already have everything they need to do it - no Premium account required.

1. Type your keyword in the main LinkedIn search bar. Not on the school page - up top, in the same search bar you'd use to find anyone. And yes, Boolean works, so you can type something like "product marketing" OR "brand marketing".

2. Click "All filters." Once the results load, make sure you're looking at People, then click "All filters" at the end of the filter bar. A "People filters" panel slides out on the right.

3. Under "Schools," add your school - and then add EVERY school that counts. Click "+ Add a school," start typing your school's name and pick it from the dropdown. Then click "+ Add a school" again for every other campus page your alums might list.

4. Hit "Show results." 🔥 You'll now see everyone who matches your keyword AND went to any of the schools you picked.

That's it. Keyword search is back - it just lives in a different place now.

The Secret Sauce: Search Every School That Counts

Step 3 is where the workaround goes from "fine" to "WOW." 🤯

Here's why. Lots of universities have more than one LinkedIn Page. There's the main university, and then there's the business school, the law school, the med school, the engineering college...

Take Michigan. When I type "University of Michigan" into that Schools filter, LinkedIn offers me the University of Michigan AND the University of Michigan - Stephen M. Ross School of Business as two separate choices (plus the College of Engineering, the Medical School, Dearborn and Flint).

The old Alumni Tool made you pick ONE of those pages. So a Ross grad who only listed "Michigan Ross" on their profile was invisible from the main Michigan alumni page, and vice versa.

The People search fixes that. Add both schools and you get alums from either one, in a single list. For career centers that serve a whole university - or a professional school that wants its students to tap the entire campus network - that's a genuine upgrade.

Rule of thumb: if your alums might list it on their profile, add it to the Schools filter.

Boolean Keywords That Make the LinkedIn Alumni Tool Workaround Sing

The other upgrade is Boolean. The old Alumni Tool search box took simple keywords. The main search bar takes full Boolean search, which means students can describe a whole career path in one search instead of guessing one job title at a time.

A few patterns I teach:

• Quotes for exact titles: "product marketing" finds that phrase, not every profile with "product" somewhere and "marketing" somewhere else.

• OR for related titles: "product marketing" OR "brand marketing" OR "growth marketing"

• NOT to cut the noise: "investment banking" NOT intern

And if a student doesn't know what titles to search for in the first place? That's a perfect job for AI. Have them paste this into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini:

I'm a [year] at [school] studying [major]. I'm interested in careers in [field], but I don't know the exact job titles people use. Give me 3 LinkedIn Boolean search strings I can paste into LinkedIn's main search bar to find alumni doing this work. Put multi-word titles in quotes, connect related titles with OR, and explain in one sentence what each string will find.

Thirty seconds later they have three searches ready to run - and a much better sense of the field they're exploring. ⚡

Why Did LinkedIn Do This?

Honestly? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My best guess is that it's some kind of cost-cutting move. It lines up with a tough stretch at LinkedIn: a WARN filing showed 606 California roles cut, effective July 13, 2026, with the CEO's memo talking about shifting investment toward areas like infrastructure. When teams shrink, older tools that don't drive revenue are often the first to get trimmed.

But that's a guess, not insider info - and I'd LOVE to hear your theories.

The Bottom Line

The Alumni Tool's search box is gone, but alumni search isn't. Teach your students to search from the main bar, use Boolean, and add every school that counts - and they'll find MORE alums than the old tool ever showed them. 🙌

If you want more ways to help students build a LinkedIn presence that alums actually respond to, grab my free LinkedIn profile resources.

That said, what the heck do YOU think is driving this change??? Let me know in the Comments!

I Ran a Real Job Search Through Huntr. Here's My Honest Review 🔎

Quick backstory: a few weeks ago, I wrote a guest post for Huntr about why 96.9% of LinkedIn applications go nowhere. Their team asked if I'd be up for reviewing the platform in return.

I said yes on one condition - that it be a real review. Not a logo drop. So I signed up like any other job seeker, pointed it at an actual job (a Product Marketing Manager role at Amazon), and used every feature I could get my hands on.

Full disclosure: Huntr gave me a free month of their Pro plan to do this. Nobody paid me, nobody saw this before you did, and I'd write the same thing either way.

Here's what I found.

The first 60 seconds are the best in the category 🤯

Most job search tools make you start by uploading a resume. Huntr asked for my LinkedIn username.

I typed it in, picked a target job, and about a minute later it had built:

• A full base resume pulled straight from my LinkedIn profile
• A version tailored to the Amazon job, with a match score
• A cover letter for that same job
• A Kanban board to track the whole search

WOW. That's a lot of blank pages filled in before a student even knows what to do next. If you've ever watched someone freeze at an empty resume template, you know how much that matters.

The tracker is the quiet hero 🙌

This is where Huntr started, and it shows.

Every job you save becomes a card with the job description, an AI summary of the role, the keywords it pulled out, a "qualifications vs. responsibilities" breakdown, and one-click buttons to log that you applied, got an interview, or got an offer. There's a contacts tab so the recruiter you met at the career fair lives next to the job, not in a random note on your phone.

And the Chrome extension (4.8 stars, 1,300+ ratings) clips jobs from LinkedIn, Indeed, and company sites straight onto your board - plus autofills application forms.

If you've been running your search out of a spreadsheet, this alone is worth the switch. Spreadsheets don't remind you to follow up. Huntr does.

The match score is smarter than keyword-counting ⚡

Here's the feature I was most skeptical about, and it won me over.

Instead of one big "ATS score," Huntr grades your resume four ways against the job: Qualifications (weighted highest), Responsibilities, Keywords, and Job Title. Mine came back "Weak" overall - 44 on qualifications, 100 on title - which was exactly right. My title matched. My cloud security experience did not exist.

That's a more honest picture than most tools give you. It tells you WHERE the gap is, not just that there is one.

Now the part where I ask you to slow down 😮

Huntr's AI writing features are powerful. And that's exactly why you need to keep your hands on the wheel.

When I ran "AI Tailor" to rewrite my resume for the Amazon job, it did a beautiful job of mirroring the posting's language. It also added a line saying I had experience "building reference architectures and demos for cloud and security solutions (AWS, IAM, VPC)."

I have never done that. Not once.

The AI cover letter did something similar - it invented a lovely little story about a lesson I "learned the hard way" at Google that never happened. And the AI resume review dropped in a placeholder phone number (+1 123 456 7890) and a few "<X>%" blanks that would be very easy to miss if you were rushing.

To be clear: this isn't a Huntr problem. It's an AI problem. Every tool in this space will fill a gap with something plausible if you let it. But it's the one thing that can really hurt you, because the moment a hiring manager asks about those reference architectures, you're done.

So here's my rule: let Huntr tell you WHAT the job wants. Then write the proof yourself, from things you actually did. (I literally wrote this in the Huntr guest post - tailoring should reveal your experience, never manufacture it.)

A few smaller things to know 👇

• The LinkedIn import is about 85% clean. Mine came in with "undefined, California" as my location and a couple of bullets split in half. Two minutes of cleanup, but do the cleanup.
• The free plan is generous for tracking (100 jobs, unlimited contacts, unlimited autofills). The AI features and the metrics dashboard are where Pro kicks in.
• The AI resume review takes about five minutes to run and gives you dozens of suggestions grouped by section. Most are good, practical polish. Just read before you click "Apply All."

The bottom line

Huntr is the best job search organizer I've tested, and the LinkedIn-to-resume onboarding is the fastest path from "I should probably start" to "I've started" that I've seen.

Use it to organize. Use it to see the gaps. Use it to never lose a recruiter's email again.

Just don't let it write your experience for you. That part is yours - and it's the part that gets you hired.

Want to try it? Huntr is free to start at huntr.co. And if you'd like a human (hi!) to look at the LinkedIn profile that Huntr is importing from, grab a free LinkedIn Profile Review here.

Let me know what you think in the Comments! 👇