AI Made the Easy Road Crowded, So Take the Harder One
Job applications hit 11,000 a minute on LinkedIn as software writes resumes, and standing out means doing work that is hard to automate.
Curiosity Chronicle · The Traffic Jam Theory of SuccessSahil Bloom, an author who writes about work and wealth, said he spent the last year getting the same question from young workers: how do I stand out now that artificial intelligence, software that can write like a person, can apply for jobs for me. He was speaking to his audience after reading a New York Times report that employers were buried in AI written resumes and struggling to tell who was genuinely qualified.
His answer, in his words: "The fast lane becomes the slow lane."
Bloom pointed to the numbers behind the pileup. Job applications on LinkedIn have surged to 11,000 per minute, up nearly 50 percent from the prior year, he said, citing the Times. The Times reported that with a simple prompt, a chatbot "will insert every keyword from a job description into a resume," and some candidates now pay for software that hunts for openings and sends applications on its own. Recruiters told the Times that "many of the resumes look suspiciously similar."
To explain why the shortcut backfires, Bloom reached back to an unlikely source. In 1968, he said, a German mathematician named Dietrich Braess built a traffic model with numerical analysis, math that simulates how cars move through streets, and spotted an odd outcome. Building an extra shortcut left traffic slower rather than quicker, because self interested drivers all flooded into it. Braess's paradox, as it is known, holds that an appealing new road can make performance worse for everyone.
Bloom believes the AI tools for applying to jobs, networking, and sending cold outreach are that shortcut for careers. He calls it his traffic jam theory of success. The tools are free and easy, so everyone floods in, and the whole system slows down. Bloom argues that work that is "cheap, easy, and exciting to automate" loses its power to inform. By signal, he means whether an application tells an employer anything real about the person behind it. When everyone sends the same keyword stuffed resume, it stops telling the employer much at all, and may even count against the sender.
His conclusion, in his words: "When there's a traffic jam forming in the fast lane, you get there faster by staying in yours." For a job seeker, he said, that means doing slow, skilled work such as researching one company's problems and writing up possible solutions before you are hired. That harder road stays open, Bloom argues, because it takes real time and effort, which keeps most people from crowding it.
Questions people ask
What is Braess's paradox in plain terms?
It is the finding that adding capacity to a network can make it slower if everyone acts in self interest. When a tempting shortcut opens, too many drivers choose it at once, and congestion wipes out the gain. Traffic researchers have documented cases where closing a road improved flow.
Can employers tell if a resume was written by AI?
Sometimes, but not reliably. They look for generic phrasing, perfect keyword matches, and resumes that look alike, yet detection software is prone to false positives. That uncertainty is why many hiring managers now trust referrals, work samples, and interviews more than the application itself.