The Job Market Is Hell

I’m super happy the EU AI Act exists. All use of AI in the process of employment needs to be classified as high risk:

AI systems used in employment, workers management and access to self-employment, in particular for the recruitment and selection of persons, for making decisions affecting terms of the work-related relationship, promotion and termination of work-related contractual relationships, for allocating tasks on the basis of individual behaviour, personal traits or characteristics and for monitoring or evaluation of persons in work-related contractual relationships, should also be classified as high-risk, since those systems may have an appreciable impact on future career prospects, livelihoods of those persons and workers’ rights.

“High-risk” in this sense requires:

1. Comprehensive logging (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...)

2. Transparency in how the systems work (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...)

3. Human oversight (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...)

4. A named individual in the EU with responsibility for the system (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...)

> He would read a posting carefully, scrub his résumé, tailor an introductory note, answer the company’s screening questions, hit “Send,” hope for the best, and hear nothing in response—again and again and again.

That sums the process up pretty well. The advice for "surveying friends and former employers for leads" seems like the best bet (and referrals probably always have been), just a shame no one in my network works anywhere I'm interested in.

> a paid internship at a civic-consulting firm, years of volunteering at environmental-defense organizations, experience working on farms and in parks as well as in offices, a close-to-perfect GPA, strong letters of recommendation

> He would do anything—filing paperwork, digging trenches—to build his dream career protecting California’s wildlife and public lands

I'm not sure this has anything to do with AI.

It's hard enough to land an environmental non-profit, state, or federal environmental job. It is doubly difficult to do so when both the Federal [0] and State [1] government are slashing hiring across the board.

This article is just "AI washing" austerity measures and offshoring that is occuring in the US.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_m...

[1] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/california-governor-ai...