How to Lose 100 Remote Jobs and Still Get the One That Matters

People are devastated.

• Weforum says 90% of companies use AI automation to filter or rank job applicants already. That’s everyone folks.
• 65-75% of job seekers are using AI during their job application process
• 62% of HR managers say they work to identify AI content in applications

It’s gotten so nuts Anthropic recently asked applicants to limit using AI assistants during the application process. Imagine that!

In a flurry of flat panic, even elite candidates from MANGA companies are applying to thousands of jobs a month, using various AI models and tricks.

Surely something will stick!

AI filters are missing strong candidates, and the candidates are burning out. Online, it seems like AI is grinding an already fragile system into dust.

But it’s not AI’s fault – it’s yours.

This is a system-wide reset. Everyone is troubleshooting and trying to find new rules for a new battlefield. If you want to keep yourself on track you can’t just apply harder or rely on AI like it’s a fairytale fix.

That’s not strategy, that’s panic.

Most candidates are frozen in survival mode, repeating the same broken patterns and calling it progress. YOU need something better. You need strategic resilience – the kind that learns, adapts and keeps moving you forward with purpose.

The kind soldiers use to win battles when faced with insurmountable odds.

As the daughter of a military strategist, thinking like this is in my DNA. I grew up understanding that even the most hopeless battles can be won with a little creativity, the right mindset and strategy-first bias for action.

In this article, I’ll show you how to pinpoint where you’re getting filtered out, and how to rebuild your mindset, sharpen your practices and land the one remote job that actually matters.  

Clone Wars: What AI Can’t See It Can’t Hire

What if I told you you’re making yourself invisible to AI resume filters?

Most candidates aren’t being rejected, they’re being ignored outright.

When a single person can send 1000 applications a month here’s what happens:

1. It sends job application rates through the roof (11,000 created per minute)
2. It keeps people in the job pool for longer (screening and vetting takes longer)
3. It overwhelms both sides leading to poorer hiring / selection decisions

As I mentioned earlier, AI is being used to flag ultra-generic, non-personalized resumes. BUT that doesn’t mean the ones using AI ‘correctly’ are working. No matter how qualified an elite candidate is, misusing AI results in erasure.

Because everyone is using AI, everyone sounds the same. LLM’s like ChatGPT aren’t designed to make you stand out (even if you tell them too).

They create statistically average results. So, when 200 candidates tell the LLM to tailor their resume to the job description – it’s not 20 brilliant originals being created.

It’s 20 polished clones – and in tech that just doesn’t cut it.

Even the most impressive resumes get absolutely flattened by AI when you scrub them with the same tool everyone else is using. The more variables that are similar, the higher the likelihood the output will be the same.

LLM’s can ERASE you.

You might have it all. The degrees and the experience – the passion for your work. But now you’ve made yourself a clone of 200 other people and have been flagged as AI.

Best case scenario you make the benchmark and fail the human review.

No-one in tech wants to hire a clone.  

It’s true – doing the bare minimum of using AI correctly isn’t enough anymore. You have to stop treating AI like a numbers game, and start treating it like a war game.

Using Resilience as a Grounding Force

One of my favorite business books is called GRIT by Angela Duckworth.

In the book she speaks about the cadets at West Point, one of America’s most famous military academies. Every cadet starts their career with Beast Barracks, a hellish seven-week mental and physical trial.

Duckworth studied who made it through that pivotal time, and it wasn’t the smartest or strongest cadets that did. It was always the ones who adapted, endured and kept showing up – despite not knowing what might happen next.

Today’s job market demands a similar passion and persistence.

You can hustle, and pick out advantages like AI, but without grit you’ll end up on the wrong end of a bad decision.

“I learned a lesson I’d never forget. The lesson was that, when you have setbacks and failures, you can’t overreact to them.” – Angela Duckworth

Rejection is hard. Not being able to secure interviews is demoralizing. There’s a psychology to rejection we have to acknowledge and stop in its tracks.

No surprise then, that 41% of 3,659 respondents in Crossover’s latest poll said they have no faith in AI interviewers. When you feel like a machine is deciding your future (and doing it badly) it’s easy to spiral into resentment and hopelessness.

For applicants that looks like:

• Giving up and going off the rails (for a while at least)
• Accepting a job offer way under what you should be earning
• Focusing on applying for ANY job and taking one you don’t like (to pay the bills)
• Taking a job that doesn’t suit your career goals

Because of panicked decision-making, you end up in a job you hate, with no future prospects and less money than before. Yikes.

The entire hiring system right now is a stress test, just like Beast Barracks.

The people that will make it through aren’t the ones that are applying for thousands of jobs, complaining loudly online about it and then publishing memes about AI dooming the human race.

They’re the ones who figured out why they got filtered out, changed course and tried a new tactic until they won.

You need that shift – from panic to precision, from mass applying to intentional adaptation. That’s how you go from blind to opportunity to seizing it.

3 Ways to Nab the Remote Job That Matters

So here we are – a moment in your career history when strategy is under fire.

You need to find yourself a high paying remote job, and it seems the odds are stacked against you. There are more candidates, more AI systems and more complexity than ever before.

Motivation is not what you need. What you need is a smarter battle plan.

These three tactical shifts will help you realign your efforts and start making real progress again - the kind that gets you seen, remembered, and hired.

You just need one GREAT remote job.

#1: Diagnose Your Drop Zone

Bad tactic: Apply to 2000 jobs using AI to pump up the volume.
Better tactic: Identify where you're going wrong and adapt like hell.

In the military, a drop zone is where you land troops or supplies with precision. Miss it and the mission fails. 

In your job hunt, your drop zone is where you’re falling out of the hiring funnel. If you don’t know where to target – you won’t know what to fix.

Hiring funnels are designed to eliminate people like you.

Three critical failure points:

• Sourcing: You’re filtered out before a human ever sees you
• Screening: You pass the filter but fail the test or AI interview
• Selection: You make it to the final round… and lose. Why?

Don’t take rejection personally, take it objectively… and measure it. Collect your diagnostic data, pinpoint where the process fails, tweak your variables.

• You should send 2-3 job applications a day (consistency matters)
• Sending 21-80 applications increases your chance of being hired
• Employee referrals work better than cold applies

It’s important to ONLY pick remote jobs you want, that pay you what you’re worth. Create lists of those, if they don’t exist – wait. They’ll appear.

Patience and persistence often leads to successful job wins.

Strategic move: Build your job hunt like a feedback loop. Audit. Adjust. Repeat…until you win.

#2: Outmaneuver the Competition

Bad tactic: Worry about who you're up against.
Better tactic: Know the job so well, they can’t ignore you.

It’s a fact – tech layoffs are still happening and competition is steep. Steep like – the best people in tech flooding the market and being your direct competition, steep.

Everyone’s worried about the 80,150 tech folks dumped into the job search pool this year, from 166 companies – many of them MANGA companies (Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple).

What they’re forgetting is that once you’re past the AI resume filters, most elite candidates look pretty much the same. It becomes even-stevens.

Some have degrees, other don’t. Some went to impressive schools and have publishing credits a mile long. Others have launched and sold incredible tech.

But they ALL meet the baseline for the job. And here’s the dirty strategic secret. Once you’re in the room (virtual or not) credentials stop mattering.

You will win by outmaneuvering them.

That means switching your focus from WHO you’re competing against, to WHAT you’re competing for…the job. It’s not you vs 100 people! It’s you vs the job.

• They say 95% of candidates research a company before applying. If the candidate is mass applying they aren’t doing that.
• Factor in discouragement from ghosting, lack of communication, rejections and stress and MOST candidates won’t do deep research.

Do what most people won’t do!

• Actually get to know the company. Not just the About page - the product, the strategy, the pain points
• Engage with the CEO or founder on LinkedIn. Not once, but consistently and intentionally
• Join the product’s community or user groups, if they exist
• Reference the company’s roadmap, press releases, or leadership articles in your interview answers
• If it’s a startup, offer insights. If it’s a scale-up, show you’ve done your homework

[Source]

Switch from being stressed about talent competition, to showing active interest in jobs you like. Authentic interest is rare!

Strategic move: Stop trying to stand out by shouting louder – and harping on achievements. Start standing out by caring and DOING more.

#3: Focus Your Fire

Bad tactic: Complain about being asked to prove yourself and avoid work.
Better tactic: Pick the right battles, then go all in.

Ever feel like you’re fighting on 700 fronts? Stop that. Struggling to find work, then refusing opportunities to prove your work has value is not smart.

Top performers know that focused fire can do more damage in less time, as long as they’ve nailed their target and surfaced some attention.

There are thousands of people in tech who point blank refuse to do skill tests or work samples. They’ve been inside nefarious freelancing cultures and have felt the exploitative sting of being used.

But this is not that. The reality is that in high competition roles, the only way to separate people who appear identical on paper is to skill test them or see them in action.

You can find out more about Crossover's skill based assessment process here.

So, my advice is to do the test. 

Get over yourself about being exploited for unpaid labor. If you’re fortunate enough to feel like a few hours of your time is too much to invest in a dream job – you’re either targeting the wrong jobs, or you’re lazy.

WHY spend 60-hour weeks firing off thousands of pointless half-hearted AI slop applications to jobs you don’t even want to do, when you could spend a few focused hours creating a sample to land one you want?

See the difference between exploitation and opportunity.

• 80% of US employers focus on skills rather than formal education
• 72% of hiring pros use skill testing to assess candidate quality
• 88% of tech companies use pre-employment tests!

So sure, the hiring system is exhausting, and tech talent is frustrated and burned out. People are tired of proving themselves – but it’s a dead-end mindset to have.

While you’re sitting on your couch sulking and drawing lines in the sand – elite talent is brandishing portfolios, building prototypes and smashing cognitive tests.

You can’t win a battle if you’re not on the field.

Companies don’t want to guess if you can do the job. Show them you can with every opportunity that you get, and you’ll NEVER be jobless.

Strategic move: Stop resisting the work and use it to shine.

Become a Master of The Force

The job market feels like a galaxy under siege – AI filters are brutal, competition is steep and the system is super unpredictable.

But that doesn’t change the facts. And the fact is that most people aren’t losing with AI job hunts because they’re unqualified, underqualified or overqualified.

They’re losing because they’re using AI without any thought as to how it might be impacting their chances.

They’ve eliminated and erased themselves, becoming clones by mass-producing applications, copying AI tactics and forgetting to THINK before acting.

Don’t forget the mission. You don’t need every remote job – just the right one.

Just one!

A job that pays you well and pushes you to grow. One that respects your mind and operating culture and lets you enjoy your life.

Jobs don’t go to the best prompt engineer.

They go to the person who can crack THIS system and still BE a person worth hiring.

The one who:

• Diagnoses where they’re falling short and adjusts
• Learns the company like a commander studies terrain
• Shows up ready to prove they've got the goods sir!

The system is turning everyone into a clone. So, stand out by becoming something else entirely. BE the main character!

This is the new battlefield.

The force isn’t luck - it’s strategic resilience. Use it well to master the new system. And don’t stop until you land the one remote job that was meant for you.

Apply Now