Half a year ago, I found myself unexpectedly unemployed. As a father of four, amicably divorced, I held a £100,000 position at a tech company. During what was supposed to be a routine check-in with my manager, I was abruptly informed that my job was being eliminated.

The suddenness of this news sent me spiraling into a period of despair, an experience I shared in the Daily Mail last year.

What followed was an unsettling awakening. At 48, the job search process had transformed from a straightforward skill-matching exercise into something akin to modern dating, filled with ghosting, deceptive profiles, and a relentless erosion of self-worth.

For those like me, who haven’t had to actively market themselves for years, witnessing once-stable careers crumble under the pressures of AI and economic challenges can feel utterly surreal.

If you’ve yet to experience an AI “screening video call”—an initial interview step increasingly popular among employers—brace yourself. You’ll interact with a fully automated AI agent, often designed to look like a polished young professional, as it evaluates your responses.

The rather sexist assumption is that dealing with women, never mind they’re not real, makes the process feel more empathetic and ‘softer’. But, frankly, I felt manipulated by the whole thing. I’d be much more comfortable with a ‘man’ in his 50s.

Not only that, ‘she’ marks you on a series of metrics for how confident you appear based on the tone of your skin, the pace at which you speak and the richness of your vocabulary. Even your eye contact with her, a bot, gets a mark – before all is fed into an algorithm to ­determine whether you are a ‘good fit’ for the business.

Strangely, getting along with actual people – the very human phenomenon of ‘just clicking’, which anyone who’s ever worked in an office knows is crucial for ‘a good fit’ – isn’t measured at all.

For the first time in my life, nearing 50, I had no option but to ‘sign on’ and start a dispiriting, weekly trudge to the Jobcentre, writes Frank Gibson

In AI ‘screening video calls’ you can look forward to a fully autonomous AI agent (often appearing as a twentysomething woman with perfect hair and model looks) asking you questions and noting your responses

It was at the end of last summer that I got the sickening news my role was being abolished and I was being made redundant – one of more than 22,000 people in the tech industry to get their P45s last year. In fact, I’m part of an increasing trend generally, with redundancy figures rising sharply at the end of 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics.

I didn’t panic – that came later – but for the first time in my life, nearing 50, I had no option but to ‘sign on’ and start a dispiriting, weekly trudge to the Jobcentre.

Scarily, I had a family to support. Divorced, I shared custody of our four children – now aged 24, 23, 19 and 13 – as they grew up. Only the youngest now lives with me, on alternate weeks, but the 19-year-old is at university, where accommodation charges don’t come cheap.

I had a savings buffer of £17,000, but with outgoings of £5,000 a month, it didn’t take a genius to work out I was facing poverty within months.

Almost immediately I plunged into the weird world of the modern-day job search.

The first thing I came to understand was that, as in dating, the most popular profiles get all the matches. And it’s no longer rare to use AI to help you get there.

In fact, nowadays, candidates are actively encouraged to leverage AI to hone and polish their CVs, tailoring them to the specific role and how it’s advertised.

Then it becomes a numbers game, with the goal of applying for as many jobs as possible, with as bespoke a version of your CV as possible, in the shortest amount of time conceivable . . . lest the job be withdrawn for being oversubscribed by applications.

This whole process can happen within hours, never mind days. I’ve seen jobs posted in the morning and withdrawn by lunchtime.

Applying for a role becomes a soul-destroying rush to spot a job, tailor your CV and submit an application under a ticking clock. And even the senior job vacancies seem to function in the same way – as a frantic, ill-considered rush. But then it gets even odder.

For on the other side of the desk, employers are relying ever more on automated tools themselves, and very often using the exact same AI software the job-seekers are using. The more applications an advert receives, the more employers feel compelled to rely on AI systems to help them deal with the deluge of CVs.

In effect, bots are evaluating bots in a ludicrous arms race, with little human input on either side.

Sometimes the job doesn’t even exist but is a figment of a bot’s imagination. Ghost jobs, sometimes referred to as Zombie jobs, are fake postings created by AI, often because the business wants to project the impression they’re flourishing and successfully expanding, or to benchmark salary levels.

Some estimates reckon 20 per cent of jobs listings aren’t for real roles.

The skill as a job-seeker is learning to identify them. You’ll see specific signs – a listing on a jobs website that stays up for longer than a few weeks, for example, or is quickly re-posted, or vague on detail. But there are still lots that look genuine, and often I felt like a total fool for being fooled by them.

I spent more than two months banging my head against the internet’s wall in this way, infuriated by the madness of it all.

It wasn’t just ghost jobs. Being ghosted, in which you hear nothing, nada, not a word, from the people for whom you’d like to work, is an absolute inevitability of the modern job search.

Sometimes this happens because the recruiters are overwhelmed with thousands of applications and don’t have a mechanism for handling the inquiries. But often it’s just default behaviour. The phrase ‘we won’t respond to unsuccessful candidates’ peppers job adverts nowadays.

I learned to develop a thicker skin as time went by and avoid emotionally investing in any of the roles I was applying for.

The other consequence of this AI-driven market is that if you’re up against a particularly stellar candidate, who is pumping out applications, they can land multiple job offers at the same time – then effectively block the system while they decide between competing offers.

Impossible expectations, fake postings and a compulsion to apply for more and more roles – it has honestly never felt harder for someone like me, in the middle of their career, to find a new job.

Miserable posters on social media sites such as Facebook and Reddit confirm it – it’s a horribly crowded, ruthless market for those in their 40s and 50s.

But if it’s bad for us, it’s terrifying for those just starting out.

In tough economic times, battling a punitive tax regime, employers are keen to cut costs wherever they can – and entry-level jobs are easy ­pickings. Already we’re seeing the elimination of graduate roles in favour of AI – which can do repeatable, low-value tasks far faster – across tech, legal and professional services: industries in which a good proportion of middle-class 21-year-olds got their first footholds in the job market.

If it makes you wonder where tomorrow’s experienced white-collar professionals are going to come from, well, the AI evangelists say there will be no need for those people soon either.

It all feels incredibly disheartening, writes Frank Gibson

It all felt incredibly ­disheartening. With financial pressures mounting, I became increasingly desperate for employers to respond; for anyone to give me the chance to demonstrate my skills.

By October, the safety net had come to an end, my savings were gone. I started to scour my outgoings for things to cut: TV subscriptions, posh supermarket shops, takeaways, random treats – all of them had to go.

I was getting the odd interview, but almost always with the dreaded AI bots – the Evas and Mayas and Sarahs – which I found even more nerve-racking than a traditional human-to-human interrogation.

Despite being hyper-realistic and presenting as a regular human on the other end of a video call, the machine feels no empathy, builds no rapport and provides only false body language clues as to how you’ve done ­during the interview. It’s an unsettling, spooky experience.

Worse, the way it works allows for none of the interesting, quirky applicants to get through. AI looks at previously successful interviewees and finds patterns in characteristics shared by these applicants. Great if you’re like the other people previously hired, but terrible if you’re not from the same background or have a different sort of personality.

As my search went on, I came across another source of teeth-grinding irritation: paid-for recruitment agencies that demand a monthly subscription to access ‘exclusive’ roles, just like ‘premium’ access on dating apps.

The cost can range from £5 per month up to ten or 20 times that. But, of course, since most people needing their services are, like me, feeling the pinch of unemployment, it’s another expense we probably can’t afford.

After weeks of attendance at my local Jobcentre Plus, my job coach began to insist I cast the net wider and apply for jobs that weren’t in my wheelhouse at all. To get your jobseeker’s Universal Credit payments – in my case a grand total of £400.14 per month – you have to agree not to limit yourself to one industry, even if you’ve been in it for the best part of 30 years.

Apply for everything, and hope that you hit the target with at least one of these shots-in-the-dark. After feeling initially aghast at this, I realised the only way forward was to put my pride aside and do it. If you can’t beat them…

I grew adept at the process. Send an application, follow up with a message to someone in HR or Talent Acquisition, be relentlessly polite and grateful for everyone’s time, no matter that six months ago you were the big cheese calling the shots.

At every interview make sure you use phrasing that mimics the job description. Swot up on the company’s ‘values’ so you can quote them back to them. ­Genuflect to the AI gatekeepers.

And repeat. Which is how I ended up with six job offers in the space of a month. Six dates! And all of them, despite casting my net wide, loosely, broadly, in the tech industry.

The irony is, now I was playing one employer off another.

I rejected two offers immediately because of their longer commute and lower salary offering, before settling at last on a great job that offers a good blend of job title and responsibilities, salary and opportunity to build my skills in the role.

But I found the choosing stressful and can honestly say the whole system felt more or less dysfunctional from start to finish.

If you’re looking for reassurance, I can report that there are jobs out there. Real jobs, working for good employers. But in today’s world you need to be far more willing to sift through the fake roles, navigate the AI bots and look past the months of silent, soul-destroying rejection.

You need to understand that well qualified 40 or fiftysomethings hitting what they think is the peak of desirability won’t always be snapped up. That it’s a strange new landscape out there, strewn with the broken careers of complacent Gen X-ers.

My advice? Keep on putting your best foot forward. There is a match out there, but you might need to flatter a few virtual young women first.

And once you’ve got a job? Pledge your undying love and hang onto it for dear life.