What job seeking looks like in the age of AI?

By 2030, applying for a job may look very different from how it does today. A team of two from Aalto University mapped out what is already changing and what could come next.

Master's students Pinja Ylä-Kotola (People Management and Organizational Development) and Adil Hassan Khan (International Design Business Management) from Aalto University carried out a project on the future of AI-driven job-seeking behaviour in collaboration with Alma Media in summer 2026. The aim of the three-month project was to identify emerging changes in job-seeker behaviour over the next three to five years as AI becomes part of everyday job searching, and to provide the company with a set of concrete scenarios to plan around.

Alma Media's recruitment services and job portals operate across several European markets under the Alma Career brand.

The team interviewed six early adopters of AI-enabled job-search tools and eleven industry experts, bringing perspectives from job boards, recruitment technology, career tools, HR and business strategy, and labour economics. These insights were supported by academic and market research, an analysis of job seekers' social media discussions, and a review of developments in startups and investment.

AI is changing the decisions job seekers make

The project identified several areas where AI is entering the job-search journey and changing how people navigate it. The findings suggest that job discovery is moving away from fixed job titles and towards describing and exploring personal career direction. Job seekers increasingly begin by describing their interests, experience, and skills to an AI tool before starting the actual search. Once they find an opportunity, AI helps them interpret the job description and assess how their background compares with the requirements.

At the application stage, AI is used for repetitive tasks such as drafting and tailoring application materials, which significantly reduces the effort required for each application and allows candidates to apply in much higher volumes. Applying for jobs is often described as a numbers game, especially among early-career job seekers: frustration is expressed through the number of applications sent, while success is also attributed to sending more. Low response rates increase the pressure to apply even more, and employers respond to the rising volume with heavier automated screening. As written documents become less useful for distinguishing candidates, job seekers look for alternative ways to reach employers and other signals through which they can demonstrate their skills and interest.

In addition to examining emerging behaviours, the students conducted extensive market research and explored recent technological developments to identify the external forces shaping the future of job seeking. Based on this evidence, they developed six plausible future scenarios for the company to consider.

The scenarios were designed as tools for strategic thinking and turned on three questions. Whether AI-driven platforms change hiring at a structural level, and how employer-side infrastructure evolves alongside them. Where discovery begins, and who owns the interface the job seeker starts from. And what signals employers will accept from candidates as evidence of skills, as written documents lose their power to distinguish.

The students explained that, while building the scenarios, it was also important to consider some key uncertainties that could push the future of job seeking in very different directions. One example is the openness of the data ecosystem, which determines how integrated different systems can become. Another is how much control job seekers will be willing to give to AI-enabled tools in the future. 

The final report brought together the emerging behaviour changes, the identified external forces and market developments, as well as the future scenarios supported by visual demonstrations, and related recommendations for Alma Career.

The report goes into practice at Alma Career

The students presented the results to the project steering team at the end of August, and were subsequently invited to an Alma Career management team meeting to discuss the findings. They have also been invited to take part in the company's onsite meeting for its team leads in Prague in November, where the scenarios are expected to be used as a framework for strategic thinking.

The management team described the final report and presentation as highly relevant to the company’s current strategic questions. 

‘I was surprised by the practical value of this work. The points raised describe our strengths, weaknesses and opportunities very well, and the results are very useful to us,’ says Vesa-Pekka Kirsi, Executive Vice President at Alma Career.

‘The project provided a clearly structured view and thought-inspiring possible future scenarios of how job seeking may evolve in the age of AI,” says Tuomas Mathews, Chief Growth Officer at Alma Career and project owner. “The work both bolsters and further clarifies Alma Career’s chosen strategy, and we will definitely bring these insights into our ongoing strategic planning and development activities. ‘

For the students, entering a new industry and bringing together many interconnected developments was both the most demanding and rewarding part of the project.

‘Learning about a completely new industry well enough to develop practical views for how it might evolve was challenging, but it was also the best part of the experience. I especially enjoyed speaking with industry experts and exploring these questions together. Many of them told us that we had been given a particularly difficult task because so much is still up in the air, but that was also what made the project so interesting,’ says Pinja Ylä-Kotola.

‘We had so many different forces at play, and making sense of how they connected to build the future scenarios was the hardest part. You start with something vague and just trust the process, until the shape of it finally comes together,’ says Adil HassanKhan. 

‘This has been an incredibly timely and relevant project. AI is changing the way we work and interact with technology at remarkable speed, making the skill of anticipating what might come next more important than ever. I am very grateful to Alma Media for trusting our students with such a complex and forward-looking challenge and very proud of the ambitious and thoughtful work Pinja and Adil have done,’ says Dina Myllymäki, Lecturer at Aalto University School of Business and the supervisor for this project.