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Many of you may have had a similar experience when it comes to the application process – sending application after application with no response. Training contracts, pupillages, paralegal or clerk work for far too many of us seem to be going the way of the dodo.

It may therefore surprise you to discover that, according to City firms themselves, they’re not swimming in applications but drowning. In particular, the increasing use of generative AI by candidates meant that firms have had to update their recruitment processes. AI doesn’t just present problems in evaluating the applications themselves either, but in massively increasing the number of applications the average candidate can make. The average City firm, therefore, is faced with trying to extract talent from more and more applications, which are at the same time less distinctive and informative.

This is the problem modern recruitment faces: dissatisfied candidates failing to stand out from the masses of graduate prospective lawyers, and perplexingly equally dissatisfied law firms. Recruiters are of course tackling these problems in their own way. Mills and Reeve LLP, for example, exemplifies the approach of some firms in explicitly welcoming the use of AI in its initial application process, possibly in acceptance of the increased use of such software by trainees themselves, or perhaps simply relying on its ability to distinguish applicants’ talents more tangibly in other ways.

Read this Oracle to discover more about using AI in applications.

But what should it mean for you? Well, for starters being less generic is an ever more valuable and scarce asset to foster. AI may well be able to pump out slick and pitch perfect corporate jargon in answering, for example, what the greatest challenge facing the legal sector in 2025 is, but it can’t do that amazing piece of volunteering or take part in that once-in-a-lifetime adventure on your behalf. Quirkiness, real inimitable human personality, may become the supreme application capital.

The same applies for interviews. I once met someone ahead of a training contract interview who’d memorised word for word every answer for every possible question he could be asked. He may as well have been an AI bot personified. Social aptitude is therefore also appreciating in value. Employees who are dynamic, engaging and personable will produce more money for any firm than universally accessible and unspecialised answers from an AI software.

However, this shouldn’t be taken as a call to vilify the integrated use of AI. Once qualified it may well be your best friend; and even now it may be of immense use in making the application/university work cycle more efficient. If there’s one takeaway it’s this: more of yourself in any application may help to make your training contract dreams come true.