The office manager at a thirty-person roofing contractor has nine applications for the estimator job open on her screen. She was told to do what she always does first: read the cover letters and bin the sloppy ones. She reads all nine. Every one is clean. Every one opens with a paragraph about precision and safety culture, every one is spelled right, and not one of them tells her anything. She has spent forty minutes and the pile is exactly as tall as when she started.
A screen that sorts nobody is not a screen
That first read exists for a reason. For years a careless letter told you something true: the person did not check their work, and an estimator who does not check their work costs you money. The letter was a cheap test with a real signal.
The signal is gone. In our experience nearly every applicant now runs their letter through an AI writing tool before sending it, and the tools remove exactly the errors the screen was built to catch. The test still runs. It just passes everyone.
That is a specific kind of broken, and it is worth naming, because the instinct is to fix it with a better test. A screen that no longer separates candidates has not become slower or less accurate. It has become a step with no output. The right response is not to sharpen it. It is to delete it.
What a university did when it noticed
UNC-Chapel Hill noticed. According to the Raleigh News & Observer in a piece published October 29, 2026, citing the Daily Tar Heel, which reported the story first, UNC's admissions reviewers had been using Slate's Reader AI tool to assign each application essay a score, rating its grammar and writing quality. A UNC spokesperson said applicants were increasingly using AI writing tools of their own, so the scores "increasingly skewed higher" and the rating "was no longer providing a meaningful distinction in the decision-making process". The university removed the rating from its essay evaluation. Its admissions director, Jared Rosenberg, said the office no longer found the tool necessary.
Notice what UNC did not do. It did not buy a better scorer, or add a second one to check the first. Neither the News & Observer piece nor the Daily Tar Heel's original describes a replacement step. The Daily Tar Heel adds that UNC separately dropped its supplemental essays for 2026-27, so applicants now write one essay. A step that had stopped telling reviewers anything was taken out, and the review got shorter.
Two honest caveats. The step UNC dropped was itself an automation, and not a new one: the Daily Tar Heel reported on February 25, 2025, from contract documents it obtained, that the admissions office had used automated technology to review grammar and writing since 2019, and its October 2026 story traces the Slate score to the 2022-23 reader guidelines. So this is a check that ran for several admissions cycles being retired, not a decades-old one. And no announcement date is given; the Daily Tar Heel, which reported the change on October 25, 2026, says it applies to the 2026-27 application cycle.
The same move in a contracting office
Look for the checks in your own office that used to be cheap tests and now pass everyone. The cover-letter read is one. The first glance at a sub's proposal for whether it looks professional is another; a bid assembled with a template and a writing tool looks exactly as professional as one from a sub who has done forty of these. The neatness of a daily report, now that the foreman dictates it into his phone and the phone cleans it up, no longer tells you whether he was paying attention.
In each case the question to ask is the one UNC asked: is this step still changing a decision? If the last twenty times through it changed nothing, stop doing it and move the time to the step that does. For the estimator hire, that is a one-hour exercise with a real set of drawings and a takeoff sheet, which no writing tool passes for you. For the sub's bid, it is the scope comparison line by line.
The honest no: do not delete a check because it is annoying. Delete it because it has stopped sorting. Before you drop the cover-letter read, pull the last twenty hires and ask whether it ever changed who got the interview. If it did, keep it. If nobody can remember a case, the letter is a formality, and you can stop pretending it is a filter.
If this is your Thursday afternoon, the ten agent roles are in the Library.