> I understand that recruiters/hiring managers/whatever get a lot of junk applications, but frankly, it is your job to sort through them. You are paid to do this.

Recruiters, hiring managers, and whatevers are humans too, with ordinary human limitations. Just because they are paid to do something doesn't mean they gain superhuman capabilities.

Even if I am a recruiter with nothing else to do, if I get 5k applications for a role each week, I won't individually review 5k applications in a week. It's not possible. So I will have to rely on some automated system that filters out most of those applications. Who knows how good that system is.

On the other hand, if I get 100 mail applications for a role each week, that I can review that.

I'm not in love with this proposal, but I definitely see the appeal. Adding a little cost/effort on the applicant side automatically filters out a ton of applicants that have not bothered to learn anything about the role or company.

In the past I've had success with adding things to the job description like: "please include a link to your favorite gif in your email." And that filters out about 95% of applicants who don't read the job description and don't have a gif link in their email. But with LLMs I imagine those kinds of filters work less well than before.