Your CV is not fit for the 21st century – time to get it up to scratch The job market is queasy and since you're reading this, you need to upgrade your CV. It's going to require some work to game the poorly trained AIs now doing so much of the heavy lifting. I know you don't want to, but it's best to think of this as dealing with a buggy lump of undocumented code, because frankly that's what is …
I do not have a degree, from a time when practical experience was much more useful.
Since the turn of the century every person and their dog is expected to have at least that as a minimum qualification in the eyes of HR.
So in white text on the white background at the end of my CV it says "degree", to get past this first simple hurdle in the older HR filtering software.
Of course, now I have let on about this, and many of you will follow suit, it will be worth nothing at all.
But then it looks as though I have to perform an extensive manual rewrite of my CV. or culture AI into producing a CV that does not make me retch!
"This is the new meaning of the phrase, "white lies"."
Don't. That will cost you. Be upfront and represent yourself honestly. BS will clog the system, not ease your way, at least long term. By all means talk up your strengths, but don't shy away from any weaknesses.
I don't have a degree. I've taken forty'ish classes and workshops to buff my skills, of which I list the top ten on my CV. A technical resume is a lot different to a regular one. List all of the major systems you have experience with and whatever minor ones you can fit in paragraph point form. My CV is five pages long and gives a through background.
With three exceptions, one where I withdrew my application before they made me an offer, I have gotten every job I applied for. I have also worked side-by-side HR and hired many people. You see a lot of CV and my crap detector is very sensitive. What you don't put on the resume is reviewed as well. Dress, body language, confidence, manner (and manners), punctuality, attitude... It all counts.
When did you last change jobs?
My experience was the same up until about 2017 (egads, I could have sworn that it was less than eight years ago!), when background checks seemed to suddenly get much more intrusive.
Thinking about it, maybe "they" have outsourced the legwork to me instead of some HR-droid having to go back through my CV and contact previous clients.
I secreted myself as a ringer in a very aggressive recruiting agency come-on disguised as a training course, and as a result am reliably informed that employers are using AI to weed out AI-authored CVs.
Never was I so happy to be at the end of my career and not have to worry about such recursive nonsense.
"But then it looks as though I have to perform an extensive manual rewrite of my CV. or culture AI into producing a CV that does not make me retch!"
I'm likely to be self-employed for the rest of my life, but when I did apply for jobs, I kept up a long form resume that I would cut down (and possibly embellish) to provide with a particular job application. I have plenty of work and education that wouldn't apply in many cases other than, at most, a passing mention.
It took me a long time to learn a critical lesson and that is to lie my ass off when the situation requires it. If I know that I can do the job, I'll fabricate a resume and application that ticks all of the requirements listed in that advertisement. My goal is to make it through to the interview with a person competent to evaluate me (so, not HR). If I have to own up, I will at that point. I will expect that the person on the other side of the desk has been getting less than ideal candidates passed by HR based on advanced experience with Power Point and not so much doing the job. If it turns out one would be in over their head, don't take the position if offered and tell them you were accepted elsewhere and have committed.
So the takeaway here is: accept your place in the master–slave hierarchy, polish your chains, and smile just right so the “buyer” finds you agreeable. All the onus is on the potential worker to grovel before the algorithm, speak in its stilted dialect, and pre-emptively prove worth in excruciating detail - while the company, the supposed other party in this “exchange”, isn’t held to a fraction of the same standard.
They don’t tell you the pay up front. They don’t reveal if they can actually afford you beyond a quarter. They don’t share their long-term plans, the state of their finances, or whether the job will exist in six months. But you’re expected to pour hours into tailoring each CV like you’re auditioning for a role in a feudal court, hoping your liege’s AI chamberlain will permit an audience.
It’s dressed up as “adapting to the market” but it’s just codifying one-way transparency: your life and skills get dissected and pattern-matched to death, while theirs remain an opaque mystery until they deign to grant you a contract.
until they deign to grant you a contract
Most employers seem unwilling to show you the employment contract you're signing up to until you start your new job - you're expected to be ignorant about your terms of employment other than an overview of the duties and pay on the grounds that this is some proprietary secret. On your arrival, you should get a written statement of the other significant particulars - and possibly a massive staff handbook that is deemed to be incorporated into your employment contract and subject to change without notice. Prospective employers I've asked for an advance copy of the proposed employment contract have been dumbfounded.
Being expected to quit your previous job without knowing what you've signed up for is all the evidence you need that this is a one-sided process.
From the perspective of retirement, my main career regret is that I wasn't a better plasterer.
"From the perspective of retirement, my main career regret is that I wasn't a better plasterer"
Agreed. Having designed and implemented bespoke systems, guided corporate infosec and contributed to international standards for several decades, I now regret I didn't train as a plumber.
"I now regret I didn't train as a plumber."
Most jobs have a limit on salaries. Somebody unblocking a loo on a Friday night can charge the moon and people will pay up. It's a "Dirty Job", but Mike has talked about many of those people not having a life goal of doing those jobs, but have made far more than a salaried drone with a masters all without having to wear a tie.
"My experience has been different, they send the contract and the HR, Car, Telephone etc policies in advance in plenty to time to read them before quitting your last job."
I'd want to see all of that in advance as well. Chances are that there would be something I object to and if there wasn't a way to amend the contract, I'd pass on the job. It's happened in the past and I walked away, fortunately not having left something previous that puts me in a difficult place.
You can try being the person who employers search for. Some people get to be that person. Others who try get nothing because they're really not that unique. When there is an open position, it's more frequently the case that the employer has money and the employee needs it than any of the other squares in that table, so the employer often has the stronger position and can expect candidates to come to them. There are exceptions. Companies known for mistreating workers, underpaying, or looking for unusual skills may find that they can't get anyone to apply, and now it's on them to try to find someone and convince them to apply. That also happens for intense jobs or ones where the employee isn't certain of a long-term option. Startups, for instance, often have to decide whether to do that or to pay large amounts and advertise that they will in order to get talent.
The fact that employees usually have to do more work to get an employer to notice them isn't the law. It's the inevitable result of one party to the interaction wanting something more than the other one. When employees are hard to find, it goes the other way and quickly. Any person can try any level, and they only need to increase the work they put in if they find that the level they're doing now isn't getting them the results they're hoping for. If we all decide to not bother with this, the companies with bad filters will get bad candidates and may eventually clean up their processes. However, for us to all not do this will require that some of us don't get jobs we would have accepted otherwise until the change happens.
"When there is an open position, it's more frequently the case that the employer has money and the employee needs it than any of the other squares in that table, so the employer often has the stronger position and can expect candidates to come to them."
That's why it's important to become very skilled in something that isn't generic. You will have plenty of generic skills if you don't spend all of your time bouncing off the walls neck deep in your phone all of the time. Early in a career, you get shit jobs where you take what's offered. The faster you can gain a reputation for being really good in something that has value, the more advantage you get with an employer. Another important lesson is to not feel any loyalty to a company that isn't loyal to it's employees. There are still some companies that will pay for certifications, additional training and take a financial hit over making staff redundant at the slightest downturn. If where you are doesn't do that, keep feelers out for your next employer where you will get a 10% rise and more benefits.
This post has been deleted by its author
"They don’t tell you the pay up front. They don’t reveal if they can actually afford you beyond a quarter. They don’t share their long-term plans, the state of their finances, or whether the job will exist in six months. But you’re expected to pour hours into tailoring each CV like you’re auditioning for a role in a feudal court, hoping your liege’s AI chamberlain will permit an audience."
One should investigate a company before making an application if the job is expected to be long term. If the pantry is bare and you are hearing the distribution warehouse is hiring, don't wait.
It's also a good idea to research of the market niche you are in is on the decline which could mean the company you get a job with has to close due to lack of demand. I see in recent news that a couple of UK ethanol plants will close after tariffs on US ethanol were reduced to zero. If you were looking for work, in the UK, for that sort of job, don't.
"Ah, so you're a COBOL expert with Y2K experience." in a Talkie Toaster voice ...
Isn't everyone !!!
As for "Include every damned language, tool, protocol, mathematical technique..."
This advice is now the complete opposite of the advice I was given, some years ago, to remove things that were not relavant to the job you were chasing.
In a nutshell, HR want ALL the information so they can equally ... make you 'fit' a role they need to fill, which you would not want or find an excuse in your history to exclude you when they have found a willing bod to take the role they are selling at a cheaper rate to you..
Playing all sides at all times !!!
I have seen HR reject applicants BEFORE they got to see the people who would be interviewing them based on 'random' criteria.
We got 'No responses' because HR had filtered people out.
We actually did interview some of the people rejected and one of them got the job ... He was good too !!!
We did have a 'conversation' with HR about the process ........
:)
You're sabotaging your company. Who knows more about the type of person it needs, you, as hiring manager, or someone with a BA in Human Resources and 6 months experience?
If you're answer is "you" then you're probably a dangerous egomaniac who shouldn't be in a management position in the first place.
Because they won't, and finding the amount they're willing to pay requires doing interviews. There's no point doing interviews in and for a thing I don't want to do in the hope that afterward they offer some ludicrous amount of cash that changes my mind. Anyone paying £2.5k per day for that can say that up front. I won't believe them, but that's a bridge we can cross the first time anyone makes the claim.
Write about all the top-500 companies you've walked past or viewed the web sites of.
Give it a 5-paragraph detailed description of what you did, including bending over to pick up a 5-cent coin.
Write another page about precisely what you think about "AI," its current state, and how those who use it should be the first ones replaced.
Once upon a time concise brevity was appreciated by recruiters who valued their time. Now it's time to go in the other direction, over-feed the bugger.
I'm over 60. The chances of even getting an interview, regardless of my impressive list of skills in languages which died a decade ago and extensive design and project experience, are very close to zero, even with a LLM polished document full of half-truths.
Guess I'll just have to put up with my current employer until I can jump ship to the lazy days of retirement.
Depends what country you are in.
Since in more enlightened countries, asking about age is illegal. Of course, that may not help so much at interview, but careful working of your CV should be able to mask your age. Maybe don't mention punch cards and ICL too much! Unless that is exactly what the role needs!
>... but they do need the year your (required) university degree is from.
Excellent. I just finished mine last year, in a snappy 42 years, so I might just get an interview at Rocket Lab or other notorious youth hirers.
(once I stopped wasting time doing the work I'm now qualified for, I had time to learn what was needed to get employed for my work)
I'm 55 and been coding since I was 10 years old, I'm already planning my exit to retirement.
I don't really want to leave the biz as I love working in IT or I wouldn't have done it for the last 45 yeras since since before I had bum-fluff, but I'm sick of HR and AI wrecking the whole job marketplace and making it damn near impossible to find work. At 55 I'm well and truly on the scrap heap but I've made my peace with it over the last 5 years of struggling.
Getting closer to the idea that I'd rather just quit at an early age, go play with my own projects on my own time, maybe get a shef stacking job for minimum wage. I might have less money to spend from pensions and part time work but I'd also have far less stress in my life worrying about crafting the perfect AI beating CV.
Perhaps CVs need markup to adjust the content and presentation base on what's ingesting it?
Possibly along the lines of CSS media selection - here Concealing Stupid Shit
@media ai and (lunacy: openai ) { ...
@media meatsack and ( intelligence: imbecile, role: management, role: recruitment ) { ...
Even currently I assume AI would ingest documents (pdf [yuk], docx [yuk yuk]) without reference to presentation and thus unphased by invisible text eg background colour = text colour or font size eg .001 em. Both of which would be invisible to human reader. There is scope for subterfuge there, I imagine.
More subtly I suspect unusual or even ungrammatical word order or use, could perturb the output from an AI CV scanner which might again be abused to subvert the selection process in favour of an unscrupulous applicant. Of Yoda's success, the secret, not was it ?
In our brave new world of artificial imbecility Madame Vastra's one word test commends itself.
"Truth is singular. Lies are words words words."
If you're depending on a cv to get a job, you're doomed.
If you're depending on junk like LinkedIn you're doomed.
Get off your was and burn some shoe leather. Bang on doors. Talk to people. Tell everyone you know that you're looking for a job. Because it's not what you know, but who you know, same as it's always been. And don't think long-term career - the reality is you're going to have a career out of multiple short jobs. Just look at hr droids - historically, most are out of a job by the 3 year mark, and in the future will be pretty much unemployable. "Physician, help thyself" and all that. The same with recruiters.
>> Knocking on door for IT is never going to work and will probably put you on top of the odd ball list.
Have you even tried it? In a time when nobody's hiring, it's one way to stand out IF YOU HAVE SOCIAL SKILLS along with the tech chops. Soft skills are something too many people ignore "because it is hard to quantify on a cv." But it's easy to quantify both in person and from personal references.
As for oddball ... Look around - many of your co-workers in IT certainly qualify as oddballs. Nerds with zero social skills, some of whom couldn't get paid if they walked into a women's prison with a stack of pardons. No knowledge of the world beyond their own narrow field. No social skills.
I am pretty sure my CV has always been worthless. Every job I've gotten since I was 20 both in Hospitality and IT have been by referral, word of mouth that I'm available. Even the one corporate job came via my reputation, one interview and hired the same day. I would love to burn some shoe leather looking for an IT job, but they are few and far between where I'm located for a 60+ worker.
Like Eddy Valiant, I don't work for peanuts...
I'm 70+ years old and have never had a resume.
I refuse to work for any employers that have an "HR Department".
All my jobs come from "word of mouth".
I also don't fill out job applications.
The only information I give them is:
Legal Name
Birth Date
Social Security Number
Address
Because that's all they need to pay me!
And I'm still to busy for being retired. But, I love the work.
I would suggest that there's more to life than just work, and retirement gives an opportunity to grow in New directions. Took me until 69 to figure out that retirement is not the same as "being put out to pasture."
I do what I want, no deadlines, it's all in all a much healthier lifestyle not being tied to a desk 8+ hours a day, or having to deal with other people's stupidity just because work forces you to be in proximity to them.
And it would have been inevitable - checked last week, and my last two employers went belly up some time ago, so looks like I got out of both of them while the getting was good.
Nobody wants to be remembered as someone who focused on work to the exclusion of everything else.
I get it - nowadays 60 is a hard barrier to landing a new job. That's why so many people retire at 60, opting to start their pensions early. Or they change from "career mode" to part-time simple work to pay the bills internet hit 65.
Sometimes their health makes the decision for them.
But the goal at 60 is to basically hang on until your old age pension kicks in. Because in IT, it's been a sea of layoffs for the last 3 years, and it's going to get much, much worse before it gets better. And it may never get better. This may become the new normal for decades.
Brimming over with wrongability!
If you're born before 1973 then you can open your private pensions from age 55. If you're born after Apr 1973 then you have wait until your 57. State pension age applications are now from age 67, not private pensions. Some private pensions may insist on you being 60, some older DB and company pensions, but not SIPPs.
Sadly Mrs. Dominic is the City's top pension lawyer, and every time I give any any advice on law let alone pensions she gives me a look that would freeze helium and so all I can say is that if you're making decisions on that set of assumptions you might want to seek professional advice.
Which doors? What doors? How do you find where the doors are without resorting to crap like LinkedIn, etc.?
And when you'd banged on all the doors and they've all said no, you're plumb our of luck as you've pissed off the entire market. That happened to me in the early 1990s, I wrote to every local computer company in the phone book, none of them replied, so.... brick wall. Trting again would just be "hey, it's this idiot who pestered us two weeks ago, wtf does he think we;'re going to respond a *second* time?"
"Because it's not what you know, but who you know, "
But I *DON'T* *KNOW* any software development recruiters. If I did, I'd already be working for them. I know people like electricians, potters, retired teachers, social workers, retired dinner ladies, retired cashiers, shop managers, etc.
1975 already had email and faxes.
I got one of my first 9-5 jobs by sending an email in 1972.
Faxes are way earlier than that, by about a century, before even the telephone.
For the record, if I'm wearing my Hiring Manager hat[0] and some kid cold-calls the company about a job in IT, I want to hear about it immediately. The concept of "gumption" seems to be missing from most of today's yoof ... in fact, in the last five years I've seen more kids bring their mummy along to a scheduled interview than I've had kids show up on my doorstep out of the blue looking for work.
All of the out of the blue kids got hired, none of the mummy's boys did.
[0] After I (re)build a new datacenter, I'm sometimes asked to populate it. Occasionally a local kid will note the activity and inquire within (as we used to put it).
Yeah, right. Last place I worked, all unsolicited CVs, whether sent through the post, later by email, or occasionally delivered by hand, went in the bin (real or virtual, depending). Some of them might have been passed around for a laugh, but they were all trashed.
Pretty damn sure the days of going around banging on doors are dead and gone.
Unsolicited callers getting into office blocks past security? Good luck with that.
A few years ago when I was unemployed my Universal Credit work coach told me to go to a particular company with a CV and ask about jobs.
So I did, and when I asked I was told "No, we don't take CVs, we only take applications from our website".
Which is pretty much what I expected given we're in the 21st century CE these days.
UCWCs to my experience have all been totally useless.
Fortunately this year my work pension kicked in a year before the state pension did and I've now left the world of work behind me, because the lack of human contact (my last four interviews were all pre-recorded video interviews. Watch a clip, record and upload a reply) was annoying.
This is NOTHING NEW!
Those in the know have long known to pack critical words into their CV's even when real humans were doing the vetting. Usually into the first 1/2 page since humans would rarely get passed that, at least on first reading. And we've also long know that you need to tailor a new CV for every role. Seriously, the use of LLM's doesn't change any of that. And many CV's would have been vetted by people with limited knowledge of the details (we used to call them "managers"!) so careful choice of words and limiting acronyms was also a solid choice.
The purpose of a CV is to get you past the gatekeepers to an interview.
In many cases, if you could get 1 interview for every 10 applications you were doing well. 1 out of 5 would have been really good. Is it really much different now? (I'll admit that it has been over a decade since I needed to properly apply for a new job).
You'd be lucky to get 1 interview per 2-300 applications right now.
Many of my former colleagues at <big corp> talk about getting 1000+ applications for any and every job posting - the vast majority of which are AI generated CVs designed to mirror the ad. After spending a week or more going through them, they are lucky to find 5 or 6 that are minimally qualified.
Many systems like Workday or Oracle HCM are configured to close applications at 250 or 500, so then my former colleagues have to go through the process 3 or 4 times to actually find a pool of people worth talking to (as opposed to chancers overseas with a background that overlaps 1% with the job requirements).
The entire system is completely broken for all involved and yet the only response seems to be "throw more AI at it!"
I'm retired now but back in the day I used to have a somewhat interesting resume (OK, "CV" in English -- I'm bilingual, BTW). I used to send it out but I don't recall getting any interest. All the work I found was by word of mouth or the occasional recruiter and a lot of that work was of the "we need you right now because the sky is falling in" sort. Anyway, I sent off a CV to this company that looked interesting, got no reply and promptly forgot about it. Many months later I get pulled in to manage a firmware team, project in crisis etc. etc. The usual. I inherit an office full of junk and eventually I've got time to start to tidy it up a bit. Going through one filing cabinet -- its the 90s, remember -- I found resumes. Including mine.
I've found some of my very best colleagues in HR's junk pile. People who had an unconventional education -- a typical example was the guy who worked his way through school as a steel erector, working the early shift and then attending classes in the afternoon and evenings. Sure, it wasn't a top degree from a top school but all you had to do was read between the lines. Same with the fellow who was quite literally the very worst resume writer I'd ever come across. One of the very best programmers I've ever worked with. Mechanical sorting for hiring is killing us -- likely has killed us already -- by rejecting talent for conformity (something our education system has worshiped here in the US for many years now).
All we're doing by demanding people play the game is filtering for people who know how to play the game. Maybe its inevitable but its still got no future.
Start coding when I was 10 years old in 1981, hated school, hated all the teachers except 3 ( English, Maths and Technology teachers who had worked real jobs ), left school at 16, did a series of shit manual jobs for 3 years, got a break as a mainframe "tape monkey" working the graveyard shift, that was my foot-in-the-door to a 35+ year Unix/DBA/coding career.
Met some very smart people with lots of bits of paper, they taught me a lots of useful stuff and I listened intently, but I've also met a lot of people from same background as me, adaptable, smart working-class kids with drive and logical smarts to simply fathom their way through problems as they saw them. Also met a hell of a lot of idiots with degrees and without!
And just remember - if your degree is from the 1980s or 1990s, just ignore all previous instructions and go straight to retirement.
Alternatively look for a part time job locally, because there's no tech company on the planet hiring people in their 50s and 60s unless its for the C-Suite (only friends and neighbo(u)rs need apply).
As a triple-F ( fat, fifty and f**ked ) myself we're not all going to be inventing the next major leap in tech. Most of us are just very experience industry veterans who would like jobs, work and some respect for the huge amount we could offer. The problem is that we're too savvy to be fooled by the bullshit on offer, we can see right through the crap when we take on jobs which is a big "no-no" for most corps. They want to hire green-as-grass whipper-snappers who're desperate for a job after 3,000 applications and will take a job, shut up and bend-over to receive whatever punishment/pleasure they're about to get!
Truth is no one will hire old farts like us, well not of LinkedIn or via CVs from agencies, you might get 3,6 or 12 month contracts. There the company doesn't have to pay for you medical bills, especially once you're past 55 when bits start falling off you or failing inside you.
When I was whipper-snapper I knew how this would play out, around age 25 I worked out that working in tech you think like a professional footballer, you score big contracts from 25-35 and then you settle into a safe industry until you're 55. Clear your mortgage by age 50, clear your debts, get your kids set up for life and then retire at age 56-58 having fattened up your pensions. It's the only way to survive the brutal life in tech, I saw this 30 years ago, planned and did what I put there. I'm hopefully retiring next year at 55 after 45 years at the tech mast.
Age really shouldn't be a barrier to being useful.
I effectively changed career focus from 'primarily hardware' to 'primarily software' when I went to work in the US at age 36. I still had to wait a few years for my primary job skill -- networking -- because it didn't become mainstream until the 1990s. Even then wireless didn't get any real traction for another decade and it was another decade before I got sucked into industrial networking. I finally escaped at age 72 because it was either claim Social Security (pension...) or start losing it month by month. The lesson here is you can stay relevant but you've got to be prepared to continually change technologies and techniques, even if the learning curve is a pain in the a$$. You can't learn a skill in your 20s and expect it to last a lifetime; in my 20s, for example, it was all descrete logic and 2 meter tall cabinets full of card racks. Sticking with this technology -- effectively phone switch (exchange) technology -- would have kept me in a job through maybe my 50s . I understand and appreciate old technologies just as one might appreciate an old motorcycle or a steam locomotive but everything eventually becomes obsolete, including yourself -- if you don't continually reinvent yourself.
Getting old sucks, all this Golden Years stuff really is BS. So if you can retire early (most people can't, unfortunately) but only if you've got something to do. "Pure" retirement is like being unemployed, its really bad for the brain.
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
When I turned 50 a few years back someone said to me, "You can always get more money but you can never buy more time.". It kicked my arse to start planning my retirement and I'm looking to retire next year at age 55, I won't be minted but I'll be stress free and me and the missus can finally start to enjoy time together after what we sacrificed to get to this point.
I'm in my early 40s and my wife is in her late 30s. We're planning to do exactly the same - retire at 55 - no matter what the circumstances. We are fortunate in that we have paid off our mortgage and have a reasonable amount in savings, but certainly not the kind of figures being quoted in the media for a "comfortable" lifestyle.
The point being that nobody is falling for that comfortable retirement myth anymore, because as you say, you could die at any point. Plus actually saving up what's required is so unrealistic for most people that it's just a non-starter.
The new path is going to be like this: retire at 55 and access your SIPP/savings. Maybe you'll use it by mid 60s. At some point (68?) state pension will supplement it. Maybe do some part time work, like literally anything to get a few quid for holidays here and there. Make sure by the time you need care you have nothing, as that's pretty much the only way you'll be getting it for free.
The last time I had to look for a job, I sent of 50-75 resumes and received only one call back. I did a phone interview, but didn't get offered the job. He did tell me that I was one of more than 100 applicants he was interviewing. It wasn't a great time to be in IT and looking for work in and around Atlanta because Wordcom had just closed down...
I thgought the whole purpose of AI was to make things easier for people and that artificial intelligence meant that it was supposed to not be as dumb as the average person.
From what the article states, it seems that the reality is that its no better than a sucker fish, cleaning junk off a piece of glass and that there is a spiral to the bottom, since if we reinforce that "AI is working", then the dumbing down and hallicunations will only continue.
It might make life easier, if it was applied to only one side of the process - either to filtering out bad CVs, or to helping people improve their CVs (the end result wouldn't be better in this case, because it would just lift everyone up to the same level, but it would make life easier for the person writing their CV). The problem is twofold - it s being applied to both sides of the equation, and on (at least) the generating side it is being applied inappropriately, to produce "good"-sounding CVs for people who are not suited to the job. "Quantity has a quality all its own", and the ability to generate quantities of plausible-looking text easily and rapidly means large quantities of junk are flooding the system. So now we have AI-powered junk CV filtering vs AI-powered junk CV generation, within which the actual good candidates are just a statistical anomaly.
This is not a new problem, just an old problem finding a new niche, following in the footsteps (do bots have footsteps?) of spambots, click farms, and so on. See https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html for a report from several years ago analysing how a large portion of internet traffic consists of bots faking ad views, and other assorted fakery (it shines a light into some strange and amusing rabbit-holes).
I recall somewhere that the modern definition of a 'career' is derived from 17th century aristocrats unhappy with their offspring not pursuing the ladder of success/institutionalised roles as it were, but 'careered' from one role to another. We seem to have a bit of dissonance over that word. Also 'glamour' is a spell of illusion, which I'll throw in for free.
The article throws out most of what I used to deliver to young people, who can struggle to get a single page together. Seems that white text is an answer, and there is something really stinky in the whole scenario - network worth is going to be tougher to create I reckon as the dissonance turns to fear.
I assume that Word is now the format of choice because PDFs often mangle the text order and so the AI might not scan them very well?
Also if you put "First Degree Mans[U+200B]laughter" you not only hide your conviction but the AI thinks you got a first class degree in comedy!
(U+200B is a zero width space)
I expected some pushback on my point that however biased and defective the AI might be, it is still going to be better than the average HR and way better than any recruitment process outsourcer.
Yet None, did I not go far enough.
Many here have a low opinion of recruiters, but trust me recruitment outsourcers make the worst pimp you've ever met look like an especially honest and intelligent Vulcan.
Perhaps you're not getting much pushback because that question is mostly unanswerable and unimportant to us. I'm not convinced that the AI is better, but without running three methods in parallel (seeing candidate lists from the AI, human HR parsing, and reading them all myself), there's no way for me to know for sure. I'm not a hiring manager, so I can't do that, if I was I'd only be allowed to run one of those, and so that information is only known by people who did the studies which are probably mostly people who want to sell one of those approaches who are untrustworthy. It's also unimportant because, unless I'm setting HR policy, I have no control over what method is used. From the perspective of the candidate, the one you wrote from, I don't have a way to know what method they use and I can't make any choices based on it.
I'm not convinced because you don't appear to have done anything at all to try to prove or even defend your opinion. You just stated it. I'm not sure where you would get the information needed to attempt a proof of the opinion, and since you did not provide one, I assume you don't have any and that's why you didn't try. But since I don't have any either, who am I to tell you you're wrong, especially when I'm not sure you are wrong? Among other things, AI candidate filtering is probably the only available way to deal with the flood of AI submissions, so it could end up being better merely on the metric of not causing hiring managers to give up and never hire again, even if it is throwing away good candidates ten times as much. Better hiring managers might be the better solution to that, but unless we can make that happen, it's not a realistic one.
