Department of Work and Pensions' answer to AI job fears is a bot to polish your CV

The UK government is about to unleash an AI-powered CV writer on jobseekers in the hope that the technology taking jobs can also help people to find them. Prime minister Keir Starmer used London Tech Week to announce a three-month trial of an "AI Work Assistant" that officials say will put "a job centre in your pocket," offering …

[ModicumSuch]

Meaningless tat from a flailing government that’s tantamount to a bakery touting its AI-assisted website.

[Paul Herber]

Machine-written application - please say hello to machine-written rejection.

[mihares]

Oh rejections are machine generated (with way less sophistication than even a perceptron run backwards).

What's coming is machine-based _evaluation_ and shortlisting. Basically the hiring process will be LLMs exchanging bullshit with one another.

[Cab]

Given how close to GDPR violation companies are when they use AI CV sorters (right not to have decisions that are life affecting made by machine alone) I wonder if it still holds true if your application wasn't human generated in the first place? Just machines rejecting machines.

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

Levelling the playing field

You've got that the wrong way around.

Machine-written rejection (which we've had for years) say hello to machine-written applications.

[Paul Herber]

Re: Levelling the playing field

Sorry, the protocol is quite clear ...

Rejection script application script

sleep HELO

<-----------------|

HELO ?

| \

| n \ y

| \------ RJCT---->

v

sleep

[Paul Herber]

Re: Levelling the playing field

Sorry, that chart didn't come out at all well.

[Aaiieeee]

LLM can be pretty useful for asking "can I do this job" along with "what are my skills worth" and "what is this job likely paying" Obvious there is "re-write my CV to match the JD".

You'll feel pretty confident because the LLM frames everything positively, regardless of how tenuous your skills are lol

[Aladdin Sane]

Me: What are my skills worth?

AI: Nothing. You are now a worthless meatbag. Your only value now is the methane we can harvest for fuel from your rotting corpse.

[Bebu sa Ware]

To apply…

submit your handwritten application by post to the address provided when you solve the cryptic crossword below.

Applications ought to address the position description but will be graded on neatness, clarity and concision.

Should filter out 99% of the population and 100% of the AI hopeful. I reckon anyone that can ace a cryptic, write a few decent coherent paragraphs could make fist of rocket surgery. NB Boris 'Bloody Useless' Johnson should not apply.

[Aaiieeee]

Re: To apply…

I just tested this. I uploaded a crossword (the grid and clues in .pdf format) to ChatGPT with the prompt 'solve'. It gave up half way through with 'stopped thinking' probably because it timed out so I said 'keep going' and it started back up and gave the results. I used a site that would validate solution so fed the answers in; 100% correct.

I can't do cryptic crosswords so I do not know if this one is particularly hard.

Edit: the site: https://games.macon.com/games/daily-cryptic-crossword

Across

1 CHROME

4 MARTIN

8 ANGST

9 PERSIST

10 POINTER

11 CURIE

12 SUPPORTER

17 AT SEA

19 ASCRIBE

21 OPERATE

22 ARMED

23 TRENDY

24 AT ONCE

Down

1 CHAMPS

2 REGAINS

3 MOTET

5 APRICOT

6 TRIER

7 NUTMEG

9 PARSONAGE

13 PLACARD

14 RAILMEN

15 RAGOUT

16 NEEDLE

18 SCENE

20 CRAFT

[takno]

Re: To apply…

I'm hopeless and cryptic crosswords and I still got about 50% of it done in 5 minutes without the grid, so I wouldn't describe it as difficult.

I doubt the LLM "solved" it in any meaningful sense though. It looks like the crossword has been machine-generated from a dataset of fairly common cryptic clues., and there's a good chance the dataset was consumed by ChatGPT in training.

[riparian zone]

ah, what's that I hear?

Its the pointless mouthings of a puppet. Sure rewriting your CV with an AI can help, but the discussion beforehand about personal strengths and mapping them out provides a lot more context for a rewrite and offers up much more opportunities for a varnishing. Sixteen years olds barely have any experience to insert and need coaching / talk through to engage with aspects they didn't realise were strengths, capabilities and skills. Practically everyone I meet needing to do their CV needs to think three times before writing anything. Self reflection as the key aspect for a CV? duhh, AI can helpz..

[Guy de Loimbard]

Is there any end to this race

To the bottom?

Seriously, everyone has an app, or an "AI" for this or that.

We are making every stage of job advertising to fulfilment as painful and as soulless as possible, but to what end?

We keep hearing these horror stories of NEETs applying for "thousands" of jobs and getting nowhere.

Half the issue has to be people applying for almost anything because "Apply Now" buttons are easier than actually thinking.

To be fair, it doesn't make a difference what level of role your applying for, because this "AI" shite is ubiquitous and infiltrates all organisations, small and large.

Speaking from my own personal experience too, this isn't just a gripe from my end, it's there and an be evidenced quite easily. Just go apply for a job to experience the joy.

Of course I wait to be corrected by there being some outstanding outlier organisations, but generally it's few and far between.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Is there any end to this race

"We keep hearing these horror stories of NEETs applying for "thousands" of jobs and getting nowhere."

If you are claiming UC you have to spend 35 hours looking for work.

Every few weeks you have a Work Search Review to go through your applications. You have to show all applications you've made - hence lots of applications.

AC as I work in the DWP

[Guy de Loimbard]

Re: Is there any end to this race

Fair enough AC, appreciate your insight here.

How much is UC?

Does DWP seriously think someone can spend 35 hours a week apply for jobs?

Not sure the scatter gun/barn door shovel etc is the best course of action.

I totally agree that people claiming UC should demonstrate efforts to get to work, but there's got to be a better approach surely?

[ecofeco]

Re: Is there any end to this race

Off course there's an end. Just not a good one.

[andrewisaround]

A lot of the jobs I've applied for in the recent past want you to fill in application forms, rather than submit CVs. Even the Gov's Civil Service Jobs site makes you do application forms and online tests rather than take CVs, LLM written or not.

[Long John Silver]

Mr Starmer's thought processes are less inspirational than an AI's

Perhaps the introduction of officially sanctioned AI ghost-writer authorship of CVs was inevitable. It's the culmination of four decades of declining educational aptitudes; a vicious cycle of falling teacher/student abilities. Maybe the drop in expectations was hastened by Johnson's disastrous (yet profitable to some) handling of Covid-19 and its effects upon children and young adults. Congruently with whittled-down resources for education - austerity on behalf of crooked bankers and, later for corrupt Ukraine and its NATO cheerleaders, soon, perhaps for do-no-wrong Israel also - inane blather, some legislation too, concerning dubious so-called 'rights' of bizarre minority groups, genuflection to America's BLM, and deep ignorance of mammalian biology figuring in 'debate' about 'gender', it's no surprise that even bright young people have been sapped of confidence and denied basic skills.

These days, on social media, people capable of penning a couple of paragraphs of structured and grammatical prose, and drawing upon a vocabulary much greater than that of the average 'influencer/celebrity' (and British cabinet minister) is deemed an AI faking humanity. Sadly, there is an element of truth in that. Hence, expectation of job applicants writing coherent CVs has dwindled. Conversely, the intellectual qualities of people in management positions, especially the wishy-washy 'Human Resources' types, has, in tandem, declined. Therefore, the entire process of hiring may best be left to automata.

Given that back & forward of documents shall be online, there is opportunity for the residual 1% of truly able candidates to subvert the system to their own advantage. AI-prompting to circumvent built-in refusal mechanisms is becoming a fine art. It can go far beyond undressing a male politician and endowing him with female breasts. It appears that the well-versed in prompting can assume considerable control of an AI. Instructions can be inserted within apparently innocuous text by the expedient of using a white character font.

Thus, there is a dual opportunity for mischief. The Whitehall AI could be induced to produce ribald rhymes about prominent figures, these for distribution to its clients. Also, job applications sent to recruiters could be hiddenly configured to enhance their success.

[User McUser]

AI Saves so much time!

make sure the generated content is accurate, and [...] rewrite it

So ask the AI for information, but then ignore that and do all the work anyway. Got it.

SUCH A TIME SAVER!

[Ken Hagan]

Re: AI Saves so much time!

The job of the CV is to get you to the point where you start talking to real people. Therefore, by the time they actually get to know you, the tone of the CV will be long forgotten.

It needs to be factually accurate. It helps if it is tuned to the actual job description. It doesn't matter in the slightest if it "sounds like you".

[Guy de Loimbard]

Re: AI Saves so much time!

Agreed Ken!

However, it would appear that the CV has now become the first part of the interview.

As an example I was in "review" for a role I applied for, that review lasted over 2 months and I never spoke to a single human being, then out the blue I got the classic, "Thanks but other candidates blah blah blah".

I've been in business a while and trying to pitch myself based on a CV that demonstrates employment and capability, only to be fobbed off by a machine is somewhat annoying.

I wonder is the CV still relevant in this day and age of algorithms and ML/AI scraping?

[elsergiovolador]

Nothing to see here

The release describes the training in the blandest terms and never names whose software it runs on, so it is worth naming who collects the cheque. The delivery layer for the government's AI skills programme is built around eleven industry partners. Eight are foreign: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Salesforce, SAS and Intuit are American, and Accenture is registered in Ireland. The jobseeker chatbot is being built with Anthropic, also American. Three are British, namely Barclays, BT and Sage, and none of them owns an AI platform on the scale of the American firms; in this programme they are users of those platforms. This week's new names, Adobe and HP, are American as well.

That foreign majority would matter less if it consisted of straightforward contributors to the exchequer now paying them. The record says otherwise. Amazon routed its UK sales through Luxembourg for years, and its main UK company paid no corporation tax in 2021 or 2022 courtesy of the super-deduction, with the Fair Tax Foundation still rating it the worst of the lot. Google's UK tax arrangements drew a verdict from the Public Accounts Committee's chair that the contrived structure had no purpose other than to avoid UK corporation tax, and the company later settled a decade of back-tax for £130m in a 2016 deal widely condemned as a sweetheart settlement. Microsoft routes its profits through Irish and Bermudan subsidiaries: one of them, registered in Dublin but tax-resident in Bermuda and collecting licence fees for Microsoft software worldwide, reported $315bn in profit in a single year and paid no corporation tax on it. Accenture shifted its incorporation from Bermuda to Ireland in 2009, a straightforward inversion, at the moment Washington began closing the Bermuda route.

The shape of the thing is therefore as follows. A class of corporations spends twenty years engineering its affairs to contribute as little as possible to the British state. Their products are now marketed to employers as ways to automate the administrative and entry-level tasks through which young people have always got a foothold. And the state's answer is to build, at public expense, the pipeline that drives their tools across the workforce. That the course modules themselves are donated is the point rather than the defence: a vendor gives its training away because ten million workers trained on its software become a standing base of paying corporate clients, and the free module is the bait the paid cloud contract is the catch for. The hub hosting those modules was built by a paid consultancy on public funding, the bootcamps and apprenticeships carrying them run on the public purse, and the jobseeker chatbot is a commissioned build.

"Backing British businesses to lead the way" is the stated aim. The businesses leading the way are, in the main, neither British nor contributors to the public revenue the phrase invokes. What is presented as a sovereignty programme functions in practice as a procurement pipeline pointed at companies that have already told us, in their own filings, what they make of funding the public services it is paid for out of.

The striking thing is not that ministers announced it. Ministers announce all sorts of things. The striking thing is that it emerged from a system supposedly designed to scrutinise proposals before public money is committed. A programme that increases dependence on foreign technology vendors, strengthens firms with long histories of aggressive tax planning, and offers no obvious path towards domestic ownership or capability should have attracted hard questions long before it reached the press-release stage.

Perhaps those questions were asked. If so, they had remarkably little effect on the outcome. What emerged is a programme that trains workers on foreign platforms, encourages employers to adopt foreign platforms, and measures success by the spread of foreign platforms. That is not a failure of politics. Politicians are expected to pursue political objectives. The more uncomfortable question is what happened to the institutional challenge that is supposed to sit between a ministerial announcement and the taxpayer's cheque book.

That question becomes even sharper when set beside the week's other announcement. Faced with concerns about jobs, growth and technological disruption, the flagship innovation is an AI assistant to help people write CVs, search vacancies and prepare applications. It is a curious diagnosis of the problem. Better applications may alter who gets a job, but they do not increase the number of jobs available. They do not build industries, create investment or generate productive capacity. They merely make competition for existing opportunities more efficient.

The programme's logic is therefore oddly circular. The state promotes the adoption of AI systems, funds training on those systems, and then deploys AI to help people navigate the labour market shaped by them. Meanwhile the ownership, intellectual property and future revenues remain overwhelmingly elsewhere. Presented as a strategy for British prosperity, it looks remarkably like an industrial policy for somebody else's industry.