Jobhunters Flood Recruiters With AI-Generated CVs (ft.com) 70
About half of all job seekers are using AI tools to apply for roles, inundating employers and recruiters with low-quality applications in an already squeezed labour market. From a report: Candidates are turning increasingly to generative AI -- the type used in chatbot products such as ChatGPT and Gemini to produce conversational passages of text -- to assist them in writing their CVs, cover letters and completing assessments. Estimates from employers and recruiters who spoke to the Financial Times, as well as multiple published surveys, have suggested the figure is as high as 50 per cent of applicants.
A "barrage" of AI-powered applications had led to more than double the number of candidates per job while the "barrier to entry is lower," said Khyati Sundaram, chief executive of Applied, a recruitment platform. "We're definitely seeing higher volume and lower quality, which means it is harder to sift through," she added. "A candidate can copy and paste any application question into ChatGPT, and then can copy and paste that back into that application form."
In recent months, recruiters have received more applications for each job because labour markets on both sides of the Atlantic have weakened. Employers need to fill fewer vacancies, and more people are job-hunting after being made redundant. Longer-term trends, such as the rise of online job boards that make openings visible to a broader pool of potential candidates and make applying easy, have already boosted the number of applications. About 46 per cent of job hunters are using generative AI to search and apply for posts, according to a survey of 2,500 UK workers from HR start-up Beamery. In a separate poll of 5,000 global job seekers by creative platform Canva, 45 per cent had used generative AI to build or improve their CVs.
A "barrage" of AI-powered applications had led to more than double the number of candidates per job while the "barrier to entry is lower," said Khyati Sundaram, chief executive of Applied, a recruitment platform. "We're definitely seeing higher volume and lower quality, which means it is harder to sift through," she added. "A candidate can copy and paste any application question into ChatGPT, and then can copy and paste that back into that application form."
In recent months, recruiters have received more applications for each job because labour markets on both sides of the Atlantic have weakened. Employers need to fill fewer vacancies, and more people are job-hunting after being made redundant. Longer-term trends, such as the rise of online job boards that make openings visible to a broader pool of potential candidates and make applying easy, have already boosted the number of applications. About 46 per cent of job hunters are using generative AI to search and apply for posts, according to a survey of 2,500 UK workers from HR start-up Beamery. In a separate poll of 5,000 global job seekers by creative platform Canva, 45 per cent had used generative AI to build or improve their CVs.
Turnabout is fair play? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Turnabout is fair play? (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone posted a reply to an application they made on Twitter. The prospective employer said they were interested but asked if they could send something they wrote instead of an AI generated application.
The applicant replied that they were not an AI, just autistic.
I wonder how many recruiters can't tell an AI apart from someone on the spectrum, and how many neuro diverse people get mistaken for an AI.
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if they don't get get the job then they may need to sue for discrimination
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It's very hard to prove that their neuro diversity was the reason they didn't get it. It's not like with racism where they can just send a near identical CV with a different name on it, and then force the employer to answer some very difficult questions.
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Just go to the option of requiring the applicant to perform a personal hand delivery of a hand written application to weed out the AIs.
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Honestly this may literally be the best way to ensure that you get real applicants that are invested in getting that particular job and not just spamming an AI generated CV at every single job listed.
Hand written resume, hand written solutions to the knowledge test done at the interview, interview done in person to ensure that the person applying already lives close enough to the job to be able to be onsite at least periodically. Gives the interviewer an opportunity to get a feel for the person.
Re: Turnabout is fair play? (Score:2)
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Depends where they are on that multi-axis spectrum. Some neurodivergent people thrive in a social job that has reputative, nearly scripted, call and response interactions; some do best alone in a room with 30000 mixed up objects that need to be sorted.
Re: Turnabout is fair play? (Score:3)
Re:Turnabout is fair play? (Score:4, Insightful)
About 6 months ago, I posted a response to an article here on Slashdot. Someone responded to that asking what AI agent I used to write my post. It would seem that if someone writes something at all individual, stylish, literate, coherent, vocabulary-rich, or otherwise unlike generic misspelled drivel, it is now mistaken for AI. Such writers need not be neuro-diverse, just individuals who can write with an individual voice. That says less about AI and more about the writing skills of modern society.
Many Slashdot posts are superb in their writing and intelligence, but we have all seen (1) those with good ideas, just poorly expressed, and (2) those that are incoherent to begin with. Also, we have all seen "corporate speak" with lots of buzzwords but no meaning. It is odd and interesting to think that AI actually writes better than most of that trash. But, if readers have now come to expect poor writing from people, and AI writing seems better to them, it is a sorry commentary on general writing and literacy skills.
Re: Turnabout is fair play? (Score:2)
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I wondered about this too. I suspect it's been trained to output good grammar.
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Re:Turnabout is fair play? (Score:4, Funny)
How does that make you feel?
Tell me more about job hunting.
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It's not minor. I estimate about 80% of applicants doing my companies assessment complete it using AI. Also the applicants aren't always job hunters. Many are hackers trying to get a foothold in company networks.
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HR and companies have been using byzantine portals and key word searches to filter out resumes for as long as I've been on the job market. Earning your paycheck isn't the worst thing in the world, y'all.
Hear, hear!
More than once I've been tempted to write a 'resume' (using the word as loosely as possible here) that just contained keywords, with no actual sentences, just because I know this is true.
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When I had to assist HR with IT one of the things they pointed out was they'd get thousands of applications for every position and it was physically impossible to do anything beyond a keyword search to get through them. Once they had sifted them down they could do a human review. Then they had to retain every application for EEOC laws.
whelp (Score:1)
Teh AI won't have any trouble replacing us if we turn stuff over to it voluntarily.
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I don’t know why we still need to bother with cover letters. My resume has my qualifications and feel free to contact my references. You hire me and I’ll do solid reliable work. Do you really need a letter stating how I wake up rock hard every morning because of your corporate culture?
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It is mainly a checkbox, another way to filter people. If someone includes a cover letter, supposedly they are more interested in the job than someone who hasn't.
Same reason why one has a unique resume for every job to focus on things.
99% of the game is dealing with the automated filtering.
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Depends. My general line of thinking was if someone is applying to a job in their area, then no cover letter needed. Obviously they want a job that pays money to do work they know how to do. It's, technically speaking stupid to need a cover letter.
If someone is coming from outside the area and doesn't have the skills, then without a cover letter, I'd round-file the application as not relevant. But if someone wants to branch out, I would give them a chance if they make a pitch. Otherwise there are way way to
now what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Welcome to 2024. I am been on both ends of the desk, and I've copied/pasted some resumes into ChatGPT to just get the points done.
I just view this as a modern form of uuencoding, I guess.
Re: now what? (Score:2)
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This is exactly how the world with AI is going to turn out isn't it?People use AI to write CV, headhunters use AI to filter it out. In the end AI is doing all the work and little is accomplished. Students use AI to do their homework,teachers use AI to grade it. So... what is the meaning of life then? Write tasks for AI... bet there is an AI that can do that.
Let's face it, humans have been mostly relegated to busywork and makework and all sorts of shit that really doesn't have any purpose for a long while now. We're just shuffling of the busywork to the bots so we can concentrate on (checks scorecard), um, let's see, writing's out (AI covers it), paintings out (AI covers it), do they make an ai for sitting on the couch and drooling into your snack bowl? I guess that's what we'll do once the AIs have taken over everything else. Surely they'll still produce crap
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AI on /. ;)
It's okay about 1/2 the jobs are fake too (Score:1, Insightful)
At some point we need to admit that our economic system is fundamentally broken and it needs to change. Like it or not we're going to have to move some form of socialism in the very near future. And I don't mean the Star Trek future I mean like in the next 10 years or so.
And that means some people you really do not like are going to have a d
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Job requirements: MS degree, 10 years experience with C/C++/Python/Java/R/Perl/
Salary: $15/hr
Company: No one wants to work anymore!
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I can take three of mine and outproduce any H1-B and ten of theirs while eating a sammich.
It's not about how much you can produce (Score:2)
You're not thinking about macroeconomic trends like somebody in the C-Suite does. They're not just thinking about you as an individual worker they're thinking about how much they have to pay for workers as a whole.
So now in order for you to try to compete with the H1B's you're doing the work of 10 of them right? That means you're doing the work of multiple employees so the company now needs less people. You've massively
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It is about turning IT into a bottom pay job like textiles, meat packing, or food service. Even if someone can work 3-10 times as much, it is that they can hire people for so cheap, where someone has to compete with foreign labor at those bargain basement prices.
IT is a skill based trade. In reality, it needs a trade body like electricians, plumbers, and such have. However, businesses go for bottom dollar, imported labor, which hurts incomes for even people who have spent many years in the field.
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At some point we need to admit that our economic system is fundamentally broken and it needs to change. Like it or not we're going to have to move some form of socialism in the very near future.
The only people who actually want this are terminally-online losers who have no real life accomplishments. They want to tear down others to feel better about themselves.
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people (Score:2)
Employers, especially those with HR departments, deserve nothing better and probably much worse.
No, seriously. I don't think there is a more destructive entity (outside C-level of course) in a company in terms of efficiency and climate.
Pragmatically speaking, if management are a bunch of dicks and cunts, then so will HR. If management is even remotely a Mensch, then HR is already absolutely redundant.
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I think this is an issue everywhere. The people who get past the HR firewall are often the ones who are the evolved "paper MCSE" who match the keywords, been to the boot camps, and have a degree from some "accredited" institution nobody has heard of. Once on the front lines, they have zero clue what they are doing, and spend more time in office politics trying to shovel their workload on other people than actually pulling their load for the team.
A lot of people mention that people in the US are not tech s
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The thing is, certifications are better than resumes, because resumes are easily fakery. We need to improve the certification and examination process, because that's easier to control. Resumes are stupid, you can put any crap in there. I mean how do you know a person did all the things they claim in the resume. Even if it's at a good company we all know there's many country club atmospheres at a lot of companies. Of course experienced workers are better than certification, but certifications and exams at le
If you are job hunting (Score:3)
Re:If you are job hunting (Score:4, Informative)
Using AI is probably the quickest way to get your resume into the trash pile.
No, the quickest way to get your resume into the trash pile is to not pass the automatic keyword scanner, which will toss out your resume without a human even looking at it. Even being in a position where a human can read your resume and might think it doesn't stand out enough, is already a hurdle to clear.
copy and paste the job description to get past the (Score:2)
copy and paste the job description to get past the bots is an old trick as well.
The Recto/Sigmoid/Descending Colon Stack (Score:2)
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I approve (Score:2)
I dismiss any AI generated CV/Letters (Score:5, Interesting)
All of my job postings even before the big LLM surge have two filtering questions, one if which is really simple:
> Of the points in the job posting above, what caught your eye or stood out to you as the most interesting?
This has become amazingly powerful for filtering with AI, because the crap that is put into that answer is CLEARLY evident when generated by an AI. Real people answer very differently.
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That's a great technique!
I use something similar during the interview process itself, where I encounter more and more people using AI "teleprompters" to help them answer my questions as we speak. Primarily, I ask "why" questions and opinion questions. "Would you choose Entity Framework or Dapper? Why?" AI will always provide neutral answers to such questions. And if the candidate says "I don't know, somebody else made that decision" then that's an automatic "No" from me. A good candidate will always have op
Bad idea (Score:2)
From what I've seen of LLMs so far, they all seem pretty samey & have a "voice" that's particularly... well, Meh!, even when I do my best to adjust the pro
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Most of HRs nowadays never get to read the CVs they receive. They simply pass the CVs through an algorithm that filters and summarizes the selected ones to them.
Unfortunately it's one more case of extreme automation and cost-cutting leading to a ridiculous outcome for all parts involved.
The way it used to be (Score:2)
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Used to be?
Yeah, I remember putting Rust on my resume back in the 1990s.
Require submission by snail mail (Score:2)
It's not that long ago that everyone had to do this. This raises the cost of each submission... ;)
CVs and Resumes must die (Score:3)
Three things instead. .. certifications. I know you guys hate the shit out of them. Mostly because of MCSE idiots. But that's the fault of the exam. We need better certification exams (scenario based questions, things like that) and also company/field specific testing.
1. Exams. Go to some testing center, do a set of exams and that is what should count the most when hiring. Yes
2. Second to that, use something like work number or a connection to IRS or whatever to verify a person's prior employment history. (Frankly, I wouldn't give a shit about prior work history if they have good exam scores).
3. Because of deepfakes and other BS, remote interviews should be conducted at a testing or interview facility that has a faraday caged room.
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Our HR will filter based on a couple of keywords and pass the job seeker over to a Subject Matter Expert for a face to face (video) interview.
The interview takes from 30 minutes to 1½ hrs. and the result will be a score, we prefer over 75% but it's not set in stone.
We now have over 5000 employees and the system works well.
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how do you not get inundated? how many interviews do you have to do per position (on avg)?
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Also, we only take people with a few years of experience and we know the companies they work (have worked) for.
A seldom problem we've seen is engineers letting someone else do the interview for them, that is an important reason for the face to face interviews.
easy solution (Score:2)
Require hand-typed CVs, typed on a manual typewriter, but only actual carbon copies of them.
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With that requirement, you'll only get resumes from retirees, because they're the only ones who know what a manual typewriter *is*!
Many years ago... (Score:2)
I was a senior engineer who was given a stack of resumes to read. After a while, they all started looking the same. It appeared that they were all written using the formula from the same book. It's hard to imagine that an AI generated one could be much worse
Great resume! (Score:2)
We'll hire the one that wrote it.
Wrong use for AI (Score:2)
I don't need an AI to write my resume for me, but I wouldn't mind an AI that could reliably fill out the arcane, bespoke forms that many companies use that expect you to manually copy/paste your job history from your resume into individual HTML fields.
Back when I was job-hunting and expected to spend hours manually filling out these ridiculous forms IN ADDITION to sending them my actual resume, I'd often thought about creating an open standard for resume metadata tagging, if I could somehow convince the HR
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"the arcane, bespoke forms"
What's worse is when they use the same talent management system so the forms are all the same but they're siloed so you have to reenter everything anyway.
Sorry for ranting (Score:2)
I'm usually not the ranting type, but in this case I'm gonna say that I'm glad to be nearing my 50s having built a solid career and now comfortably working by myself at home. I have a steady influx of clients and projects and will never have to deal with the annoyances of job-seeking.
I'm really sorry for most of the 20-30 year-olds out there who will have to face the ever-increasing mess of a job market that exists from now on.
FWIW, I had an AI go over my resume. (Score:2)
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Dang dude. That makes me think. I should make like a 5 page super resume and then just have chatgpt produce the best 1-page version of it for the job description
No, make it 10! (Score:2)
With 10 pages I could have an excess of useless details that I might never remember to mention in relation to a job.