News

If I ever have to job seek again, I'm probably gonna just hand write my resume on a crumpled piece of notebook paper to make it stand out from the AI generated drivel.

I'm only sort of not joking.

As someone looking for a job, I fucking hate this. It is so annoying to hear HR people commenting that you should make sure to put a lot of effort into the jobs you are applying to and write a new cover letter tailored to each job. Bullshit. Maybe if you were not getting 300-500 applicants for your posting for a mid level position, I might consider it. There is zero possibility they are looking at more than a dozen out of the 100 that are qualified.

This is, of course, industry dependent. My wife was able to land a fairly decent job in her industry despite not meeting every qualification because there are simply not a lot of people in it. I'm in tech in Seattle where I have to contend with HR getting flooded with applicants which means they start looking for unicorns that somehow have experience in the combination of the dozen systems the job uses along with a decade of experience in them. I also have to contend with job postings getting canceled after applying, once while I was on the phone with the fucking recruiter.

My advice if you are in the tech industry is to work with recruiters. Eventually you will find one who is not shitty at their jobs.

Using this tool, you should submit many false but PERFECT UNICORN applications, flooding the system. As the interviews approach, obviously last minute cancel the others. If you booked an interview at all, you've improved your chances by generating multiple absents that would have been your competition.

Be sure to back these up with fake accounts and such.

That's true chaos.

So I've gotten pretty good at applying for jobs having moved quite a bit and needing to change a few times in the past decade. Here's my unsolicited advice for people getting sick of the application process (it sucks I know):

• Make sure your resume can be easily OCR'd. OCR, or optical character recognition, is how programs and machines convert image-formatted text into plain text. Sometimes it works pretty well, and sometimes it spits out a garbled mess of text. If you've ever done an application that auto-fills fields after you upload your resume, you probably have a good idea how readable your resume is by a computer. Like it or not, the first step for a lot of companies is to filter by OCR converted text fields, and if yours isn't legible, you may be out of luck. Use a simple, consistent font and don't do any special formatting. If you want a second "fancier" printed version of your resume for interviews, go for it.

• Fit your resume to a single page and highlight your skills at the top. You can change these from application to application if you want, and if you do, I suggest using verbiage from the job description because these are the keywords they'll be looking for.

• You'll probably see a few jobs that really seem like a great fit for companies you really want to work for. CALL THESE COMPANIES. Trust me, employers don't love the hiring process either, and if they're actively trying to fill a role and they get a call from someone interested, they'll probably respond. They may just politely tell you to follow the standard process, but that's really the worst case scenario. And even if they do, they'll probably keep an eye out for your application.

I hope this brings down the whole system as AI HR evaluates AI resumes.

The conclusion was to rely on nepotism.

120 jobs aren't that many to apply for. I applied for 99 during my last job search granted it was over a few months but still. For an AI tool it should be much more

Aw dang, paywall.

Make it do 120 an hour for a week. Indeed and other job search apps with 1 click apply makes it easy for a regular person to apply to 120 different jobs in a day.

So it's pretty bad and barely works. And yet, I'm considering it.

Reading the article, this went exactly as I imagined it would. Equal parts hilarious and horrifying!

Paywall.