Oak Ridge High School Drum Majoretees 1947. Original public domain image from Flickr

AI Has Sucked the Soul Out of Hiring

My company is hiring at the moment and it’s been a very strange experience.

We get AI suggestions and summaries by the recruiter

We get AI CVs

We get AI emails

AI has leaked it’s way through the entire chain of recruitment.

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Here is the thing, I don’t particularly care if people use AI and I don’t expect people to write CVs by hand. In fact, for us it’s a major positive if we see high AI usage expressed in the CV. If someone was doing like 100,000 lines a week on Cursor, I would be super interested in that. You would be amazed at how many CVs we get for developers and people still haven’t used AI.

But with all of this, the thing that has made it so strange is that AI has sucked the soul out of the hiring process.

I find myself reading CVs and skimming them, because they all feel the same. Gosh it’s almost like I would prefer a typo or something written “LiKe ThIs To ShOw” that a human was on the other side of the keyboard.

A few years ago I could usually tell who someone was within about thirty seconds of opening their CV.

One person would obsess over side projects. Another would have a bizarre career path that somehow made perfect sense. Someone else would have a terrible CV but incredible work hidden underneath it.

Now a lot of them read like this:

“Results-driven professional with a passion for innovation and a proven ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver impactful outcomes.”

What does that even mean?

It’s like those dementors in Harry Potter that suck your face off, and it’s sanded off all the rough edges. But the thing I liked about the rough edges, is that that is where the personality lives!

The typo. The oddly worded sentence. The hobby section that shouldn’t be there. The side project nobody asked for. The random as Microsoft Word Template.

Those are the things that make me stop skimming.

Instead, I find myself reading ten CVs that all sound like they were generated by the same extremely polite management consultant.

Here is my first CV submitted for a job I didn’t get. This was back in 2014.

My first ever CV I wrote

All of those notes are my friend that reviewed it. It’s a bit of a random cover letter honestly, but it’s got soul and it’s authentic. I would appreciate getting a CV like this. Just something that told a story, something that was authentic.

Instead, this would have happened.

What everyone is doing

Converting it into this.

Which then looks and sounds like everything else.

But I’m not trying to assess how well you can prompt, I’m trying to assess you as a person and what you are about.

Who are you authentically? What are you good at? What are your achievements? How do you normally talk? I find that the strangest thing now, you get these CVs that imply great communication skills and the CV has no bearing on the interview at all and the communication skills are terrible.

Maybe I take my point back about hand writing the CV, maybe that would be better? But then I’m sure people would then just get ChatGPT to render an image of a handwritten letter.

But where is this all headed? Is this the strange world that we are moving into? Just sending each other stuff that we haven’t really taken the care to do? That we haven’t had our friends markup and review and critique? CVs used to be annoying and they took ages but you had to cohesively think about what you were going to write.

The good news right now is that if you want to stand out, it’s pretty easy, just do anything apart from a ChatGPT prompt and you will catch my attention. Do something original, be yourself.

Until then, I’ll keep sifting through a mountain of similar CVs doing my best to figure out the real human sitting behind them.

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