Recruiters Are Getting Bombarded With Crappy, AI-Generated CVs

"Without proper editing, the language will be clunky and generic, and hiring managers can detect this."

Trash Mountain

Companies and recruiters are getting flooded with AI-generated job applications — and predictably, many of them are badly written and generic sounding, Financial Times reports.

The use of AI has reached such a fever pitch that about half of job seekers are using AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini to churn out cover letters and resumes, and to fill out job assessment forms. FT used interviews with recruiters and employers, in addition to several surveys, to arrive at that estimate.

And it's seriously annoying people who need to fill positions.

"We’re definitely seeing higher volume and lower quality, which means it is harder to sift through," Khyati Sundaram, chief executive at recruitment website Applied, told FT. "A candidate can copy and paste any application question into ChatGPT, and then can copy and paste that back into that application form."

Productivity Killer

Several surveys have also found job applicants are making ample use of the tech, like this recent poll by Canva, in which 45 percent of 5,000 people surveyed said they had used AI to "build, update, or improve their resumes."

Worst of all, many applicants are clearly not going over the text they send out.

"Without proper editing, the language will be clunky and generic, and hiring managers can detect this," Victoria McLean, CEO of career consultancy company CityCV, told FT. "CVs need to show the candidate’s personality, their passions, their story, and that is something AI simply can’t do."

With no clear solution to this problem in sight, employers will have to rely heavily on in-person interviews to assess a candidate, recruiters told FT, which goes to show that AI isn't making everybody's jobs easier.

Besides job recruiters, AI has also made educators' jobs harder. It has become practically impossible to detect AI-generated writing in student work, requiring teachers to assess pupils in other ways — such as in-class assignments.

A recent UpWork survey revealed that 77 percent of workers who had used AI find the technology cumbersome and hampering their productivity.

What's clear from these disparate tales is that AI may not be the magic bullet proponents of AI claim it to be, especially when it comes to the job search market.

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