The Verge: With AI-backed hiring on the rise, tips for “hacking” your resume are all over social media. As job search companies increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to sort through applications, job seekers wonder how to best position themselves with those filters in mind.
All this talk about optimizing your resume really makes me question just how authentic the job world is becoming. At this point most companies don't even have a human looking at your resume in the first place, it will be a computer, and I think that lack of connection between human to human is exactly why most places at this point don't even hire from applications posted online. Because it has gotten to the point that most applications you submit might even be from an AI, it's just AI to AI now. I've become more and more of an advocate for just reaching out to people personally, and just talking to them, reach out to alumni of your college or program. More than likely they are people who have been in the exact same situation as you, and will have some sort of knowledge on a pathway that you can take to get work. They want to help people, in the same way that they most likely where helped by someone else.
ReplyDeleteThe integration of artificial intelligence systems into the hiring process across many industries is quite concerning to me. I don’t think I really trust a machine to make a decision about whether a candidate is a good fit for a position when it does not ever have to work with said candidate. Also, the fact that people are now putting buzz words in their resumes just to get the algorithm to pick up is concerning. It’s a reasonable response when hiring processes are governed by algorithms that just search for those words, however does that not call into question the usefulness of the automated system? If it is just looking for buzzwords, rather than attempting to evaluate a candidate holistically, is it really worth the extra step? I suppose we will start to see the effects of the use of AI hiring systems on the employees working at companies soon, given that these systems are really just starting to take root.
ReplyDeleteI believe we shouldn’t need to AI-optimize our resumes in the first place, but how jobs are selected now it seems it’s what people need to do. The idea of “keyboard stuffing” just made no sense to me whatsoever. Why should a person put fake skills and keywords in white text just to get a job. Either way it doesn’t seem like it would help them when getting interviewed because the real life employer is gonna check their resume themselves once selected and find out they lied to get selected. Now the job seeker has a good reason to do so because they want their resume to be seen by the actual employer, but it’ll just hurt their chances once the employer finds out they lied. I understand why employers are using AI to select candidates for a job, it allows them more time to complete other work and not spend all their time looking at resumes.
ReplyDeleteWhat really stood out to me from the video on the article was the conversation on the biases within AI recruiting. I gave the example of Amazon AI software from a couple of years ago and how it actively pushed out applications that had the word women and or women's colleges on them. I think this raises a bigger conversation of AI and how the data it is trained on means that it is inherently biased because we as humans are inherently biased. The video almost felt a bit contradictory because it talked a lot about focusing on yourself and what you can do and to not worry about using different strategies to make your resume stand out to an AI, but also it talked about how much things are changing and how we need to adjust to them to fit. I did think it was interesting how it also talked about how using tools on different platforms can give you preferential experiences. To me this seems very predatory because it forces people to use a site, therefore most likely making that site money.
ReplyDeleteThe use of AI in the hiring process makes applying for jobs feel more complicated than I expected. It’s stressful to think that many resumes are first reviewed by an algorithm before a human hiring manager ever sees them. I’ve seen a lot of advice online about trying to “optimize” resumes by adding keywords from job postings, so it was interesting that the article explains how tricks like keyword stuffing or hiding text don’t actually work very well. It was also interesting how the article explains that in some cases those strategies can make an application look suspicious once it reaches a human reviewer. The point about writing a resume for two different audiences, the algorithm and the person reading it, also stood out to me. It shows how technology is influencing the hiring process, but that clarity and honesty are still important. Overall, it seems like the best approach is to clearly present your real skills and experience rather than trying to trick the system.
ReplyDelete