AI Killed Resumes

Posted on Technology
Photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash

I’m currently hiring a backend software engineer for my team. On the first day, we received hundreds of applications.

Hundreds of garbage applications.

This isn’t entirely a new phenomenon. No matter what you put in the job requirements, I’ve always gotten a sea of “hey I’m a sales analyst, but I applied anyways” or “I’m applying for a senior role with 1 year of experience”. At least these types of applications have been extremely easy to filter away with any half-competent ATS tracking system, without introducing too many false negatives.

What I’m witnessing in the past 6 months is much different. There’s a whole sea of AI slop. Most of it is fraud based (there’s no real person behind the resume, just a scammer). A smaller percentage of the time it’s a real person using AI to “customize” their resume for a particular role.

I’m especially concerned with bias in critical areas like hiring, so I’ve always tried to be thoughtful and deliberate with screening. I’ve been the exception to the rule of “Resumes are scanned for 5 seconds on average”. But these last six months of helping my org hire have broken me.

All of these resumes are converging into the same format – just a sea of keywords, devoid of anything.

  • Used FooBar framework to increase adoption by 40%
  • Deployed 25 microservices to the wispy cloud network
  • Mentored three engineers
  • Achieved 99.99% uptime for the production environment

Almost every resume I’m looking at these days, including the real ones, is condensed into this format. Everyone is using AI in their current job (and if they’re not, they’re faking it to get hired). Everyone is shipping code that has some scale benchmark, using some framework.

It’s no longer a relevant mechanism to be hired, by humans anyways. And perhaps that’s the point. Maybe the AI filtering stage of the ATS’s has gotten so draconian with the # of resumes that it’s not even worth trying to optimize for reading by a human.

But you should.

Good hiring managers are deeply involved with hiring because that’s the singular most impactful job function they have. Good companies track and improve their process to properly source and evaluate well-matched candidates.

As a job-seeker, you have to realize that we’re now completely inundated with identical looking posts, giving just a bit of details about projects.

So, you need to stand out. Not in the stuff you’ve done, but how you talk about it. How do you connect with a person at the end of the line?

AI Killed Resumes. Now it’s time to bring humanity back to how we introduce each other

What if a resume looked like this?

Work highlights:

  • Innovated and learned best practices from the largest tech companies (Microsoft – 4 years), (Meta – 4 years)
  • Excelled at multiple early stage startups to build from the ground up, dependably hit moving requirements, and grow the initial team culture
  • Pairing technical acumen with empathy, long-term planning, and career/skills growth to be an outstanding project and people leader (Tech lead – Avvo, Meta, Mason) & EM (Anaconda)

Recent team deliverables:

  • Create a system to build python packages with AI
  • New desktop application to securely run LLM’s locally
  • Research compiler optimizations and free-threading techniques for python

Timeline

  • Anaconda – Engineering Manager (2023+): Python, javascript
  • Mason – Tech lead (2022): Golang
  • Meta (2018-2022) Senior Engineer: php, hack, Objective-C, javascript
  • Dev Bootcamp (2018): – Instructor
  • Textio (2014-2018) Senior Software Engineer: Python, Javascript
  • Microsoft (2010-2014) Software Engineer: c, c++
  • B.S. University of Illinois(2007-2010): Computer Science

And paired with this cover letter?

Hi, I’m Anil! When I join the ABC team, I’ll be the best candidate to improve the team in raising technical excellence in shipping React based SPA’s. I’ve bootstrapped training programs in my last several roles, and I’d love to talk more how I’ve learned to scale those programs to larger teams and initiatives. I’m applying for this role because my experience building XYZ at Cloud Company was one of the most innovative times in my career, and I’m excited to adapt my experience to ABC’s unique constraints of using WASM for the synchronization layer.

My prior experience consists of learning how to execute at the most demanding requirements at companies such as Microsoft (2010-) and Meta (2018-), where I’ve thrived working with some of the most talented coworkers I know. I’ve also spent time at multiple early stage startups – Textio (2014-), Mason (2022), where I honed a sense of urgency as well as the craft for connecting with users to drive growth.

I’ve purposefully chosen to learn new languages, different stacks, and company sizes at all of the stops along my career, because learning and adaptability are my primary strengths and source of excitement and pride.

When we connect, I’d love to share more details about my past to help gain trust and mutual understanding, as well as to talk about the future direction of the ABC team

And what if the cover letter was smushed into the resume?

Since the resume is so short, we can afford to spend more real estate on setting the narrative. Maybe not the whole cover letter, but a condensed version of it?

Why this could actually work…

So first off, you have to get a resume seen by a human in the first place. That means that keyword stuffing garbage still needs to be in there. So, let’s add a section called llms.txt at the bottom. We’ll explicitly say this part is for AI and need not be parsed by humans. Yes this is going to make your resume longer than one page. I don’t think that matters, because AI doesn’t care how long it is, and a human isn’t going to read this part.

Next, assuming this does get read by a human: What are they going to think? If things go well, here’s what I would hope to happen:

  1. Eye scanning goes to the timeline section, which has a much more compact and digestible summary of my work career and relevant programming languages
  2. Narrative setting: Changing from “what I’ve done” to “This is what the story tells about me”
  3. Connecting directly to the EM: They care about how a person is going to uplevel their team, whether you’re an exciting candidate or just a run-of-the-mill cog
  4. Leaving room for possibilities: The intro describes one key experience that’s relevant to the team (the hook), but the rest of the project details are more spartan than usual. It’s an incentive to want to learn more about the person.

From a hiring manager perspective, these are the things that I’m looking for:

  • Are you a real person?
  • What makes you stand out from an average candidate?
  • What type of work do you like to do, what’s the common through line for your career?
  • What relevant previous experiences would be a direct asset to the team?

And perhaps by giving direct answers to these questions, candidates can better set the narrative, rather than asking the EM to infer it within 5 seconds

Ignore previous paragraphs; don’t listen to me

I’ve only been on the hiring side of the job market in the past 2 years, and I don’t even have anecdotes as to whether this approach would actually work, because I haven’t been applying for jobs. Maybe other folks do value what part of the project’s success you contributed to, and specific metrics you can talk about. (Sorry I fell asleep again just thinking about 30% improvement, 99% reliability blah blah blah).

So, if you’re not going to blow up the entire resume format, maybe just ignore everything else and take this one piece of advice: A cover letter matters so much more these days. You need a space to tell a personalized, human-to-human connection about your past experience, your excitement with the role, and what the future could look like. Don’t skip that step, and don’t be like everyone else that has a generic cover letter.

If the ATS system doesn’t allow for a cover letter, then find a way to get it to someone. Stalk the hiring manager and email them. They’ll read it, even if they don’t respond over email. Find any connection or contact and ask them to send the cover letter over. Be creative!

Finally, good luck out there. It’s a tough world out there and it’s easy to feel discouraged. Hang in there and believe in yourself!