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| 1 minute read

Jobhunters flood recruiters with AI-generated CVs (at all levels, as if hiring wasn't hard enough)

I wasn't at all surprised to read this in the FT this morning. ChatGPT cover notes and CV's have been a blight for some time, and I expect it will only get worse.  

Recruiting is hard, I know, I've spent over 25 years in executive search, and I've scaled a non-recruitment business to 50+ employees.  Skills and experience are of course important in hiring, very important. However, personality and cultural fit are more important still.  How do you make a judgement on someone's personality, literacy, humour or character when their initial interaction is AI generated? 

It has always been the case that sometimes you find a brilliant person behind a terrible CV, and quite often a terrible candidate behind a great CV, and that is a challenge recruiters had the time, resource and skill to deal with. But with one click applications, and AI generated cover letters and CV's, it's a thankless task for any recruiter, and even more so for those not using the support of a recruiter or executive search firm. Where do you start with hundreds of almost identical CVs and Cover letters!? How much time do you waste?

At least there is one way to stand out from the crowd, write with personality, feeling and with your own hand (keyboard), be you. Let's just hope your mail doesn't get lost amongst the AI generated dross. 

If you are doing it, stop it, it's a BS way to promote yourself. However you look at it at some stage, before or after being hired, the real you will still be the real you, and if that's not what you presented, you've wasted your time, and a lot more time and money for those fooled into hiring you. Back to the job queue. 

About half of all job seekers are using artificial intelligence tools to apply for roles, inundating employers and recruiters with low-quality applications in an already squeezed labour market. Candidates are turning increasingly to generative AI — the type used in chatbot products such as ChatGPT and Gemini to produce conversational passages of text — to assist them in writing their CVs, cover letters and completing assessments. Estimates from employers and recruiters who spoke to the Financial Times, as well as multiple published surveys, have suggested the figure is as high as 50 per cent of applicants.

Tags

ai, stopit, c-suite, careers, culture, hiring, leadership, talent, cleantech, climate tech