[charliebwrites]

Anecdata, sample size of one:

When I was looking for my next role after being laid off, I didn’t get much of a response with my human handmade resume despite my experience

Just for kicks, I asked ChatGPT to “Analyze my resume and give it a score for what percentage it was in” then I asked it to revise it to make it score as high as possible

I still tweaked and fact checked it but after I started sending that out, I got a much higher hit rate than before

But who knows, maybe the market changed, was a better time of year, etc

I still had to pass interviews and prove my worth. But it probably helped me get my foot in the door

[leonidasv]

Same thing happened to my wife as well. I helped her tailor her LinkedIn profile and resume with a lot of attention to detail: adding metrics, keywords, results, etc. Nevertheless, she never received any outreach recruiters and got very few application responses. It went like that for months, almost a year.

Then she asked ChatGPT 5.x for help. I was skeptical about the changes it recommended (and was skeptical at all about using AI for this given the homogeneification it tends to produce). But somehow it worked: few days later, a recruiter reached out, then another, then applications started moving forward, etc.

My guess is that, as LLMs are shoveled into every phase of the recruiting process, not having an LLM write your resume for you is now playing on hard mode. The LLMs reviewing resumes are downranking resumes and profiles that are not "speaking" the same language and activating the correct neurons, thus preventing you from moving forward. This contrasts with years ago when we had more humans in the loop and the pasteurised writing of GPT 3.5/4o would make you look less worthy. Again, just a theory, but...

[andsoitis]

> I helped her tailor her LinkedIn profile and resume with a lot of attention to detail: adding metrics, keywords, results, etc.

FWIW, when I see a resume with metrics and keywords, I immediately filter it out.

[schrodinger]

Same.

If it's something like "Refactored the apartment list service improving P99 Latency from 2s to 180ms", it definitely boosts the resumé in my mind. A good engineer would be measuring their impact and likely have numbers like that off the top of their head.

But if it's like "Increased revenue by $18.7M by reducing time-to-first-interaction latency from 2.3s to 117ms, increasing conversion by 47% and LTV by 28%," with the same fidelity on each bullet, I'm very skeptical.

--

I don't summarily reject AI-written resumés to be clear, as honestly, it's basically a necessity at this point to be competitive with others; it'd be putting yourself at a severe disadvantage on pure principles in a way that has no real positive net effect on society. Even if you disagree with AI resumé screeners, you're only hurting yourself — especially at a time that has the largest impact on your compensation (i.e. negotiating salary at job start is one of the most valuable ways to spend your time since it will pay you back every paycheck).

Though I _do_ tend to question resumés that look like they were written almost entirely by an LLM without the candidate providing significant context and refinement.

[jwolfe]

> If it's something like "Refactored the apartment list service improving P99 Latency from 2s to 180ms", it definitely boosts the resumé in my mind. A good engineer would be measuring their impact and likely have numbers like that off the top of their head.

> But if it's like "Increased revenue by $18.7M by reducing time-to-first-interaction latency from 2.3s to 117ms, increasing conversion by 47% and LTV by 28%," with the same fidelity on each bullet, I'm very skeptical.

Do you mind explaining why? The former doesn't indicate caring about business impact whatsoever (is this service in the critical path of any online process? Who knows!) while the latter does.

[majormajor]

A couple issues I have with this in particular:

> "Increased revenue by $18.7M by reducing time-to-first-interaction latency from 2.3s to 117ms, increasing conversion by 47% and LTV by 28%,"

The first is that they're playing fast and loose with their numbers. Latency has before/after, conversion and LTV have percentages; revenue is just a single number. Did that double revenue? Or is that half a percent, and is it lost in the statistical noise?

The other is that there's nothing there to convince me that the technical work was was the full cause, instead of, say a new marketing promotion that launched at the same time, or another team redesigning the landing page flow, or another team re-doing all the product photography, or any other concurrent work.

Maybe all those questions have good answers, but I would at least want some nod in there to how they validated it. I find people who focus on "business impact" but don't know how to do the math to have confidence in it dangerous, because it's so easy to cherry-pick numbers that will make execs happy at a glance and prioritize for those things instead of actual long-term system or product or customer-facing improvements.

I'm not binning the resume for it, and maybe it helps get past the people who see it before I do, but I'm gonna dig in on it. And I'm usually disappointed by the answers.

[dolebirchwood]

Because the latter's "business impact" is clearly made-up bull shit?

[nerdsniper]

I wish it was at least normalized to submit two resumes - one for AI and one for humans. Threading the needle to please both audiences is such a crap-shoot.

[8note]

im kinda thinking about adding an llm resume to my resume as like tiny clear text somewhere in the corner.

[mikeyouse]

Which is a very “HN” sentiment when the vast majority of recruiters and hiring managers are absolutely not doing the same. Especially for roles outside of tech.

[andsoitis]

Yeah I don’t know what others are doing, but I work in the valley and those elements signal checklist mentality. To wit, those keyword lists often include, in my experience, proficiency in specific tool use, rather than communicating skills that transcend tools, which tells me the person is likely not very dynamic or creative.

[Izkata]

> those keyword lists often include, in my experience, proficiency in specific tool use

This used to be called "buzzword bingo" and was pretty much required. It was how you got past the initial automated filtering step before a human even saw your resume.

[andsoitis]

I don’t know whether it was ever effective strategy for candidates, but I will simply say that as a hiring manager for over 12 years, I have never been interested in anyone’s resume when I see that.

[rustystump]

No used to be. It still is standard. Large companies that do not use external recruiters still use keywords and skills matching to find candidates and it drives me nuts.

[mcv]

I rewrote my resume in a way that sounds like exactly what you want: focus on skills that transcend tools instead of just the tools, and every recruiter asks me about tools.

[ponector]

And then during the screening call they ask questions like this: how many years of experience do you have with Jira?

[david-gpu]

Please, do show us your resume so that we can judge the heck out of you as well. It is a fun game, apparently.

[andsoitis]

I’m giving advice that I judge to be useful.

[roymain]

What i have observed, which is the hard (unpredictable) part for candidates is, they can't tell which kind of hiring manager they'll get. Some reject resumes with metrics, others use software that won't let the resume through without them. Most (non-subject matter experts) would just look for whatever they think will get past the filter.

what i am researching right now is if you (hiring manager) got 2 resumes from the same candidate, one hand-written (metaphorically) and the other built by chat-GPT or AI, which one would you call ?

[RajT88]

Same. I am well aware how the metrics game goes - even inside the company it can be hard to disprove the metrics claimed, and people count on that. Even managers coach you on putting metrics you cannot prove or disprove.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

What counts as a keyword here? If you're hiring for a frontend developer and you see e.g. "Redux" do you just can it?

[andsoitis]

Knowing or having experience with Redux isn’t going to cause me to pick you over someone else who doesn’t list it for a job where I’m paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars. I look at other skills.

I would not can it in isolation, but if I see a comma-separated list like: “proficient in redux, react, html, JavaScript, sql, kubernetes, word and excel”… then yes, you don’t make the cut.

Or if you list your Microsoft qualifications or your MIT continuing education courses. These are all negative signals.

[coder68]

What would be an example of a positive signal?

[mcv]

Unfortunately many recruiters do look at that. I'm always a bit disappointed when someone wants me to rate my Java experience, or complains that my CV doesn't mention REST experience.

[tkiolp4]

Metrics: I increased retention 2x; I reduced latency from X ms to Y ms; increased slo to 99.999… those are all meaningless. It was in fashion to put such numbers in cvs maybe 5-10 years ago. Not anymore

[andsoitis]

They were always lies because they’re imprecise. “I” didn’t do any of those things, you did other things together with other people leveraging company infrastructure to accomplish those things. Tell me about the SKILLS you excel in tha make those things happen.

[Melatonic]

Why would you not want to know a general idea of what specific technology someone is familiar with ? Someone could be an "infrastructure engineer" and be more proficient in specific tools vs others - don't you want to match that to the job your hiring for ?

[mcv]

In my case it's not a lie: I reduced the time for a complex import process from 1 hour to 3 minutes, a 20 fold improvement. I included it in my CV, but now I wonder if I should take it out.

[ai_slop_hater]

Gigachad. Just don’t forget to signal somehow that you aren’t like everyone else, so that legitimate candidates can send their real resume instead of AI generated one.

[reillyse]

You must be a pre 5.0 model so.

[j45]

Having implemented more than a few applicant tracking systems, too many are so anchored in the past, that they would probably try to boil the ocean at once by letting AI loose on it, leaving an ability for ai resumes to ai applicant tracking systems.

The key insight here is humans are responsible for improved articulation to the ai, who in turn will improve the rest, and that can be as detailed and informative, and educational as the human likes.

[newsy-combi]

Kafkaesque

[kafkaesque]

The Orwellian nightmare is nigh

[Esophagus4]

There are services that will do this as well - I’ve used them both on my LinkedIn and resume with decent success.

[spike021]

I was recently job hunting and did something similar. Had it check my bullets and see if they "read well" and it suggested many many tweaks. I tried a few. I'm not sure how much more it helped the applications though.

[fuzzy_biscuit]

I've done as you described and then edited it down to sound human again.

[amelius]

I suppose the HR folks gave you a "+1 knows how to use AI".

[grey-area]

It seems more likely the HR people depend on LLMs to do the job of screening and LLMs unsurprisingly prefer LLM output and rank it highly.

It’s not lazy incompetence, it’s quietly getting the job done with 1% of the effort (that was a sarcastic pastiche, in case anyone was unsure).

[zdragnar]

It's not uncommon to get hundreds or thousands of applications per opening for web tech, if the position is advertised on LinkedIn or a similar job board.

They'd need to use some automation, even if it is just picking ten at random.

[normie3000]

Maybe? I've filtered 300-400 CVs by hand before, and didn't find it particularly time consuming to bin the ones which clearly didn't meet requirements or have any redeeming features. And hiring was not my full-time role.

[anthuswilliams]

At 90 seconds per resume, that would take up a full 8 hour day. Having gone through this myself, I don't think it's possible to do this much faster than that, even if you have an ATS that optimizes for that workflow.

I often found myself falling into patterns of poor judgement, e.g. mentally filtering out resumes based on the layout because, to my tired and bored mind, they looked similar to the resumes I had seen from unqualified candidates. I actually think some automation is helpful in evaluating them more rigorously.

[cyberax]

The last time I posted on HN in the 1-st of the month hiring post, I got around 2 thousand resumes. Pretty much all of them were this kind of: "Increased the performance of the service by 23.123213%" collection of bullet points.

PS: I replied to most of them, I think, but I'm sorry if I missed somebody :(

[grey-area]

Some automation is inevitable but fallible LLMs are the wrong tool for such judgments IMO.

[ben_w]

Some will, others openly say on the job ad they will fail you for using AI.

[izacus]

And then still use a CV scanning service that rejects non-AI resumes.

[dawnerd]

I know if I got a resume from someone that had obviously used AI to generate it, it would be a pass.

[drillsteps5]

Before the resume ends up in the hiring manager's inbox it needs to be picked by the recruiter from literally hundreds of others. The recruiter uses HR software to determine the match (usually the percentage), and then picks top 5% or top 20 or whatever highest ranked resumes.

Guess what's doing the ranking.

[dawnerd]

That’s assuming everyone is doing it that way.

[bell-cot]

What if your own HR's LLM didn't send you any other kind?

[tayo42]

Llms were good for being objective and helping cut out stuff from mine. Harder to do when you personally think everything you ever did is important.

[davebren]

It actually is important and if I was hiring you I'd find it useful to get a more comprehensive understanding of your experience, especially if there's something I'm aware is a very challenging problem to solve. And it would provide more things to cross-examine in interviews to make sure it's not fake. The idea that people hiring are saving time by not reading an extra resume page when deciding on someone that will hopefully work there for years is ridiculous.

For some reason that's the minority opinion because everything has to be dumbed down now.

And how is a resume with the most important or recent work highlighted and at the top worse than a resume with that plus the rest of your experience after it?

[nickserv]

Same. I've gotten into disagreements with HR over this when hiring for my teams.

[tayo42]

If I could give two resumes one for the recruiter and one for the hm I would.

But as an applicant, I'm dealing with recruiters who think Java and Javascript are basically the same.

[luotuoshangdui]

It makes sense. An LLM can definitely help polish your resume.

[p_stuart82]

that's the loop though. if GPT does the screening, people learn to write for GPT. once that loop exists, why would the company selling the filter want it gone?

[davebren]

Probably gonna get downvoted for this, but when you give an anecdote you don't have to preface it with "anecdata, n=1 sample size".

We know it's from your individual experience because it's a story about your individual experience. We've been doing this for all of human history. This is some kind of strange milieu of trying to always sound scientific, or it's fear of the "well akshually I'm gonna need to see a random placebo controlled trial", which is equally annoying.

[Fezzik]

It became necessary because, for years (decades), if you made a comment online that your personal experience informed you in such-and-such a way, the first comment would always be some moronic comment dismissing that personal experience because it is just one person’s experience. So, to avoid that idiocy, people started to preface their anecdotes by acknowledging that they know it is an anecdote. It sets the tone for the conversation.

[davebren]

Yeah but we can't let the insufferable dictate our way of speaking. In spoken language I hear it mainly by people that don't have a scientific background trying to sound more scientific.

[peyton]

I’ve been told explicitly to do what GP said, so it’s perhaps becoming word-of-mouth career advice at this point. In my case it told a different career story that is maybe more easily digestible.