[antonymoose]

Use a good recruiter to do the dirty work for you, it’s not cheap but it’s worth the lack of hassle.

With that said, at my firm we switched to using an in-house non-technical HR recruiter using nothing but a LinkedIn Job listing and the results are exactly as you’re experiencing. Perhaps 1 in 100 is a real human with a real resume, the rest are AI being fed our job description to generate a resume.

Onsite final interviews and technical assessments are our stop-gap.

[gcr]

How can humans stand out to companies like yours?

I’ve considered writing informally and putting subtle typos in my cover letters, for example, to signal humanity. Is this a good idea or do recruiters look down on it?

[cullenking]

The people I hired in my last round, with over 600 slop and fake applicants, had honest and informal cover letters that stood out. I’m sure I passed up on real decent people as a result, but there’s no perfect way to avoid this right now.

It helps that we have something closer to a lifestyle business, where I can ask for a brief paragraph about your relationship to the outdoors and cycling, but that just means I had 500 slop cover letters gushing about cycling. The three that made it through were short concise honest and linked to real world activities they did.

Good luck, it’s a hard problem , and very very adversarial. You have true scam level applications from North Korea and India, and you have unqualified people trying to appear qualified. Sprinkled in are unqualified people who would be a good hire because of raw capability, and qualified people who are looking to do bare minimum.

[platevoltage]

I'm glad I read this. Pre AI, I've always wanted to tell the company about myself using my own language instead of this fake corporate LinkedIn style language, which seemed like was the norm, and was expected. Now it seems like employers are looking for some hint of humanity. I guess I'll remember this if I ever decide to apply for a job again.

[shimman]

You can't, this is the issue with an extremely unregulated industry. You want to stand out as a single individual among 10,000 similar qualified people on paper? Good luck.

This is likely an unintentional, but beneficial, side effect in thwarting labors power.

Since workers have a hard time getting interviews due to AI slop, that means they'll have a harder time developing leverage rather than being forced into accepting any job because the alternative is to become homeless and die.

[antonymoose]

It’s hard to say because I’m not the recruiter nor am I or HR staffer.

Historically, typos on a resume are immediately filtered out. Lack of duty to care or some such.

We have some type of tooling to filter out obvious AI slop writing. We also check your submitted social media, not for offending content, but to make sure it’s been around for some number of years, especially pre-AI.

We’ve had folks spam both our hiring manager and Senior+ level staff begging for a leg up. We turned them down.

To honest answer is the hiring market sucks for all involved and there is no good answer here other than be honest and organic and pray. I wish I had a better answer, but it’s a hirers market. We can afford to be picky and lose a good candidate.