AI is changing a lot of things. One thing that is changing, for better or for worse, is the process of hiring employees. It seems to be a 2 sided arms race between the employers and the applicants.

Recently I hosted a podcast with the CTO of one of my clients who is actively engaged in hiring software engineers. It is amazing how many candidates just happen to have exactly 7 years experience with your technology of choice when that is exactly what the job post specified. After reviewing several hundred applicants my client determined that a large amount of the applicants' cover letters and even resumes were AI generated.

On the other side of this is the view from the applicants. I have two friends sending out resumes; one very much entry level and the other with decades of both technical and managerial experience. Both have been met with AI generated responses and we are pretty confident that some LLM is attempting to parse their resumes and then rank them.

This change in AI and the hiring process is further underscored by this humorous Facebook post. If you don’t get it basically they are describing a way to hack ChatGPT to get to the top of the applicant list. On a technical note, unless the integration with ChatGPT was done incredibly poorly this is not likely to work. There is a reason we have different roles for prompts.

So we have AI on both sides of the equation. My guess is it will be a bit of an arms race as new tools emerge for both employers and applicants; some tools on the level and others not so much.

With all this completely artificial content(both resumes and with content marketing) coming out it really makes me see the value in real person to person relationships. I deeply value my clients, my colleagues, and my friends. Those relationships cannot be faked. Something to keep in mind as the AI arms race progresses.