The frustration has reached a point where AI companies themselves are backing away from their own technology during the hiring process. Anthropic recently advised job seekers not to use LLMs on their applications—a striking admission from a company whose business model depends on people using AI for everything else. //

However, this trend from businesses has led to an arms race of escalating automation, with candidates using AI to generate interview answers while companies deploy AI to detect them—creating what amounts to machines talking to machines while humans get lost in the shuffle. //

So perhaps résumés as a meaningful signal of candidate interest and qualification are becoming obsolete. And maybe that's OK. When anyone can generate hundreds of tailored applications with a few prompts, the document that once demonstrated effort and genuine interest in a position has devolved into noise.

Instead, the future of hiring may require abandoning the résumé altogether in favor of methods that AI can't easily replicate—live problem-solving sessions, portfolio reviews, or trial work periods, just to name a few ideas people sometimes consider (whether they are good ideas or not is beyond the scope of this piece). For now, employers and job seekers remain locked in an escalating technological arms race where machines screen the output of other machines, while the humans they're meant to serve struggle to make authentic connections in an increasingly inauthentic world.

Perhaps the endgame is robots interviewing other robots for jobs performed by robots, while humans sit on the beach drinking daiquiris and playing vintage video games. Well, one can dream. //

OldPhartReef Ars Centurion
12y
225
Subscriptor
You can skip all the AI silliness by just going back to old-fashioned relationship building. You know, the human-2-human; face-2-face kind?

Smack me now for such a stupid idea. //

fuzzyfuzzyfungus Ars Legatus Legionis
12y
10,222
I'd be a lot more sympathetic if Team HR hadn't been using fairly extensive(if less technically trendy) tooling for auto-screening resumes for keywords and such and just silently binning any that don't meet criteria; and (at least judging by the hype) they were all on board with 'AI-enabled' resume screening as well.

Obviously an arms race is a loss for everyone involved; but let's not pretend that there was some sort of bucolic non-broken state before people started huffing LLMs.