I just tried hiring someone and received over 200 resumes that looked mostly fake. Thinking about adding a final in person interview in an attempt cut down the garbage when I repost.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
