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People who use AI to write CVs and cover letters

Dom Traynor

Dom Traynor

Tino Pai
So far in the last 6 months across 3 jobs I have rejected some 25 applicants out of hand for using AI to write either their CV and/or their cover letter as soon as I see they used AI. Normally you can see in the first sentence.

I do this because AI has never once improved my writing and is often full of mistakes and the jobs I've been advertising require a lot of writing and attention to detail and pay well (50k UK) for it.

What's Urban's views on this? I think it's just going to get more prevalent but once I cant tell its AI then maybe it doesn't matter?
 
I feel mixed because I like unique personal CVs and cover letters but regularly see people recommending others to make ultra generic conformist version. I can really see someone turning to AI for that.


To be honest job application may feel like such a numbers game you might turn to it.


I might even have suggested it to some of my job centre students even if it were just to meet JSA targets.
 
I keep getting sponsored content/ads for AIApply, which supposedly redoes your CV and writes covering letters.

Must admit, I've been a bit tempted to get it to reformat my CV, but only because I didn't get shortlisted for an interview for a job that I met the required criteria for. It was a big company that uses a careers portal and ATS. The rejection email signposted me to a section of their website about how to improve your job applications. There was a feature whereby you could upload your CV and you would get an automated score and feedback. I did that. My carefully crafted and written CV scored 68 per cent. So no wonder I didn't get shortlisted for interview. I wondered how on earth my CV could've scored so low. When I clicked to take a closer look, it turned out that their ATS had mangled my CV. It had taken the text and inserted gaps in the middle of words, so it read like my CV had a load of typos in it.

So I was thinking I might try to get that AI to change my CV, which I formatted in Canva and then converted to pdf, back into a plain text version.
 
Overall, though, I think using AI to produce CVs and covering letters is counterproductive.

Because I'm jobhunting at the moment, I keep seeing comments on eg LinkedIn and in Facebook groups and elsewhere about people who've applied for hundreds or even thousands of jobs and haven't landed a job yet. I wonder if it's because they're just sending the same CV to everyone, rather than tailoring it? And worse, many people aren't bothering with a covering letter, even if one is requested, or they're not bothering to write a tailored covering letter.

I get the impression that a lot of people just use the 'quick apply' functions on Indeed and LinkedIn, just click and submit a CV that they've previously uploaded, without bothering to tweak it to highlight relevant skills and experience.

Having said that, a couple of weeks ago, I got curious as to what an AI might come up with. I wrote a covering letter how I would write it, using bullet points to highlight how I met the criteria in the person specification. Then I copied my CV into ChatGPT and also the list of criteria in the person spec and asked it to write a covering letter. It was quite cringe and it also introduced factual errors. For example, in my CV, I mentioned how part of my role involved organising the company I worked for's participation in a trade fair, but the AI had rewritten it to make it sound like I'd actually organised this huge trade fair!

Oh, yeah, just remembered, I read a comment from someone saying that AI applies for jobs while they're sleeping! I was horrified by that. I mean, it's bad enough if people let AI generate their CV and a covering letter, if they submit it after quickly reading through it to make sure that there are no glaring errors. But to just let the AI write and submit stuff?!? There's absolutely no way I would trust it.
 
I wonder if they ai scan the CVs first and your was auto deselected.

I have known agencies to botch mine to make all their CVs the same.

My custom one has a lot of formatting and a slight off white background.
 
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Shippou-Sensei said:
I feel mixed because I like unique personal CVs and cover letters but regularly see people recommending others to make ultra generic conformist version. I can really see someone turning to AI for that.


To be honest job application may feel like such a numbers game you might turn to it.


I might even have suggested it to some of my job centre students even if it were just to meet JSA targets.
Click to expand...
Tbh, I think people are doing themselves a disservice by thinking of it like a numbers game and doing the equivalent of machine gun spraying their CV everywhere, when they would be far better off taking a sniper approach, pick a target and aim very carefully.

(Although of course if the JobCentre is giving them grief, then by all means bang in a CV with a one click job application for jobs they're not interested in, to hit the quota.)

In my experience, it's far better to spend time thoroughly reviewing the job ad, job description and person specification, and also checking out the company's website and social media. And then tweaking my CV, so that maybe I delete some bullet points under one or two old roles, and then expand on what I did in another role, to make it clearer that my skills and experience are aligned with what they're looking for, or it might be a matter of using some different terms/phrases to mirror the language used in the job ad, etc. And then I write a covering letter, using the essential criteria in the person specification as the skills/experience I wanted to highlight in my bullet points. And also say why I want the job/why I'm interested in the company, and this is where things like checking out their website and social media comes in handy, because they might have mentioned in a news section on their website on on social media that they've expanded or launched new products or something, and referencing something like that demonstrates a genuine interest in the company and its business activities.

I applied for five jobs in December. I've got two interviews lined up. And another company replied to say they thought the entry level job wouldn't be challenging enough for me, but to contact them later in the year for casual work during a busy period. I don't apply for jobs just for the sake of applying for jobs, I only apply for jobs that I actually want and could envisage doing. Sometimes, I start an application, but then I realise that I'm just not feeling it, and I don't bother finishing and submitting it. There are more job ads that I saw where I thought 'I could do that job' but wouldn't want to, so didn't even start an application.

Maybe that's another factor in those AI job applications not resulting in interviews and people getting jobs? Because the recruiters can tell someone's not that interested if they haven't bothered to crafted the application themselves.
 
Shippou-Sensei I tend not to use agencies. I had a bad experience with a recruitment agency years ago, where they sent me for a job interview and I turned up and the company weren't expecting me. The recruitment agency had faxed over my details to the company and told me I had an interview, and I turned up, waited for about an hour, then found out I didn't even have an interview.

Also, I think some recruitment agencies submit CVs speculatively, when they don't actually have that client/role on their books. So there's a chance that candidates think they're in the running for a role, but they were never going to get an interview because they're immediately ruled out because the company wasn't a client and they don't want to pay the agency fees. There's some shadiness that goes on sometimes.
 
If you can't be arsed to put in the time, why should the employer? Bollocks to AI for this sort of thing. I've hired people with terribly written cv's, knowing full well their skill set underneath the pith.I understand that the jobs market is tight and I also understand that some people struggle to put together CV's and write cover letters. But let's be frank, if it's a high level job and you can't get the first bit without cheating (yes I'm calling ai cheating) maybe you're not ready for the rest...

Also just for the record, dreadlocked and aged 19 I managed to land a job as product tester in the video games industry. Later became good friends and raving buddies with my manager. Years later at glasto, he said to me, you know you were the only one with a hand written cover letter out of around 600 applicants. I didn't have the heart to tell him it was because we were too poor to own a printer.
 
jontz01 said:
If you can't be arsed to put in the time, why should the employer? Bollocks to AI for this sort of thing. I've hired people with terribly written cv's, knowing full well their skill set underneath the pith.I understand that the jobs market is tight and I also understand that some people struggle to put together CV's and write cover letters. But let's be frank, if it's a high level job and you can't get the first bit without cheating (yes I'm calling ai cheating) maybe you're not ready for the rest...

Also just for the record, dreadlocked and aged 19 I managed to land a job as product tester in the video games industry. Later became good friends and raving buddies with my manager. Years later at glasto, he said to me, you know you were the only one with a hand written cover letter out of around 600 applicants. I didn't have the heart to tell him it was because we were too poor to own a printer.
Click to expand...
Sometimes, it can be something quite arbitrary that helps you get a foot in the door. I once thought that I'd landed a particular opportunity because of my previous relevant experience in Business Sector X, but then I heard from a colleague that it was because big boss had a particular interest in Country Y, where I'd lived and worked. You never know what's going to float someone's boat.
 
AnnO'Neemus said:
Sometimes, it can be something quite arbitrary that helps you get a foot in the door. I once thought that I'd landed a particular opportunity because of my previous relevant experience in Business Sector X, but then I heard from a colleague that it was because big boss had a particular interest in Country Y, where I'd lived and worked. You never know what's going to float someone's boat.
Click to expand...
You can't. But I'd put a fiver on an AI cover letter sinking it pretty quick.
 
Shippou-Sensei said:
I wonder if they ai scan the CVs first and your was auto deselected.

I have known agencies to botch mine to make all their CVs the same.

This is what my custom one looks like
View attachment 461457
Click to expand...
Yeah on the same basis i reject any AI I can identify I have also dug my heals in on using AI to vet applications. I mean I could understand volume driving people to do that but we don't have that problem.
 
tommers said:
As long as the employer isn't using AI to screen the cvs.
Click to expand...
Oh they are and its absolutely stuffed full of false positives, seen reports of it being used on schoolwork and even PHD's where it falsely reported as AI. (Reddit so likely US based tho). Someone then ran the rejection reply through the same AI detector and it showed up as AI. Anything very formal gets flagged quite easily as its mostly nonsense.
 
As somebody who recently was applying for jobs the amount of time it takes to write a covering letter for a role to never hear about it again is ridiculous. Anything advertised online has hundreds or thousands of applicants so the chances of you getting anywhere are slim. People apply for loads of jobs, writing a bespoke letter for each one is a waste of time when it's likely that nobody is even going to see it.

I ended up developing about five different templates depending on exactly which role I was applying for, and changing the names of the companies each time. Still a pain in the arse but better than writing something each time.
 
tommers said:
As somebody who recently was applying for jobs the amount of time it takes to write a covering letter for a role to never hear about it again is ridiculous. Anything advertised online has hundreds or thousands of applicants so the chances of you getting anywhere are slim. People apply for loads of jobs, writing a bespoke letter for each one is a waste of time when it's likely that nobody is even going to see it.

I ended up developing about five different templates depending on exactly which role I was applying for, and changing the names of the companies each time. Still a pain in the arse but better than writing something each time.
Click to expand...
Yeh I did a lot of that for ones I thought were very unlikely anyway, then put my energy into the ones I thought were more likely instead. Surprising amount of interviews off the templates, especially when I started setting jobs to within the past day and applying immediately. Seems a lot of them will just stop looking once they have x number of candidates to put forward. Dependent on place of course but seemed to improve the odds.
 
I have to confess that this is one of the only areas where I have a bit of sympathy for the use of AI, I fucking hate applying for jobs and job descriptions tend to just be a list of mindless soul-sucking cliches. So far I've stuck to writing out my own list of mindless cliches in response rather than generating one, but it does feel like one of the tasks that the cliche-generation machine is best suited for. That and PDRs.
 
tommers said:
As somebody who recently was applying for jobs the amount of time it takes to write a covering letter for a role to never hear about it again is ridiculous. Anything advertised online has hundreds or thousands of applicants so the chances of you getting anywhere are slim. People apply for loads of jobs, writing a bespoke letter for each one is a waste of time when it's likely that nobody is even going to see it.
Click to expand...
To give the “other sides” view - I had to reduce over 80 long listed applications down to an interview shortlist of 6. Which am I going to pick - ones with a specific statement that’s clearly been crafted to the actual job spec/advert, or one that’s generic?
 
The increased use of AI is inevitable for job applications and things like dating profiles, as people feel it gives them a better chance if they're not so good with words. And it probably does too sadly, unless they've inputted really shit prompts.

I can't even begin to imagine the amount of scam AI profiles that are going to be piling into dating apps soon. I've already had one conversation with someone who was either a bot or using AI for all their answers. Not sexy!
 
editor said:
The increased use of AI is inevitable for job applications and things like dating profiles, as people feel it gives them a better chance if they're not so good with words. And it probably does too sadly, unless they've inputted really shit prompts.
Click to expand...

Wouldn’t the use of AI just transfer the knowledge deficit / competitive disadvantage from those shit with words to those shit with AI prompts. They may be the same people of course
 
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