alt Hacker NewsAnecdata, sample size of one:
When I was looking for my next role after being laid off, I didn’t get much of a response with my human handmade resume despite my experience
Just for kicks, I asked ChatGPT to “Analyze my resume and give it a score for what percentage it was in” then I asked it to revise it to make it score as high as possible
I still tweaked and fact checked it but after I started sending that out, I got a much higher hit rate than before
But who knows, maybe the market changed, was a better time of year, etc
I still had to pass interviews and prove my worth. But it probably helped me get my foot in the door
Replies
I was recently job hunting and did something similar. Had it check my bullets and see if they "read well" and it suggested many many tweaks. I tried a few. I'm not sure how much more it helped the applications though.
that's the loop though. if GPT does the screening, people learn to write for GPT. once that loop exists, why would the company selling the filter want it gone?
There are services that will do this as well - I’ve used them both on my LinkedIn and resume with decent success.
I've done as you described and then edited it down to sound human again.
I suppose the HR folks gave you a "+1 knows how to use AI".
Probably gonna get downvoted for this, but when you give an anecdote you don't have to preface it with "anecdata, n=1 sample size".
We know it's from your individual experience because it's a story about your individual experience. We've been doing this for all of human history. This is some kind of strange milieu of trying to always sound scientific, or it's fear of the "well akshually I'm gonna need to see a random placebo controlled trial", which is equally annoying.
Llms were good for being objective and helping cut out stuff from mine. Harder to do when you personally think everything you ever did is important.
[flagged]
Same thing happened to my wife as well. I helped her tailor her LinkedIn profile and resume with a lot of attention to detail: adding metrics, keywords, results, etc. Nevertheless, she never received any outreach recruiters and got very few application responses. It went like that for months, almost a year.
Then she asked ChatGPT 5.x for help. I was skeptical about the changes it recommended (and was skeptical at all about using AI for this given the homogeneification it tends to produce). But somehow it worked: few days later, a recruiter reached out, then another, then applications started moving forward, etc.
My guess is that, as LLMs are shoveled into every phase of the recruiting process, not having an LLM write your resume for you is now playing on hard mode. The LLMs reviewing resumes are downranking resumes and profiles that are not "speaking" the same language and activating the correct neurons, thus preventing you from moving forward. This contrasts with years ago when we had more humans in the loop and the pasteurised writing of GPT 3.5/4o would make you look less worthy. Again, just a theory, but...