Know when to leverage AI in your job search--and when not to.
By Mike Farragher
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
This job market is tight for not only people looking for a job, but for the companies looking to attract pools of talent and hiring managers onto their platform.
The marketing practices of these job board and professional networking websites have intensified. With much fanfare, Recruiter.com recently released a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) capability called Scouted, which enables hiring managers to find the right candidates quickly.
“Companies spend over $4,000 for each hire they make,” said Evan Sohn, CEO of Recruiter.com. “Our Scouted product reduces the time-to-hire with video and AI-enabled curation, which saves time and money for hiring managers. Our candidate pool focuses on a specific segment who significantly raise the talent density of an organization, helping to achieve a better return on human capital investment.”
This press release is further proof that it is no longer enough to have a well written or eye catching resume: you must leverage AI to get yourself noticed. In plain speak, you increase your chances of getting noticed when you align as many keywords in your resume with the ones in the job description as you possibly can.
We’ve heard of some candidates taking this to the extreme. They’re cutting and pasting the entire job description, changing the font to size 2 and the font color white so that a human eye wouldn’t see it but the AI “robot eye” will catch it. While we haven’t seen any evidence that this deliciously diabolical practice actually works, it does give you a sense of what candidates will do to get noticed by the robot eyes.
In a particularly desperate move for revenue in an increasingly competitive job board market I have seen the robot eyes develop robot hands as they wade into the lucrative resume writing business. When a candidate uploads a resume into some job board sites, they’ll get a “free diagnostic check” on their resume. AI will scan the resume, find a million fake faults with it, and offer an AI tuneup written by robot eyes and hands for an extra fee that could be as low as $50.
Job seekers have been taking notice. Some clients come back to us confused after getting this diagnostics back, which shakes the confidence in the work we have done together in hand crafting an AI friendly resume.
What the $50 AI resume will miss is this: your resume and job board profile cannot just be written as a history of your work experience, it has to be crafted to attract the next job. That direction will only be uncovered by you discussing your goals with a live person, who will then craft the resume to match that and play nice with the robot eyes at the same time.
You might be thinking this blog is self serving, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Look, I've got nothing against robots; one called Roomba is busy keeping the place clean under my feet as I type this and it saves time. The AI powered vacuum cleaner doesn't have the good sense to sidestep a pile of doggie do when my pooch is too lazy to go out, however, and will proceed to track the mess unchecked all around the house. This causes extra work for the human cleaning crew, who must clean both the floor and the robot vacuum cleaner before the next voyage around the house.
I rest my case.
There’s a strip mall not far from our office. A fancy hair salon has been there for years, and their landlord made the desperate move to fill unused space by signing a lease with one of those bargain national chain barbers that offers discount hairdos. The fancy salon responded with a simple sandwich board on the curb. In big block letters written in chalk, the sign said, “we fix $25 haircuts.”
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Let CareerLetters fix YOUR $50 resume!
Mike Farragher is the CEO and Co Founder of CareerLetters. For more information on how to amplify your professional brand online and your resume, visit us at www.careerletters.com
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