If everyone uses AI how do employers choose who to interview?

[dontcomeatme]

This is more of a curiosity than a real AIBU. Basically my DW is applying for a new job, it's definitely a step up in her career but quite a natural curve for her current experience and skills.
The application is gruelling. Last night she started using AI to help with the answers and to get all of the job specifications into her paragraphs. She was using something called copilot? I have never used AI before and I was intrigued. Her answers sound amazing and she was able to put in personal experiences and information.
My question would be, surely the employers are aware of AI, and if everyone uses this type of software to make their application look and sound better, how on earth would they decide who to give an interview to?
Surely any person idiot with a computer or phone can use AI to make themselves sound absolutely amazing and perfect for the job, but unless they meet in person they have no idea what they're actually like? How are employers going to get around this? Just interview every single application?
I mentioned this to DW last night and she said I made her feel like a cheat, which was not my intention at all! Genuinely curious how company's will navigate this. But I suppose it goes deeper than that doesn't it, college essays could be completely written by AI, how would anyone know? A whole new world to me this!

Do UK companies not use selection criteria? Surely that would weed out faster than reading CVs.

AI is killing recruitment and rehires are at an all time high because of it. Complete false economy for companies, but sunk cost fallacy perpetuates the issue.
Woman? Computer says...you don't get this role as often as a man, so you may be filtered out at this point.
Had kids? Computer says...ah what is this gap in dates, does not compute. Filter out.
Used long words relevant to the role but perhaps too detailed for basic AI? Computer says...why hasn't this person run this through AI before applying so that I can understand in a simplistic way. Filter out.
Etc etc.

Surely though, many of you will only be seeing applications that have got through the AI net - so of course those people use AI for their application, likely intensively. I'd be ferreting the AI bin to get to the ones who still engage brain, personally.

To be honest when you advertise a job, often at least 75% of the applicants do not actually have the qualifications or experience you've asked for.

Eg i might post a senior manager role. It needs

• a 2.1 degree from a good uni
• one of two standard industry qualifications
• 10 years of experience including 3 different areas of work
• right to work in uk (we can't sponsor your visa)

For starters I will get a load of applicants online, most of whom do not have right to work in uk. These all get binned immediately.

Then i will get a bunch who don't have the qualifications listed. Bin

Then i will get some who have done stupid things with their cv that make me not like it

• made it 4 pages long
• spelling/grammar errors (AI often uses American spelling!)
• only put 2 lines on most recent job, with a full page on a job they were in 15 years ago
• listed daft stuff like winning the geography prize in year 9 at school or playing for the county youth cricket team when aged 16

Then i will get loads with

• 5 years experience
• 10 years experience in a different area to what I've asked (not matching any of the three)
• 10 years experience but in only one area of the three

By the time I've binned all these I'm usually left with about four. Its not hard to interview four.

So a friend recently gave a sensible tip. He wrote his own statement, then he asked co-pilot to score his statement out of 7 based on the job spec. I thought this was quite a novel way of 1) not letting AI write it but 2) having a critical second pair of eyes look at your work.

If you have a look at places like Civil Service Jobs - AI is allowed in the way described above. Or you could ask it to order your example in to a STAR format. But it can't be made up. The experiences have to be genuine. Statements that are just the AI format with no actual examples/ experience that is not genuine get sorted out (by a person). Also, if you are going through 100+ applications it becomes easy to spot AI templates (as they are all virtually identical, presumably based of a good template uploaded at some point).

There are some really good points made in this thread. I really appreciate everyone's thoughts on the matter and a lot of it makes complete sense.
My DW does not need to hand a CV in, it is purely application based. She wrote her own application and then asked copilot if she had missed any of the job specs out, which she had, almost like the pp who said they asked AI to rate it. She used AI like a spell checker/thesaurus. It helped make a few of her sentences flow better and pointed out anything she had specifically missed. But it's all her writing so I'm hoping that falls into the "okay" category! Plus, she is 100% qualified for this role with all of the necessary experience so 🤞
I always thought of AI as something that makes mock up photos of anything you ask. This is all entirely new to me and fascinating! However, I can see how AI could cause a lot of problems, especially in the future.

Just to add, in a sense AI is a counterbalance to the bloated HR industry.

So sick of applications that take an age to complete with cookie cutter STAR requirements that just prove you know the game rather than have the experience and skills to do the job.

I'm job hunting at the moment, and I use AI for every application. I don't ask it to write my CV or cover letter from scratch though.

What I do is give it the job description, my CV and the cover letter I wrote for a previous application. And then I ask it to identify strength and where there are gaps. The gaps always brings up things I haven't noticed.

I then rewrite them myself and once I have a draft, ask chat GPT to improve the cover letter. I might ask it something specific. For example, most recently I was going for a job that is a step up. I asked chat GPT if my cover letter sounded appropriate for a more senior role and to suggest where it could be strengthened for this. It made some excellent suggestions.

I find it's language style a bit "enthusiastic American" and have asked it to make the style more down to earth and suitable for a UK audience, which helped. But I never just copy and paste it. I always edit so it sounds like me.

Make sure you remove long hyphens, they're telltale signs of chat gpt!

I put my last letter through an AI detector and it said not written by AI.

I got an interview, waiting to hear the result this week 🤞

Previous two applications I also got an interview, and got to the last two. So close!

Thank you this is really helpful.

AI is a tool not a way to cheat. I used it for a job application last year. I typed up all my own answers in line with the job spec and then asked AI to fine tune it for me. To me, that’s a good use of AI as a tool and sounds like what your wife was doing.

I sit on a lot of interview panels and it’s pretty easy to see which candidates use it as a tool and which use it to cheat. If the application form has that sort of robotic sound and lots of em-dashes, I’m likely to be suspicious and less likely to offer an interview.

If I were a recruiter nowadays, I would set applicants who seemed like contenders some kind of written task on the day of interview to check that they can actually string words together coherently themselves. Before anybody asks, yes I would make allowances for dyslexia etc.

I answered a post about chatgpt (it's basically the same thing as copilot but better in my view), and said that actually no, you cannot just be an idiot and use it and get great results. You actually do have to be intelligent and use it intelligently to make it work. I have used it for an application very recently and got an interview.

It can reword things and assist you in levelling up but you cannot put in slop and get non-slop back.

Any job worth having will have screening processes that have a proper look at actual experience of the person and how they present that experience. A language model (which is what they are. They predict the next correct word but have such a wide database that it seems like an actual person speaking back to you), can only do so much.

I have a chat where I have input all my experience and then I will paste in job descriptions and person specifications and it will spit out an application. I then take that and work from it. This removes the step where previously I would have gone down the JD and PS myself manually in a Word document and typed out how I meet each.

The AI does that part and so frees my mental capacity up to go deeper into the weeds of it all, perhaps getting the AI to reword my stuff, which I will then go back and tweak once more. So you could never tell that I had used AI, because I am using it, rather than relying on it.

Interesting thread. I recently used AI for the first time in applications. I didn't get a single interview. Without sounding arrogant, I should have had an interview even if I didn't get job.
I have now wondered if it's because they realised it was AI. I did however write it all, just used AI to polish and check.
My concern was that if everyone used AI that my natural version would sound less impressive. Now I'm not sure....

This is my wife's exact worry! She doesn't know how to write it in fear they think it's AI if it sounds remotely impressive, or that hers will sound "dumb" compared to everyone if they are using AI 🤦🏻‍♀️

The civil service applications come to mind re: STAR approach. So rigidly implemented - there is no room for deviation.

AI can make your CV or application sound better but it can only work with what it has - you still need to have relevant experience and examples for it to work with.

TBH when I’m reviewing CVs for a role I spend very little time actually reading them (I think research says hiring managers spend an average of 6-10 seconds before deciding whether to shortlist or decline). And I’m talking about hiring for a role that is c. £100k plus bonus.

Basically, this is what I look at:

The headlines of role titles and time spent there - do they have significant experience in relevant roles, in the same industry and at similar global corporates?

How long did they spend in the roles? Any evidence of them moving roles frequently which may suggest they find it hard to settle/perform?

If they’ve moved frequently, is there anything which gives sufficient explanation to put my mind at rest (redundancy, contracting, etc)?

Any weird / unexplained gaps?

I cast an eye over their candidate profile / most recent two or three experiences - are they well written? Typos or grammar issues? Are they mentioning experiences that fit well with what we’re looking for?

TBH AI would only help them with the “Are they well written? Any typos or grammar issues?” part.

I’d also bin any that very obviously used AI, so things like having lots of em-dashes in. I wouldn’t be binning them for using AI (I use it too, frankly think it’s silly not to) but for lacking the nous / emotional intelligence to know that you shouldn’t just copy and paste its output and need to personalise and remove AI tells.

I think it will change the future of hiring. I would have no idea right now how to use it to enhance my CV. I tried to put my CV through it and it took out all databases I had used and made me sound as though I could do a wide range of marketing, which is something I've never done but appeared to be based on a Media Studies A' Level from 1999.

Maybe CV's should always be submitted in person if under a certain pay/level - keep those jobs local for the community and ensure you won't be spammed with applicants from the other side of the country who haven't filtered their search engines properly. I do understand widening the net is important as positions become specialist, however LinkedIn seems like a more natural way to scout people and is at least reliable in the sense that real people in your network will likely have heard of them. I can see how it is a nightmare for employers and think it's been rolled out without much understanding of how it filters what could be viable employees, particularly with a sexist bias due to the coding.

Absolutely this.

I use AI for my CV (and for most of my actual work) in this exact way.

The problems with using AI come when people don’t use it intelligently. It’s a tool…

Lots of people use it like they’re running around with a sledgehammer and hitting every bit of DIY they need to do with it and then wondering why that doesn’t give great results.

Very rarely should anything just be copied and pasted as it is - it needs personalisation, putting into your own tone of voice, polishing, etc.

Unedited or badly edited generated text is easy to spot for someone who’s been working at least a few years before AI came in.
I have stopped using dashes in my writing though, as AI overuses them so much.
Tell her to upload a covering letter if there’s anywhere to do so, and ensure this letter has her own voice.

I recruit and I'll be honest, it's made things more difficult. We are interviewing more people because they all hit the requirements and the points on the person spec perfectly. We usually interview 4-5 max but the last recruitment round we interviewed 9 and another 2 or 3 were not quite as impressive but definitely would have been interviewed a year or two ago.

However, interviews were very telling as several of those with excellent applications were very poor and clearly didn't have the depth of experience that AI had written for them. Some barely scored any marks at all. This is unheard of - in the past, all those reaching the interview stage would have done reasonably well.

Clearly the way we recruit will need to change but we're not sure how yet - I work in a niche area that doesn't require specific qualifications so it's harder to objectify the application part.

One thing that really annoys me are jobs where you upload your CV and the application form requires to repeat the content of the CV! I was worried that if I just copied and pasted the duties etc from the CV to the form, it might have got rejected. Just rephrased the wording

Maybe CV's should always be submitted in person if under a certain pay/level - keep those jobs local for the community and ensure you won't be spammed with applicants from the other side of the country who haven't filtered their search engines properly

I tell you now that some job site search engines are rubbish. Something that has not improved since the last time I was job searching in 2007. I select 15 or 20 miles from my postcode (websites have different distances to search from) and living in Leicestershire, I got results for jobs in Swansea, Southampton and Sunderland!

Obviously in 2007, there were hardly any remote/wfh jobs. Sometimes I found a job which was listed as remote and looking through the listing, I found that its WFH three days a week and the location of the office is 80 odd miles away. That is NOT remote. Then some listings don't even have a location and it said onsite. Even sometimes couldn't find the name of the employer on the listing. Don't bother to list the location which I can't find on researching, I didn't apply just in case it turns out to be the other side of the country!

Our policy is we cannot discriminate for using AI. Spelling is usually with z’s in the American style so you get an idea even if they have the experience it may be they are not suitable. When interviewing we use the ones with the relevant or closest experience.

You actually need to take out the AI polish. Use AI for structure, flow and spotting gaps, but remove the polish because that is the giveaway that people spot. AI is too emphatic, earnest and rythmic. It focuses so much on crafting compelling phrases is sounds non-human.

We found this! It said the word restorative about 7 times on one page and the word inclusive about a thousand times haha.