> This is why the New Yorker is such a piece of shit publication.

Where did that come from? As far as I can tell, this article has absolutely nothing to do with the New Yorker.

Mcsweenies, close enough.

> “Tell us what makes you the perfect candidate for this position. Remember to have fun!”

More than that, it's a filter for screening out people with less good English skills or a different cultural background.

> Have fun while writing a cover letter? Are these people unwell?

Any job that asks me to start the relationship with non-technical fantasy scenarios, is a non-starter for me. At least lip service toward that viewpoint is paid.

So here I am on Indeed, I submit an application, or am trying. Even have a cover letter that has customizability (several paragraph inserts depending on the nature of the position). And then I turn the page...

And there's a wall of text boxes. "Describe in detail, including the metrics, KPIs and reasoning you used when you launched your previous 0 to 1 product to ensure a good fit to your customer", "We have noticed that churn is increasing. What steps do you take to identify why this is, and what you intend to do to stop this trend?", "Describe in detail the biggest challenge and obstacles you've overcome getting a product to market, including both the technical aspects and business/people components, and be specific about the role you played in making sure these were surmountable".

Uh. No. Let's have those discussions in the interview process, not when you're winging through hundreds of resumes to see how "compatible" I am. (I may also be bitter because my previous experience includes working on a health insurance claims benefit management system AND an EHR system for a medical specialization, and I really doubt that, within 20 minutes of you getting my CV for a position that requests someone with "expert level" health insurance system knowledge AND "experience interfacing between EHR providers and partners" that you "are looking for someone whose experience more closely aligns with the job requirements").

In 2023 you might as well let ChatGPT do it in 30 seconds and call it a day. The recipient is probably using ML to process your application, you might as well do the same to them, bring the scales more to parity.

I'd love it if ChatGPT could simply look at my LinkedIn profile, scrape and navigate the company's byzantine application web portal, filling out all the text fields, generate whatever prose that fit the company's expectations/vibe, and hit submit for me. Scale that across 1,000 companies, and I could spam a reasonably good application across the entire industry in a morning. I'd pay $200 a shot for this if it could be shown to be effective at producing job offers. Go make it happen, founders.

Next step is to just send it to work to do your job!

You could pay a human to use ChatGPT like this for you to 100 jobs.

I tried this and I’d usually didn’t do a good job. This surprised me.

I think it’s because each point on the cv conveys a lot of information and you need logic to put it together.

It would get experience from different jobs mixed up and write sentences that were obviously factually wrong

This isn’t the New Yorker.