In the common vernacular “Don’t hate the player. Hate the game.”

He is playing the game to have a chance to exchange labor for money to support his addiction to food and shelter.

When I interview someone, I want to know whether they are the type of employee who is “smart and gets things done”. He has demonstrated both

This is just leveling the playing field between HR which already filters job applications with AI, and candidates who need to painstakingly research and fill out job applications one by one.

Have you personally worked at a company that used algorithmic filters? Because I haven't, and plenty of people here attest that they haven't. I've only ever seen baseless speculation that it's prevalent, with no anecdotes much less data.

I'm currently participating in a hiring panel that is still working on sifting through hundreds of junk AI applications by hand to try to give the honest players a fair shot. I can certainly see the temptation to resort to algorithms now that the spam is so awful, but the causality there is reversed.

For reference, I’ve been successfully finding jobs quickly since 1996, I’m on my tenth job and I have every resume I’ve used since 2008 (leaving my second job).

I’m very qualified in my niche:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42559488

I did use ChatGPT rewrite parts of my resume this time to be more inline with the job I applied for. It didn’t make a difference since I replied to a recruiter who reached out to me based on my LinkedIn profile.

But how is it “dishonest” if I didn’t lie about my qualifications? I didn’t just take the ChatGPT output and copy and paste it. I did reword it slightly to sound like me.

Using ChatGPT to require part of your resume and looking over it before submitting it to a recruiter you're already in touch with is one thing.

Mass applying for hundreds of jobs while you sleep is something entirely different that will almost certainly lead to lying on the submitted resumes.

Well if that last step is what made it feel honest, many of these tools are basically a way to bypass that. I think it crosses into dishonesty when you include an AI cover letter that says you want the job/would be good at it but you haven’t even looked at the post or evaluated the company. For example if you don’t actually want the job (have seen this).

I think you misunderstand what most people want out of job. Like I said, I’ve had 10 jobs. All of them were targeted because they had money and I needed to exchange labor for some of their money.

I didn’t have “passion” about any of them. I “wanted the job” because they had money. The only evaluation I cared about was was would I get paid on time.

I’m exaggerating slightly. I did care about other things. But I wasn’t desperate like many people are in today’s market. That is the attitude I would have if it came to that.

No one reads cover letters by the way. They barely read resumes.

my hypergrowth hiring days are a few years behind me but fwiw I did read cover letters. Including one was an easy way to get to the top of my ATS pile. At the time, there was no AI generation so it was a decent signal someone actually wanted the job vs was just spamming. I was sifting through thousands of applicants for the few who would give a shit about our product and customers. That signal is no longer useful and you now have to use some AI countermeasures to cull the stack of applicants (or as you mention, ignore the stack and only interview referrals... 100% agreed that is the most effective way in).