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Comment by bink | Hacker News Reader

It is a bit funny that if you apply for a job with many of these companies they ask they you do not use AI for the application.

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As any company should. Not sure what's funny about it - I'm interested in the person. If using AI is one of required capabilities I will ask them to perform a task using it during the interview so I can review their process. In the same way I don't expect to receive an executable binary as a cover letter for a SWE position.

I had many candidates submit absolutely terrible cover letters clearly made by ChatGPT. The number one sign - it talks about their experience exactly in the order I listed it on the job post; number two - I don't get to know anything about the person. I asked them to submit a cover letter they wrote themselves, and while not everyone's writing was as good as ChatGPT can write, I got to know the person, and hired few of these who definitely wouldn't make the cut if I went by the AI made letter.

If you can have AI generate your letter so well I can't tell, you get a pass. Nobody was able to do that yet, though (or at least didn't admit to it, even though I'm asking after they are hired and saying that at this point it would only help them if they did so).

> The number one sign - it talks about their experience exactly in the order I listed it on the job post

I wouldn't attribute that to AI; it's a very natural way to write a cover letter. You want to hit the bullet points in the job posting, and the most logical way to do that is to go down the list and check boxes.

Yes, but this goes much further - on a word by word, sentence by sentence basis.

I've never seen that from an LLM; usually the error they make is I've asked them for too many things (a quantity which varies wildly), I get a response for about 3 of those things and a note saying something to the effect of "put more here".

A very common piece of advice is to include keywords in your resume in exactly the way they are typed in the advertisement. This is because of places that use ATS systems to filter down the "best" candidates based on how closely their skill set matches the requirements. For example, if the requirement says "Must have proficiency in the Python scientific computing ecosystem, including TensorFlow and Scikit-Learn," if you subscribe to the keyword methodology, you'd make sure to sprinkle in the exact phrase "Python scientific computing ecosystem" on the off chance that some non-domain-expert in HR copied and pasted into their ATS.

I can see how someone would take that advice and include exact phrases in their cover letter in an attempt to get through the filters.

most companies are using AI to filter out CVs these days, and cover letters written with ChatGPT seem to have a higher success ratio. I wouldn't blame anyone for using it, unfortunately.

Maybe in first rounds. I am the third/fourth round interviewer. If a cover letter like that gets to me, it's automatically a no - not because of the fact itself but simply because the cover letters are terrible.

Don’t you see how the incentives become impossible? The AI stage needs you to be as obvious and direct about your experience as possible, the human stage gets irritated when you write like the reader doesn’t have a brain.

Personally I send my resumes through a gpt with the job posting and ask if I’d be a good fit. Almost always the GPT will initially say no because I’m using some terminology that anyone in the industry would understand is a form of the posting’s requirements, but the GPT does not. But then perhaps the screening recruiter doesn’t either. So why not be specific? But then anyone else at the company might think I’m a moron… ugh.

In a third round, why are you even looking at cover letters?

Who is even looking at cover letters at all?

I suspect it depends on the field, but in my experience it’s often a good indicator of success. A shoddy letter betrays a lack of professionalism. If you’re not going to spend 10 minutes running a spell checker it means that either it’s not important to you, so good bye, or that your standards are really low and you will keep producing garbage if I hire you, so good bye as well.

The problem with cover letters is false positive (people who did not write the letter themselves, or who did it to a much higher standard than their usual). But then, that’s what interviews are for.

I did hire a couple of people with either a subpar CV (some good people sometimes end up in dead ends or difficult situations), or cover letter (not everyone is a great writer), or reference (your issues with your former boss are not always your fault), or interview (you can have a bad day), so I would not rely on a single factor. But a combination of 2 dodgy elements is an automatic rejection. Each one tends to surface different aspects.

Consider that job seekers today sometimes have to apply to hundreds of positions before being hired. For most of those applications, they won’t hear anything back. Given that dynamic, would you spend time polishing a cover letter for each application?

My recent job hunt was over 1700 applications.

Nobody is spending 10 minutes writing a cover letter.

Companies that are getting hundreds to thousands of applications are not reading every cover letter.

In my field, certainly. We expect them to prepare a presentation for the interview as well. Our pond is not large enough, there are not hundreds of positions to apply to.

I guess my thing is that I don’t want to jump through hoops, I want to write code. You know how some people are enamored of those little ‘shit tests’ for relationships, they think they’re really clever? I have no patience for that.

Show me who you are and I’ll show you who I am, and if we like eachother, then let’s try to get together and see what we could build together. if the entire interview process is a series of hoops that you dictate I jump through to even have a chance with you, then why should I expect my future with you to be any different? I don’t want that.

I don’t want to write a carefully crafted letter pretending that I want anything other than respect and money and a chance to do work on interesting from a potential employer. I just want to write code. The rest of it is extensive shit testing in my book and I have no patience for that. I don’t put up with that kind of treatment from anyone else - what makes you think dangling money in front of me would change my mind about that?

A guess: First round was "AI" (aka keyword matching), second round was recruiter who doesn't understand anything and doesn't read

First round is phone call prescreen, second round is non-technical interview with a recruiter. No GPT or keyword matching involved.

How am I supposed to learn something about the person?

at the third or fourth round? By talking to them, obviously?

Before I get to talk to them, obviously

You have a CV, three rounds of notes, usually a linkedin profile, and you’re arrogant enough to dismiss people because they had to put up a crappy cover letter to get past your stupid ATS, and you still don’t see how shameful your behavior is.

Lol. If all you can give me is a crap letter that says nothing about you and just lists what I wrote in the ad and how excellent you are at it, then I'm going to go with the people who excitedly told me about their actual experience and related interests. Don't see anything shameful about that.

CV is nice except that most people have a list of "Senior Software Engineer at XYZ" and that's it. Doesn't tell me anything, so again, if that's what you're going with, I'm going to prefer the person who took the time to actually talk about their related experience and interests. LinkedIn is nice but same problem as with CVs.

Seems like you think everyone has perfect detailed CV and LinkedIn profiles... Nope. It's mostly crap that says nothing. If your CV/LinkedIn can take the role of the cover letter then sure, no problem, but I don't see that often.

Not sure how the recruiter's notes about your nice friendly outgoing personality and good English level would help me understand your experience and interests related to the job, but yeah sure lol.

No crappy ATS at our company, BTW. Applications go to the inbox and are handled by real people.

Google, I think that's the 9th round.

This could be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff - if your AI can be detected through your writing, then you aren't who they're looking for!

I've been trying to get Gemini to write things for me. It's either way to formal, passive, and evasive, but if you ask it to be less formal its like "Yo dude, give me a job!".

I find it quite hard find a middle ground and write in a style I like.

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