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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 t

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).

herval 3y ago
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.
- throwaway11460 3y ago
  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.
  - crooked-v 3y ago
    In a third round, why are you even looking at cover letters?
    - badwolf 3y ago
      Who is even looking at cover letters at all?
      - kergonath 3y ago
        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.
        ungreased0675 3y ago
        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?
        badwolf 3y ago
        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.
        kergonath 3y ago
        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.
  - basil-rash 3y ago
    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.
StableAlkyne 3y ago
> 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.
- throwaway11460 3y ago
  Yes, but this goes much further - on a word by word, sentence by sentence basis.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    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".
  - StableAlkyne 3y ago
    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.
deleted 3y ago
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herval 3y ago

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.

throwaway11460 3y ago
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.
- crooked-v 3y ago
  In a third round, why are you even looking at cover letters?
  - badwolf 3y ago
    Who is even looking at cover letters at all?
    - kergonath 3y ago
      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.
      - ungreased0675 3y ago
        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?
        badwolf 3y ago
        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.
        kergonath 3y ago
        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.
- basil-rash 3y ago
  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.

StableAlkyne 3y ago

> 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.

throwaway11460 3y ago
Yes, but this goes much further - on a word by word, sentence by sentence basis.
- ben_w 3y ago
  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".
- StableAlkyne 3y ago
  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.

deleted 3y ago

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