I’ve never been good at social media. On Twitter I generally just observe, with a rare comment on someone’s project that looks neat, but that’s about all. Reddit provides an interesting outlook on a lot of different topics in a more organized way, but again I’m largely just observing. At a few different points in life I’ve had the urge to blog, but “finding my voice” or, more specifically, deciding what I want to say has not come easy.

Let’s talk about work! More specifically, let’s talk about recruiting. In the last couple of months I’ve been working on two full-time, mid-level developer backfills for folks who have left or are leaving the organization (congrats again on your retirement!). In about three total weeks of having the role posted, almost three hundred candidates came in. Almost one hundred of them were not at all a fit for the openings as they completely misunderstood the role (our role titles are… they could be better), and trying to sift through the other ~200 applicants was exhausting. Some interesting patterns emerged of these remaining, though:

Some people are just taking a shot, and that’s great! Folks on the edge of the requirements (ex: 2yrs of experience when the role requires 3.5+), some that were even fresh out of school, perhaps hoping to be noticed. This was about 40% of the applicants.
Some people were coming from a place where they had progressed to a leadership role and were thinking about coming back to development as a focus. That’s cool, too! Leadership roles often come with baggage of other kinds (politics, for example), and sometimes just being heads-down and having a clear end goal can be exciting.
New (to me anyway) buzzwords! Around 60% of the applicants used the term “Spearheaded [insert thing here]” at least once in their resume. It’s like the trend of people giving a presentation and they pull up a slide with way too much text on it and they say “I’m not going to drain this slide, but…” I heard it once, and then a week later almost every meeting had somebody doing the exact same thing. Where do these trends come from? Anyway.

The thing that surprised me most was what I’m assuming to be AI content. It wasn’t rampant, but I started to see a trend of very specific measurements. “Increased performance by 29%,” “Reduced downtime by 17%,” and many more. My first reaction was: “hey, those are really specific! I wonder how they got them?”

What makes me think this trend was driven by AI was when I hit one candidate with a full bullet point paragraph citing five specific percentages. And then a second candidate with the exact same paragraph, including the order of improvements, the exact same percentages, and identical grammar aside from one person losing the period at the end of their last sentence. The ONLY thing different between the two resumes was the technology cited: one person said React while the other said Angular.

I completely understand how exhausting resume writing can be. I don’t enjoy doing it, I don’t enjoy applying for roles, I don’t enjoy the stress of the interview process. I can completely understand the allure of asking a machine to help you fancy up a bit of your resume, trying to answer the age old question: “how can I make this sound more impressive?”

Folks need to realize that AI is not as clever as it can seem. If cool AI of the day gave you something fancy, and with such specific measurements included, you can all but guarantee that it’s going to regurgitate the same thing for someone else. Perhaps take it as inspiration, or use it to help break that mental roadblock! Do yourself a service, though: if you’re going to ask AI to help, DO NOT just copy and paste the output. If you can’t take that one simple step, and if the person reading your resume catches the pattern, it’s not going to end well.