Just realized my AI resume screener was filtering out good candidates because of font choice

I run a small shop with like 30 people and started using this automated system to scan resumes for keywords. Thought it was working fine until a buddy from another company told me his system was trash at reading certain fonts. So I tested mine with my own resume in Arial vs some script font and sure enough the script one got like a 40% score while Arial got 80%. Is it fair to ditch people just because their resume has fancy formatting when the actual skills are there? Or is it on them to use standard fonts since they know AI is reading it now?

2 comments

2 Comments

holly_sanchez7513d ago

Gently pushing back on something here - its not really about the font choice being "fancy" formatting. The problem is that these AI systems are just bad at reading anything that isnt a standard font like Arial or Calibri. I tested my own resume too and found the same thing you did. The thing is, people might use a script font cause it looks nice on paper when a human reads it, not because theyre trying to game the system. Should someone really lose a job chance just because they picked a font that looks professional to the human eye? What are you gonna do, make everyone use Times New Roman from now on?

julia_lee13d ago

You're absolutely right that nobody should lose a job over a font choice. What gets me is that the same AI systems that can supposedly "read" resumes are actually just pattern-matching against super clean text. I saw a test where someone used a simple serif font like Garamond and the parser completely mangled their contact info. Even standard fonts that look clean to us can throw these systems off if they have any decorative elements at all. We're basically asking job seekers to design their resumes specifically for robots first and humans second. Thats a backwards way to hire people in my opinion.