That time I laughed at the idea of an AI resume screener... until it rejected mine

Back in 2019 I rolled my eyes when a recruiter friend told me companies were using AI to filter applicants. Then my own resume got auto-rejected by one at a mid-size firm in Denver, and a human later told me I'd used the wrong font size for keyword scanning. Has anyone else had a machine gatekeep them from a job they were perfect for?

2 comments

2 Comments

oliver225d ago

Read something about how these systems actually penalize people who use two-column resume layouts or fancy graphics... turns out the AI just can't parse them properly and throws them out. Makes you wonder how many good candidates never even get a look because their resume doesn't fit some machine's outdated rules. Heard a story about a guy who literally had to remove his Harvard degree from his resume because the algorithm kept rejecting it for some formatting reason. Whole system feels pretty broken if you ask me, like we're all just playing a game nobody told us the rules for.

uma_johnson25d ago

A friend of mine runs a small HR consulting firm and she told me last year that some of these systems will even reject a resume just because the file name has a space or a special character in it. So you spend hours tailoring your experience and skills, and then a robot bins it because you called the file "John Smith Resume 2024" instead of "JohnSmithResume2024.pdf". It really makes you wonder how many perfectly qualified people are getting weeded out for things that have nothing to do with their ability to do the job. The whole system is basically a black box where nobody knows the real rules until they've already lost.