Tell HN: Please stop sending AI-generated job applications (whoishiring threads)
Via yesterday's whoishiring thread, I received more than 70 emails. A good percentage of them (nearly half of them) came with unedited AI-generated cover letters.
Please don't do this. I spend time going through the resume, the various links in it, and then responding to everyone who applied. But this time, with so much AI-generated verbiage I simply don't want to.
I understand non-native speakers of English wanting to use AI. But frankly, just saying "here's my resume (and github/blog/publications etc)" is better than ChatGPT content. Writing longer emails creates an obligation for us (at the hiring end), and when it's AI-generated you're just wasting our time. If there's a distinct AI-generated tone to the email, I'm inclined to not consider the application.
201 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] thread2. They can be lengthy.
You're dinging people for being too long?
I mean, what are your metrics for a cover letter then?
In other words: Upon perusal of a mere handful, the prevailing characteristic becomes abundantly clear. The prose predominantly revels in a labyrinthine complexity, intertwined with a flourish of ornate lexicon.
this is how im told to write for a corporate setting... this is insanity lol, be perfect, but not to perfect.
With ChatGPT some of its stock phrases are quite easily recognisable and I'm sure they're a lot more recognisable having seen 30 other generic cover letters that also use them!
I have to figure out how not to sound like an AI overlord :)
In theory, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are designed to generate text that is challenging to discern from human-written content, allowing for a wide range of styles and tones.
However, in practice, these models are often fine-tuned to serve specific purposes or emulate particular writing styles, making them more recognizable and less versatile. Fine-tuning narrows down the model's output to align with desired characteristics, sacrificing some of the inherent diversity and unpredictability found in their raw generative abilities.
This fine-tuning process can result in LLMs producing text that conforms to a specific style or pattern, potentially reducing their ability to seamlessly blend in with the full spectrum of human-written content.
1. Too Perfect: If the language is too polished, without any flaws, it might be a sign. However, this is not conclusive as many humans also produce impeccable cover letters.
2. Generic Content: AI-generated content might be overly generic, lacking personal anecdotes, or specific experiences that tie the candidate to the position.
3. Mismatched Details: Sometimes AI might include details or skills that don't necessarily align with the person's actual background, especially if it's generating content based on a broad set of inputs.
4. Lack of Personal Touch: Personal nuances, humor, or any unique writing style that most humans have might be absent in AI-generated content.
5. Repetition: AI sometimes has a tendency to be repetitive or overuse certain phrases.
6. Too Structured: While structure is good, if every sentence seems to follow an almost formulaic pattern, it could be a hint.
7. Check References: If the cover letter mentions specific details, cross-checking them with the resume or online profiles might show inconsistencies.
8. Use Detection Tools: There are online tools and software solutions designed to detect AI-generated content. However, their efficacy can vary.
9. Ask Direct Questions: If you're hiring and suspect a cover letter might be AI-generated, you can always ask the candidate specific questions about its content during an interview.
10. Gut Feeling: Sometimes, it's just a feeling that the content doesn't "sound human". Trust your instincts, but always give the benefit of the doubt and follow up with other methods.
Remember, the use of AI tools isn't inherently negative. Some people might use AI to help draft or polish their cover letters. What's important is the authenticity of the experiences and skills presented and the genuine fit for the role.
> Detecting if a cover letter is AI-generated can be challenging, especially as AI improves over time.
huh? that doesn't seem true, it's pretty easy to tell AI-written work
> However, here are some general tips that might help:
Oh lol.
(actually written by me ways to tell):
- it will ALWAYS give an irrelevant first couple lines that sound like they're from a third grader's "haha you have to write an introductory paragraph" assignment
- it tries to "both sides" literally EVERYTHING it says. like if you said "how do you make a snowman" it would say something like "Learning to build a snowman can be challenging. However, if you live in a cold climate with snow, it's a great activity for both children and adults!" like what? why do you need a POV contrast here? but it will always do this.
- there's next to 0 sentence length variation.
- no idiosyncratic tendencies, eg using "like" a lot. Few people write like this, we write like we talk (as you can see I picked this example because I'm, like, guilty of it myself)
- no personal anecdotes at all. people like to talk about ourselves. the fact that an AI-generated response will never do this is very weird. (though I guess it would if you said "write a cover letter about myself")
I'm sure there's a shitton of clues that I pick up on subconsciously but yeah AI content is pretty obviously AI content.
Pretty sure this is from all the blog spam it was trained on. They all use this writing style.
*1. Academic Tone (Concise):*
Detecting AI-written cover letters is tough, but here are quick tips:
1. Watch for flawless language. 2. Look for generic, non-personal content. 3. Check for odd details that don't fit. 4. Absence of human touch, humor, or style. 5. Beware of repetitive phrases. 6. Too structured? Might be AI. 7. Cross-reference details with references. 8. Try AI detection tools (varying results). 9. Ask candidates direct questions in interviews. 10. Trust your gut but stay fair.
AI use isn't all bad; authenticity and fit matter most.
*2. Informal and Conversational Tone (Concise):*
Spotting AI-written cover letters is tricky, but here are the real-talk tips:
1. Too perfect? Red flag. 2. Generic content? Not a good sign. 3. Weird details? AI mistake, maybe. 4. Missing human vibes? Yep, AI. 5. Repeating phrases? AI does that. 6. Super structure? AI-like. 7. Fact-check with their profiles. 8. Tech tools? Hit-or-miss. 9. Grill candidates with direct questions. 10. Trust your instincts, but be fair.
AI tools aren't all bad; some folks use 'em to jazz up their cover letters. What counts is the fit for the job.
*3. Sci-Fi Futuristic Tone (Concise):*
In the quest to detect AI-generated cover letters, here are key signposts:
1. Absolute precision: Beware impeccable language. 2. Generality: AI leans generic. 3. Juxtaposed fictions: AI might invent details. 4. Humanity essence: AI lacks human touch. 5. Echo chamber: Watch for repetitive phrases. 6. Algorithmic straitjacket: AI can be formulaic. 7. Verification: Cross-check specifics. 8. Detection tools: Varying efficacy. 9. Directness: Ask direct questions. 10. Intuition: Trust your instincts.
AI use isn't inherently evil; focus on fit and authenticity.
“Detecting AI-written cover letters is tough, but here are quick tips:”
It’s his ChatGPT opens most discussions.
(Took a few attempts, but eventually got an AI response that followed the guidelines—no question repetition and in the style of a HackerNews comment. Pretty neat. ((This too was AI generated)))
That is actually AI generated, because people thinking they can easily differentiate between them probably also think they are immune to publicity.
The constant, 0-feedback autorejections make this a demoralizing experience.
And no; we can't rely on something like "it's a small company" (there are small companies where everyone's too busy to read cover letters, or doesn't care about them), or "they say they genuinely care about cover letters" (that's about as reliable as the list of qualifications, and we all know how idiotic those can often be).
We would all be better off if we could relegate that "getting to know you" part of the hiring process to the interview. It's a relic of a time when applying for a dozen or so jobs would be likely to get you hired, so you could justify putting in a solid hour or so of effort crafting an individualized cover letter for each one.
That isn't to say that the lack of a cover letter is disqualifying (though a bad one might be), but a good one can definitely set you apart.
I know you think you're a special snowflake that's different from every other company out there, but looking for a job is a grind. A tough one. Why make people dance and sing even more?
True, it's a lot of work. But plenty of people (myself included) manage it.
I'm not going to say that anyone is wrong for not writing cover letters, of course. But there are lots of people making hiring decisions that put a lot of stock in good ones, so it makes logical sense to provide one.
Generally what the person recruiting ate for lunch and the state of their bowel has ten times the influence on the success of your application than any amount of time you spend writing a cover letter. It's all random, and you can't know beforehand if your application will arrive at a serious recruiter or not.
Like start with some bio - as a young child, I took everything apart to see how it worked (much to my parents' chagrin). From that I learned to see the beauty of a mechanical watch ticking away, and I see a similar beauty in a RabbitMQ server ticking away messages, directing them where to go and seeing the inside of the system at work - it's been a lifelong interest of mine.
That part can pretty much stay the same. Then write a paragraph or two about the job. You might not know much but try and find a connection. Like if it's a bank, talk about how you'd like to know more about how money moves over the modern global infrastructure, or if it's some service you've used, talk about how it was helpful. If it's hard to find a connection, then you can say I've got some relevant skills, but I don't know much about your industry and I'd like to learn more.
For weeks.
Months.
Can you still bring yourself to do it at all, let alone find something meaningful to say about each one, after all that?
If they were to apply to fewer jobs, less frequently, and more personally, putting more effort into each, they might not need to be searching for months, or making so many applications where it's clear to the company that they don't care whether they get that job or 1 of hundreds of others.
Maybe think of it like phishing vs. spearphishing. Or sending "hi" as an opening line on a dating app, vs. tailoring it to the person. The latter gets a better response rate per interaction.
In all those cases (okay, not phishing), I got better results the other way myself. I also didn't reach out to recipients that struck me as having the type of culture/personality you described when I read up on them. So there's a selection bias there, too, but one that works for me.
You don't research a company before you apply for a position with them?
b) How on earth do you expect me to be able to "research a company" to be able to tell whether they're genuinely going to read a cover letter and care what it says? The only way I can think to find that out is to be able to talk to people who've recently been hired there, and fuck cold-emailing random people at a company you're trying to apply to; I guarantee some significant percentage of companies would find that super creepy and shitcan your résumé out of hand.
I don't. That's not what I was talking about when researching a company. You can't (usually) know if a cover letter will be read or valued. But it might be, so it seems worth doing anyway just to gain that possible edge.
Are we headed for: why meet anyone face to face when you could send an AI avatar loaded with "professional courtesy small talk"?
I believe I see a lot of that in the comments here. People are frustrated, because even when there's a great skills match, that they don't get a rejected letter, or if they do it's a auto generated one. They are trying to short cut the process using AI or not posting at all.
It's because generative AI writes generic "say-nothing" letters. They're impersonal, don't say anything substantive about the candidate's skill, and read like the uncanny valley version of written text.
As the OP said, they're just a waste of time.
"I was reading up on your company, and came across a podcast interview with your CEO/your CTO/the hiring manager. She was talking about the company culture/goals/story/challenges and said something I really identified with: X. This spoke to me because my own track-record/philosophy/goals include X. For example..."
At least, I try to use it to show I've done some pre-work to ensure a good fit.
Of course, if a person is applying to hundreds of positions, they likely haven't done that pre-work, so that person would have nothing to say.
If someone isn't that interested in that specific job, and would take just any job, they shouldn't do it, but someone who wants that specific job more, will
That's one risk they take by adopting the scattershot, "impersonally apply to so many jobs simultaneously that you need AI to automate it" approach. Another one is getting a job somewhere that ends up being a bad fit
I'll also note that cultural fit can be important for job satisfaction and/or effectiveness, even though you mock the concept as 'the candidate telling how the company is greatest thing that have ever existed and why they love to join it so much...'.
Hah. I have done exactly this. Personalized story, breaking down my interest and background (not just rehashing my resume), putting something coherent together.
And, bluntly? I'm an excellent writer. While I may not be cranking out Booker or Hugo award winners, I know how to craft something.
Ninety per cent of the time? Crickets. It's profoundly demoralizing.
Hold on, you're selling an LLM/NLP product and you expect your prospective employees to avoid using the same?
“See? Workers are only trying to fool us when things are remote. We have to keep a constant eye on them in person.”
You've been using AI to rapidly filter through all the resumes, and now finally we have something to fight that, and now WE need to stop?
And yes, I don't know if the OP uses AI. This is a more general complaint about the state of hiring managers and the disproportionate advantage they had over the job market. Ability to ingest massive amounts of resumes, parse them, send out emails to take personality tests etc, requiring cover letters why the applicant believes they are the most suitable candidate for the job being offered, and how it will be a magical experience...
Now finally, when applicants get some help to do mass-applying, it's not ok?
How the turntables... [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FwmGLzyRDk
(also, not being snarky, but it's "how the tables have turned")
> You have no idea if the author has been doing this
Why are you calling out GP as if they didn’t openly acknowledge this?
The hiring industry put up with ridiculous requirements on the engineers. There is such a disconnect between the requirements on job post and actual job. As a result, all entry level people are forced to apply to 300-400 jobs at least. And you are all looking for programmers. If one thing I know is most of them are having a heck of fun creating their automated system.
I know it's annoying to you but it is equally annoying to us. I hope the upper management learns something out of this. Compile a presentation and show it to upper management. If they don't do something, expect more weird stuffs down the line.
I think your upper management will force your senior engineers to come with a filter and we will come with ways to bypass the filter. The race to the bottom is on.
[0]: https://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Documents/re...
This is also precious coming from an industry that uses automated emails for rejection. Yeah you don’t want to write 80 personalized rejection emails (probably way more) aaaand we don’t want to write 80 (or more) cover letters. I feel that’s pretty fair.
Also isn’t this the industry that uses keywords to automatically detect “good” resumes and skips the resumes that don’t have those keywords?
> Please don't do this. I spend time going through the resume, the various links in it, and then responding to everyone who applied. But this time, with so much AI-generated verbiage I simply don't want to.
Congratulations, now there's one more company "that uses automated emails for rejection". And rightly so, if you ask me.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with OP or their employer.
I also love that the way things have worked for decades is applicants have to do everything by hand, but employers can automate as much as they want. Now suddenly applicants can automate just the writing of the cover letter and suddenly automation is bad and it’s all about being personal and what happened to the human touch lmao. This is just over a cover letter, by the way.
Also this is likely not applicants that are filling out one job application. We’re talking applicants that have probably spent weeks trying to apply for jobs. Spare then the 5 minutes of writing a cover letter for a job they’re probably not going to get for the 50th or whatever time.
Your record is far better than mine! I don't think I've ever been informed when I was rejected for a position. I just don't hear from the company again.
Those fields are mainly for Workday's data gathering anyway vs what hiring managers review.
This is such a brilliantly good point!
Before getting my current job, I think I had applied to around 180 companies (getting about 10 callbacks -> 3 on sites -> 1 offer).
And I totally used an automated script I wrote for creating cover letters. It was basically a general template about me, listing relevant skills and interests, a blank variable for company name, and then an area where I could say why I wanted to work for XYZ.
Made that part of the process so much easier.
Interestingly, being on the other side, when I’ve reviewed candidate applications before phone screens or interviews, I always enjoyed reading cover letters.
This can filter out candidates that aren't really interested, and companies that aren't really hiring.
The cost to an employer to accept (not review) 100 applications is about 1/100th of the cost to the candidate.
Employers have more information about the applicants individually and in aggregate but candidates don't about the companies.
Employers don't give much basic feedback to candidates, like underqualified, overqualified, not sure, something else.
A rejection letter is meant to convey a single fact. A cover letter is meant to convey important information that is relevant to the hiring decision. The two things are not equal.
When I've been hiring, cover letters have often been really critical to making these decisions. If an applicant omits a cover letter or uses one that is clearly boilerplate (or AI generated), that applicant is reducing my ability to assess their suitability for the position. As a result, they're less likely to land the job.
And you are less likely to hire someone that is a good fit for your role but couldn't put an insane amount of time to apply to your job post and a 100 more.
And it’s your pickle to put however much stock you want in the cover letter. That’s not what this is about at all. If I were applying to jobs and I know a significant percent of my cover letters will never be read by a single human on earth, I might be tempted to have an AI write it. If you happen to read it and reject me based on whatever likely-subjective metrics you use to determine it was chatgpt that wrote it, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. You could also reject me on a million other factors I don’t control. Either way, I saved however many minutes.
I assume you mean the general "you", not me specifically, because I do, in fact, do that.
Please tell us with a straight face that you craft a personalized response to each of your 300-700+ applicants.
Dear lovehashbrowns,
We are unfortunately decided to proceed with other applicant this time because even if you have roughly the required work experience for the position, based on your cover letter and resume you seemed to be generally unpleasant people to be around.
Regards, HR, Honest LTD.
But I only bother with putting that kind of care into a cover letter if I think I have very good odds of getting the job. In this case, I knew my chances were good because one of their top employees was recommending me.
It's an absolute waste of time.
Then when you get through the first filter, you need to do x aptitude tests and a degrading personality test.
And only THEN, when you understand how those tests work and get to get a perfect score, then you might get an email to set up a phone call.
Now I will soon have to do one (serious) job application a week in order to receive benefits for the time being. If I could use ML to make that part easier (I will get declined a lot without even having been read anyway, not even a non-personal rejection letter) while I put effort into it then all the more power to me. Actually, I'd like to thank the OP for the heads up.
... did AI write this?
Instead, network. Reach out to your college profs and family friends. Go to meetups and tech events. Do hackathons. Anything to get time with a real human to build a connection.
Seriously, its how things get done.
Given the scale of this company, I believe that crafting a sincere cover letter is a wise choice, should they require one. In the case of larger organizations like Facebook, to mention one example, cover letters are overwhelmingly unlikely to have any impact. It’s highly probable that they won’t even be reviewed, and even if they are, they won’t significantly influence your chances if you can’t successfully navigate the interview process.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37740448
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/company/credcore/people/
I remember when I applied for one of my previous jobs at a relatively small game studio with about 120 employees. The CEO took the time to read every single cover letter they received. This was possible because the number of applicants was manageable, and they genuinely cared about understanding what kind of work each candidate was passionate about. I made sure to convey my genuine passion for the industry in my cover letter, and as a result, I secured a position that aligned perfectly with my interests at the time: learning about and developing distributed systems.
Later on, the company was acquired by a major player in the gaming industry. Although the HR department continued to collect cover letters, there was no longer anyone available to read and assess them.
When I applied for a job at Apple, I submitted a cover letter with the hope that, at some point during the interview process, perhaps towards the very end, someone would take the time to read it. I thought maybe the hiring manager or some higher-level managers might review it. However, a few weeks into my new job during the onboarding process, I asked some people I had met during the interviews, “By the way, regarding the content of my cover letter, what were your thoughts?” To my surprise, not a single person could recall ever reading or even seeing a cover letter from any candidate.
One of the hiring aspects I've heard is that interviews aren't terribly predictive of performance, but past accomplishments are, so I'd read through peoples' resumes and ask them about past projects and what they learned from them - seems like the best way to spend the time. But I was always surprised at how few of my fellow interviewers used the resume like that.
So I was a bit surprised when I was on the other side of the table for my latest job and the interviewer did it to me. It's an impressively competent place and I'm glad to have gotten it.
Same as with email already
…Unironically.
Really, is this any different to the usual smoke and mirrors people use to get ahead? Before now, it was hiring ghostwriters or farming your work out to other humans and pretending you did it and accepting plaudits barefacedly - this is just the newest iteration of the same old shit.
Think of Damien Hirst. The guy is renowned as an artist, but doesn’t actually produce anything himself - he has a team of pet artisans who come up with concepts and execute them, and he then sticks his signature and a price tag on them. Just like Michelangelo, or da Vinci, or titian.
Think of the biggest pop stars - none of them write their material, none of them can sing or play an instrument - their chief skill is in taking credit and self-aggrandisement.
Think of politicians - they have armies of advisors, writers, and staffers - they are empty vessels which echo sonorously.
Sorry to break it to you, but this is how it works, and always has. The biggest bullshitter always wins.
If you’re going to question the sincerity of everything, it’d be tasteful to question your own conclusions as well.
No. If the author couldn’t even be bothered to write it, people won't bother to read it.
Like we have to go through whiteboards, multiple rounds, STAR pattern, pretend founders are brilliant and passionate, pretend dumb ass phrases mean things, have "culture fit", show enough passion that we just do it all the time even for fun!, get laid off over Zoom after record profits or because "macroeconomic conditions" and watch the founders cry about how "difficult" it is to lay people off - and they're going to add yet another thing to arbitrarily use as a metric to reject people.
Like this company uses AI for late stage capitalism financial shenanigans, but fuck us if we use it to write a cover letter, we're the bad guys?
Oof.
We do have a lot of non-native speakers here who say "I'm using AI because my English is not good". I think that's fine to add to the AI cover letter.
I suppose it's also fair to ask them to resend a human written cover letter. Some people spam, some legitimately care.
The thing that helped me most was to try to put in as much effort as the sender did - if they just used an autofilled-ChatGPT letter? Send them a one-line no thanks. It doesn't have to be much. If you want to just go through the resume anyway, you don't even have to read the cover letter.
But so many engineers have also been beaten down by the applicant tracking systems that have come before. All sorts of things to get in front of a recruiter so that they aren't filtered out. I've watched recruiters throw away applicants because they didn't understand why their resume was neat and tidy and watched other applicants get pushed through simply because they filled out 4 pages of everything they've ever possibly done.
It's hard to blame people when the signal they get back from applying is so poor.
This alone puts you in the ninetieth percentile. Most employers won't even bother with that.
That is, if they used AI but made sure it addressed the specifics of how their qualifications suit the specific role, you’d be fine with it.
Ironically, recruiters have been doing this for years: sending the same email to hundreds/thousands of prospects, not even addressing the individual qualifications of the prospect, and why they specifically would be a good fit.
I’m not saying you specifically are doing this. But we’re talking about the general practice of using the same cover letter in an application, so I’m arguing that this is no worse than sending the same email to many prospects.
I see a rosy future for AI. Humans will use it to transform their salient points into prose, and back.
Or we as humans could just do away with a lot of boilerplate pretense, and just communicate the important bullet points. This might rid us of a lot or jobs though so it probably won't happen.
In general, my understanding has been that the résumé should be showing what you've done, learned, and can do, while the cover letter should tell why you'd be good at doing it there in particular. But I've seen job ads that had very specific things listed as expectations for cover letters, and I've seen stories from hiring managers who act exasperated that "no one" has these particular elements to their cover letters (or résumés), which were never communicated, and seem to just be that particular hiring manager's random expectations.
It would be great if there were some kind of standardized format for all of this information, and some assurance that companies that try to buck the standard will suffer for it, but we really don't have that.
Headhunters are the cover letter though, and like to at least claim to employers that they've done some basic screening for fit beyond obtaining the CV. They're also rarely involved in the sort of hires with so many qualified applicants nobody needs to do anything to stand out
Jobs are exchanging work for money. Asking more than that turns it into a cult.
I wonder if psycho employers think they are Jesus.
It's important information because if you have two candidates that are otherwise equal, and one applied to the position just because it's a job they qualify for but the other applied to the position because they're excited by the work or company, you'll go with the second one every time. Everyone will be happier for it.