Spent $400 on an AI resume screener, got rejected by my own tool

I picked up one of those AI resume tools last month because I was hiring a helper for my plumbing crew and got buried in applicants. The thing promised to rank candidates by how well they matched the job post. Cost me $400 for a month. First batch it flagged my top pick as unqualified, and the guy it loved had no pipe experience but some fancy words in his summary. I ran my own resume through it just to test, and it gave me a 2 out of 10 and said I lacked leadership skills. Took it back to the sales guy and he told me I needed to feed it better examples of what I wanted, like a job history database. Is anyone else finding these AI hiring tools are just guessing, or did I get a bad one?

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kim_nelson11d ago

That line about feeding it better examples is the tell right there, because it means the whole thing is just pattern matching against whatever data you dump in. I read a story last year about a company that built an AI hiring filter and had to scrap it because it kept tanking women's resumes, and it turned out the tool was trained on years of biased hiring decisions the company had already made. So it was not even making new mistakes, it was just copying old ones faster. The sales guy's answer is basically "the tool works, you just used it wrong," which is what they always say. For a plumbing crew, what you actually care about is whether the guy can sweat a joint and show up on time, and no software is pulling that out of a resume. Four hundred bucks for a month of guesses is a rough way to learn it, but you are not the only one.

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