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That moment at the coffee shop when a stranger showed me how AI reads resumes
I was waiting for my latte at a Blue Bottle in Austin last Saturday and overheard this guy talking to his friend about how he screens job applicants. He said most companies now run resumes through AI before a human ever sees them, and the system looks for specific keywords like "managed" or "led" but ignores whole sections if they're formatted weird. I asked him more about it and he showed me a sample resume where the AI flagged a font change as suspicious. It made me wonder how many good candidates get filtered out just because their resume layout is too creative. Has anyone else seen this happen in their own hiring process?
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elliotr3915d ago
Dude, same thing happened at my last job - we had this guy with 10 years of experience get filtered out because his PDF wasn't the "right version" for the system. It's wild how these algorithms just bin perfectly good people over stuff like font size or extra spaces.
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That coffee shop guy basically described my entire frustration with hiring right now. A friend of mine works at a tech startup and she told me they had to completely redo their ATS system because it was automatically trashing resumes from older candidates who used classic formats like Times New Roman. She said they lost a really good project manager because the AI read her skills section as "unverified" since she listed them in a bullet point instead of a paragraph. It's honestly dumb how much power we give to these keyword scanners. They treat formatting like it's a crime scene and completely ignore actual experience. I've seen people purposely slap random words in white font just to trick these systems.
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