The job market is queasy and since you’re reading this, you need to upgrade your CV. It’s going to require some work to game the poorly trained AIs now doing so much of the heavy lifting. I know you don’t want to, but it’s best to think of this as dealing with a buggy lump of undocumented code, because frankly that’s what is between you and your next job.

Why AI should write your CV

A big reason for that bias in so many AIs is they are trained on the way things are, not as diverse as we’d like them to be. So being just expensively trained statistics, your new CV needs to give them the words most commonly associated with the job you want, not merely the correct ones.

That’s going to take some research and a rewrite to get it looking like those it was trained to match. You need to be adding synonyms and dependencies because the AIs lack any model of how we actually do IT, they only see correlations between words. One would hope a network engineer knows how to configure routers, but if you just say Cisco, the AI won’t give it as much weight as when you say both, nor can you assume it will work out that you actually did anything to the router, database or code, so you need to explicitly say what you did.

Fortunately your CV does not have to be easy to read out loud, so there is mileage in including the longer versions of the names of the more relevant tools you’ve mastered, so awful phrases like “configured Fortinet FortiGate firewall” are helpful if you say it once, as does using all three F words elsewhere. This works well for the old fashioned simple buzzword matching still widely used.

Being boring

Among the many important reasons actual humans write El Reg and not AI (hallucinations, reasoning problems etc) is that generated text is by necessity boring. LLMs output the most “likely” response, not just buzzwords but the pattern they form. It follows that if you want them to match your CV as the best fit for the specification the hiring manager set as interpreted by the AI, it ought to fit the pattern it finds most familiar. Ironically, that is easiest done by using AI to help you achieve optimal dullness by telling it exactly what it wants to read, the way it wants to see it.

There is even a good chance that the LLM you use is running on the same provider as the AI filter. In the new job market, fitting in with the pattern AIs are looking to find is as important as actually being able to do the job, more maybe. Obviously that means 40 million Reg readers are now going to get AIs to write tedious CVs which will train the next generation of application filters, but that’s not my problem.

You need to attack this from both directions, both creating new versions from scratch and getting your LLM to rewrite your CV as an “outstanding” Pytorch developer or project manager. That will make it both attractively dull and help you quickly generate multiple versions.

Treat your skills as a database

You also need to rewrite your own algo for building a CV. The AI will have found correlations between skills that vary from the insightful to the absurd, like how people whose CVs use the word “involved” tend not to be good at C++. 

Your prompts to the ChatGPT or whatever should include a list of all the skills you can credibly claim to have. Stop thinking of your CV as a Word document, and start thinking of it as a report run on the database of your skills. Include every damned language, tool, protocol, mathematical technique, certificate, line of business, skill and experience in your career and education. Then wait a few days, go back, and add some you’ve forgotten. Feel to repeat over a beer. Yes, this is hard work. Getting a job is itself a job.

Even before AI, it was always better to tailor your application to each job and that gets tedious rather quickly, so automation is your friend here especially because…

There is no perfect CV

Every tip I’ve given you is wrong. Sorry. Because each AI filtering system is different. Putting Java 24 is often better than just Java because they seem to be impressed by numbers, but since they can’t count, it may mess with a filter for “Java 21.” That means you must not put all your eggs in one basket, a CV that works well for one AI may bomb at another and to add to the fun, the employer may use an agency for the first cut, which has a different AI, so there’s two to deal with.

Recruitment AI filters include the published job spec and you absolutely must copy out phrases from that and put them exactly as written into your CV. So if they say “architect and implement features” you say that, and not “designed and built.” Yes I know these mean the same thing, so pick out those words from the specification and swap them with the words you currently have.

As a headhunter I always despised the pretentious intros on some CVs of the form “a hard working professional master software engineer with a top tier education.” Guess what? I’m now telling you to put this crap in. That’s because the filter HR will set goes beyond the spec it publishes and includes words like “exceptional,” because half the job specs I’ve seen have the “E” word.

All the training a CV filter on recruiters databases can give you is tell you what phrases correlate with people who work in these jobs, hence the biases some people whine about with AIs filtering CVs, but let’s be honest here, humans were never all that good. It’s just too much to expect an MBA in HR to understand the very different skills necessary to be a security guard, configure a firewall, write secure code as well as accountancy and whatever it is that “sales enablement” do.

That’s on top of the hideous levels of bias against anyone over 40 and according to Youth Futures Foundation, 48 percent of young minorities have experienced discrimination, so it’s hard to see AI as worse.

Do I have to tell you to check the AI hasn’t hallucinated?

Yes.

Because LLMs chuck out plausible text, it’s all too easy for an extra skill or worse a nearly plausible version number like Python 5 that kills you when you turn up to meet a human.

Less is no longer more

The full version of my CV is eight pages. Yes. And much of it is true. Normally I’ve chopped it down so humans with their short attention spans could cope, but if you’re serious about job hunting it is worth adding a “Skill Summary” page, based on the list I told you to compile earlier, laid out as a simple table of Skill, Where used, Expertise Level. It doesn’t hurt when applications are vetted by wetware either. But writing code to parse randomly formatted text has been a pain and often gets confused.  That means your CV needs to have a nice simple layout, plain text, no images or clever tricks with fonts else the ingestion code used to train the AI will mess up some of the text or lose it altogether, so the best way to test how an AI will see your CV is just to paste into a flat text editor.

Opportunities

Just because it’s a grotesque violation of LinkedIn’s T&Cs doesn’t mean that the companies building AI CV filters have more respect for intellectual property than Meta who trained their AI on pirated books.

That’s not your problem, but it is an opportunity to read up on the profiles of people with the jobs you are going for. That will give you not only ideas about buzzwords and phrases to use, but also remind you of skills you have not thought to include.

You suspect by now that I am training you in the same way the AIs are. Guilty as charged: know your enemy.

There is a pitfall in this approach, that it will have to be read by a human the old fashioned way, so although it might be tempting to just have endless buzzwords, you still need to invest in quality words. If your CV does not say “business” at least three times, it is defective and mix in words like “deliver”, “achieve”, “reliable”, “efficient”, “team”, and of course “quality” to comfort both wetware and AI.

Why am I making you do all this work?

Even if the current downturn isn’t affecting you, if you’re lucky enough to be getting jobs too easily, you’re not getting the best jobs within your reach. That’s why when I wrote Why Your Tech CV Sucks I was fine about the flames in the comments. ®