58

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.

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.

This is all so fucked.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] HER0@beehaw.org 7 points 3 days ago

I agree and I'm sure many feel the same.

At the same time, this is the reality we live in. Some need to have jobs at companies that don't evaluate applications/materials as fairly as they'd like, and they will have to deal with this problem regardless.

[-] bl4kers@beehaw.org 4 points 3 days ago

Bad employers eventually face the music

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 9 points 3 days ago

The market can be irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.

this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
58 points (93.9% liked)

Technology

39977 readers
109 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS