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.

top 18 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 33 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I actually asked my locally running LLM(s) to rework my resume and specifically to add in any common skills or tools for the roles that I didn't have listed (8 years as a generalist you touch a LOT of stuff, and I hadn't remembered quite a few of them), and removed any that weren't applicable.

I've been getting a decent number of interviews (3 this week, 2 last).

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

Honestly this isn't just an AI issue, this is also a recruiter issue. The hiring manager gives a role description and a list of skills or other keywords for the posting, but the recruiter doesn't know what half of them are. An actual human may not know that "Cisco" + "network engineer" = configured routers. Hell, I've had people ask me if Cisco (who I actually did work for, but not as a network engineer) is the food company, thinking of Sysco.

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 6 points 2 days ago

Cisco? Oh, the vegetable oil?

[-] chahk@beehaw.org 2 points 2 days ago

No, it's that guy from Star Wars.

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 4 points 2 days ago

That's shortening!

[-] Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org 7 points 3 days ago

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but is there a good place to figure out how to run LLM's locally? Seems safer than entering personal data onto a server somewhere

[-] ulo@beehaw.org 8 points 2 days ago

As a start, you could take a look at Ollama, which seems to be available in many package managers if you use one. I've done some experimenting with mistral-nemo, but you should pick a model size appropriate to your hardware and use case. I believe there are GUIs and extensions for Ollama, but as someone with a low interest in LLMs, I've only used the bare bones features through my terminal, and I haven't used it for any projects or tasks.

You definitely shouldn't trust it to teach you anything (I've seen some highly concerning errors in my tests), but it might be useful to you if you can verify the outputs.

Also check out the PrivacyGuides page on LLMs.

[-] Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org 3 points 2 days ago

Thank you for the information! Yeah, I don't really trust them. They feel flimsy and unreliable for most things. Sometimes, they have their moments where they seem actually helpful.

I hate their usage overall, I just figure if I need it to help me land a job at some point, I should probably just have some extra options ready.

[-] its_me_xiphos@beehaw.org 13 points 2 days ago

I'm not quite sure how to jump into this, so here we go.

I've found myself unable to get new work but am in a position that I know my job is gone in 3 months. Academic, no funding.

I've been using Claude to parse through job postings and help me tailor a CV or resume. I never, if at all, even get a rejection email. I'm sad to say but leaving academia is going to likely be a survival issue. The prospect of having to get passed AI screeners is insane to me. AI is ruining so much in ordinary everyday life so rapidly that I'm frankly shocked...and I did climate disaster research so I'm hard to shock.

[-] MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de 17 points 3 days ago

If a company is "evaluating" resumes by SEO standards, or with over-reliance on algorhythms/AI, I would rather not work for them in the first place.

[-] adespoton@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 days ago

Unfortunately, companies are being bombarded with AI- generated CVs at a massive scale, and so have turned to AI filters to filter out all the slop. This has resulted in filtering out a lot of qualified people as well. But in an employer’s market, that doesn’t really matter to them.

Once you get past the filter, everything is mostly business as usual; many hiring managers are probably even unaware that their HR department uses AI filters.

[-] MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 days ago

Honestly, almost any job I've been hired for has involved a hand-delivered resume(or paper application, when I first started out). Applying after the interview was basically an afterthought.

The more time goes on with shady hiring agencies and clueless HR departments, and then the automated processing that was messing this up long before the AI slop, the more it seems we're heading back towards paper resumes and in-person first-contact.

Then there's the fact there were always people you could pay to polish your resume. In that regard, AI has kind-of levelled the playing-field for job-hunters.

[-] 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 2 days ago

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

[-] prex@aussie.zone 3 points 2 days ago

I feel like there is a spectrum between this and picking the CEOs son.

[-] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 15 points 3 days ago

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.

Very simple solution: ask AI to rewrite your resume for specific job applications or fields.

This is the answer.

I found myself unemployed in late 2022, just after ChatGPT had rolled out... I obviously didn't want to have ChatGPT write my resume because it's still pretty obvious when someone does that, but I did use it as a tool to help me with structure and brainstorming ideas. The first month of looking was rough. The second month I started feeding the job applications in to ChatGPT and asked for it to create a resume for the job, and then I'd use that to rework my resume. I very quickly started getting interviews and by the 3rd month I was starting my new job.

I often tell people that I've never worked harder than when I didn't have a job, and even with the help of an LLM it was still a lot of work, but I do think it gave me an edge.

[-] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago

I'm not fit for the 21st century, it's just a matter of waiting for the end at this point.

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

Technology

39967 readers
82 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