This is a great discussion and I very much appreciate Curtiss Murphy for posting this feedback. As someone currently looking for a open role, I myself am guilty of using AI to help write parts of my resume and cover letters. From my perspective, I kind of felt this was a necessity in this new age of AI to help get my foot in the door. The stress and anxiety of needing to provide for my family has made me consider using these tools, as well as the motto "time is money", but I see that it could also very much not have the effect I want and be hurting my chances too as it seems to make the hiring manager's job even more difficult than it already was. Now I definitely don't believe in having AI do all the work for me, and have tried to use it only to enhance my information, experience, and workflow while simultaneously trying to maintain a personal touch by writing some parts completely without AI, and editing anything AI generates for me into my own words as much as possible. It is also extremely tempting to use a lot of what AI generates for me though as most of the time I feel it can say the things I want to communicate more eloquently than I could have myself even after spending hours writing and editing. Definitely not a perfect formula, and realistically there isn't a perfect formula since not everyone is going to have the same values on the use of AI, and so their opinions might vastly differ. Did I use AI at all to write this post? Absolutely not as I felt like that would just be disrespectful in response to Curtiss's perspective and feelings here, and so I felt obligated to make sure I wrote my own response and feelings entirely on my own in my own words. It also took me a considerable amount of my time this morning to write, edit, and revise this post to make it feel like I was effectively communicating my reasoning behind my own decisions to use AI, and try to have a rational and mature conversation about the subject, but I honestly still can't help but feel like I could have way more quickly and effectively accomplished this with the use of AI, and then better allocated my time to other tasks and responsibilities. I find myself flummoxed as well haha, because as a job seeker I want to figure out what hiring managers are looking for to improve my own process. Everyone's opinions are valuable to me, and it seems like this is very much a topic that will be up for discussion for quite some time which really doesn't help me make any decisions for how to improve my process in the short term. It is a catch 22. I want to do it all myself, but also feel that I would be remiss not to use such powerful tools to enhance my life. It is a strange time we live in, and I am extremely curious as to how it will continue to play out in the future. Shout out to Curtiss for taking the time to make this post! It is great food for thought and helped me see just a little bit more into a talented hiring manager's mindset on the subject of AI.
I’m flummoxed. See, we’re one of the few game companies hiring right now. Hence, 1,614 applications for a junior engineering spot. That’s 10X what it was a few years ago. And most of those applicants made no effort whatsoever. They didn’t research us. They don’t work in the games industry. They just read a prompt on a jobs site, read the title, and clicked, “Auto Apply.” Easier than a pizza. So then we have to sift through them. Hundreds of resumes, mostly written by AI - GPT, Gemini, whatever. Every resume looks the same - making it impossible to suss the strong from the weak. Worse are the cover letters. Far too many are written by AI. Not just a little bit - actually, 100% written by AI. They have the same length. They have the same structure. And they use overly grandiose language, like “With a strong background in Unity C# development and a passion for game design, I am eager to contribute to your mission of bringing joy through mobile games. … I am particularly drawn to the no-crunch philosophy at MobilityWare, which speaks volumes about your commitment to the personal development and wellness of your team.” GPT created those perfect sentences. Took less than 90 seconds. As the reviewer on the other side, I just don’t know what to do. I’ve read hundreds of these things. I’ve started to recognize the patterns. And that’s the best case. The worst case is when I can’t tell. After all, if I ask GPT to tone it down a bit, it will spit this out: "I'm Curtiss Murphy, and I'm excited about the Unity Engineer spot at MobilityWare. I've got a BS in Computer Science and have been building games in Unity C# for several years, focusing mainly on UI and game logic. My approach? Simple—write clean, maintainable code that works well.” That’s pretty good, right? And it’s made up, one word at a time. So, what am I supposed to do? I can’t tell the difference. And if I’m not careful, I worry that people who spent 90 seconds in AI will get preferential treatment over people who toiled for hours. In the end, I had no choice. I stopped reading cover letters. It makes me sad. And also, who knows. Maybe it’s okay. Maybe a cover letter is an old-school relic. Maybe all we need is a resume. Maybe a career can be reduced to a formulaic list of hashtags: #Unity, #WasOncePartOfATeam, and #ThisHashTagProvesICanCode. Of course, there's pre-screening tools that could help me. AI that will filter the stack, picking the ones it thinks are best. Those systems could filter 1,614 to 50, in seconds. And if we use those systems, here’s what’ll happen. AI will write the resumes and letters. AI will auto-apply to the jobs. And AI will pre-filter the applications on the other side. Creepily like a prequel to Phillip K. Dick’s, Autofac.
