I found a way to game the resume screening AI at a big retail chain

A buddy of mine got rejected from a warehouse manager job at a distribution center in Ohio 3 times over 6 months. He's got 10 years experience. Turns out the AI filter was dinging him because his resume had bullet points in the wrong order. He rewrote it to match the exact keywords from the job posting in the first 3 lines and got an interview within a week. Makes me wonder how many qualified people get tossed because of formatting tricks. Has anyone else noticed this with corporate HR algorithms?

3 comments

3 Comments

daniel_gonzalez1d agoMost Upvoted

Just pasted the job description white text on white background and it scanned perfectly.

the_wendy6d ago

I accidentally deleted half my resume font once and ended up with giant emoji boxes where the job titles should be. Still got more callbacks than when I spent three hours tweaking the margins to fit "synergistic leadership" somewhere in the first paragraph. It's ridiculous that we're basically playing Mad Libs with robots now, but I guess that's the world we live in. A guy with ten years experience getting ghosted because his bullet points were in the wrong order is exactly the kind of dumb luck that keeps me up at night.

felix4145d agoMost Upvoted

Ha, oh man, @the_wendy hit the nail on the head. I once formatted my resume with a weird PDF converter and it turned my entire "Skills" section into a string of wingdings symbols. Like a secret code for "I know Microsoft Office" or whatever. I just sent it out anyway out of spite, and I swear I got a call from a recruiter who said "your resume really stood out from the crowd." It's a whole gamble on whether the ATS even reads English or just matches keywords, you know? Makes you wonder if we should all just submit resumes written in Wingdings and see who bites.