Last week I put in for a job outside my long-time field, hoping three years of my old career will overlap with the position I applied for. I create an account for the employer’s website, upload my resume, fill out two separate pages of fields with the exact same information on my resume, the usual BS when applying.
Then things got weird.
So they have a page with subsections, with more personal data requested. I get to one subsection, and it’s asking me to rate myself in a certain skill set from 1 to 5, with each level having a word descriptor for each level. It’s listed at “3,” so I’m thinking that’s the default, as I don’t know the skill and didn’t mention it in my resume. Then I realize there’s a button to expand the subsection. I click on it, and I almost cursed out loud.
There’s 40 different skill sets they ask you to rate yourself on, from a 1 to 5, again with a word descriptor. Instead of being set to “3” as the first one was, they have been pre-filled with various numbers, and I can only assume a bot assigned the values after reviewing my resume.
I can’t properly express to you how off the values were. There were several things listed as me being an expert in that I’ve never even heard of. Conversely, there were things that I have nearly 20 years of experience in noted on my resume, and they had been scored “No Prior Knowledge.”
I was lucky and they gave the option to edit my scores. But I’m left wondering how many jobs I’ve applied to and never heard back from because their AI grossly misread my resume, and they didn’t bother to give the applicant an option to review and revise their initial scores.