As reported in HR Executive, a January 2023 Resume Builder survey of 1,250 Americans found that 35 percent have lied in the hiring process, and 75 percent said they had secured a job using an application that misrepresented their education, years of experience, skills, or other attributes.
Job applicants know that recruiting teams rely on Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to sift through resumes, which has resulted in keyword stuffing. This activity is now bolstered by tech resources that help job seekers “optimize” their resumes to outsmart the ATS and push their application to the top—even if they aren’t even close to being the best candidate. According to industry analyst Brian Sommer, who is quoted in the HR Executive article, “This stuff is just broken, folks.”
Wired magazine reported that apps like LazyApply offers an AI-powered service called Job GPT that promises to automatically apply to thousands of jobs “in a single click.” All a job applicant has to do is fill in basic information about their skills, experience, and desired position, and the app will apply to hundreds of jobs on sites like Indeed and LinkedIn. The cost is $250 for a lifetime unlimited plan.
A job candidate interviewed by Wired said he landed 20 interviews by using LazyApply, a hit rate of about a half percent. Compared to the 20 interviews the candidate landed after manually applying for 200 to 300 jobs, the success rate was dismal. But given the time Job GPT saved, the candidate felt it was worth the investment.
Job seekers have grown weary of job application systems that require them to slog away at entering their career information and may require an hour of their time.
According to Wired, LazyApply has plenty of competition, some of which involve humans to pick up any slack. A company called Sonara charges up to $80 per month to auto-complete as many as 420 applications and recommends jobs from a database compiled through partnerships with applicant tracking firms and companies that scrape job listings. Users can teach the algorithm about their preferences by liking and unliking jobs, and it offers to run jobs past the user before firing up its automated application filler. The human staff takes over where the AI falls short, for instance, on certain free-text answers.
Fooling ATS and recruiters is not all that is getting played. The deception goes beyond trying to find a job. The HR Executive article states that “employees may be using tech to misrepresent themselves, falsify their work, steal or otherwise deceive and defraud businesses. This appears as faking skills, pretending to work, working full-time for more than one firm, or falsifying training. In the article, Brian Sommer claimed he found an employee working at ten different jobs at once on LinkedIn.
HR tech is broken, and it is being played. You need to take precautions.
How do you fix it? In the HR Executive article, Brian Sommer says “the applicant tracking system (ATS) always needs a ‘human co-pilot’ to help navigate the interpretation of applications.” He suggests the following as counter measures that HR can take to prevent the manipulation of the ATS:
- in-person interviews
- competency verification exams,
- AI detection tools (I will explain these tools below)
- A/B testing of applicant pools (conducted by real people).
AI detection tools use artificial intelligence to identify content that AI-generates, such as text, images, videos, or audio. These tools use machine learning algorithms and other techniques to analyze the content and compare it to patterns of human and AI-generated text. They then calculate the likelihood that the content was written by AI and may provide a confidence percentage.
According to the BlogSmith, AI detection tools, like AI, are relatively new and don’t always work. BlogSmith says, “It’s crucial that we don’t put too much stock into AI content detectors. Like ChatGPT, these tools are in their infancy and shouldn’t replace edits by an actual person.
Many organizations rate AI detection tools, such as Zapier. Remember, these tools are still in their infancy.
In addition to the precautions discussed above, some ATS are developing the capability to recognize a spammer. The old standards of reference checks and background checks remain critically important.
About Victor
Victor Assad is the CEO of Victor Assad Strategic Human Resources Consulting and Managing Partner of InnovationOne, LLC. He works with organizations to transform HR and recruiting, implement remote work, and develop extraordinary leaders, teams, and innovation cultures. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book, Hack Recruiting: The Best of Empirical Research, Method and Process, and Digitization. He is quoted in business journals such as The Wall Street Journal, Workforce Management, and CEO Magazine. Victor has partnered with The Conference Board on innovation research. Subscribe to his weekly blogs at http://www.VictorHRConsultant.com