Should you use AI to help you get a job?

Given the ready availability and quality of AI tools, and that ECM work with highly technical candidates, we have naturally encountered AI generated CVs, reports from companies of candidates’ AI generated interview “homework” responses, and people who have told us they looked to use AI in past interviews elsewhere to assist them during video calls.

The TL;DR: Is it worth it? In terms of finding a job to apply to, absolutely. For other aspects of the hiring process, our simple advice would be, unfortunately not. It may be detrimental to your application, and can lead to unfortunate outcomes later.

Should you use AI to help you find a job to apply to, or an agency?

This is easy to answer. If you are already working with a reputable recruitment agency you trust, they will be looking for you. But in the general case, AI search can be very helpful, and it does have the advantage that the AI has already read much of the internet so you don’t have to. So, yes, feel free.

Be aware of the limits of AI knowledge though. Just like any search engine, the AI may miss things you may consider vital, it may misunderstand, and the top results it produces are not necessarily the best ones for you. Your review and judgement will fill in the gaps. And consider traditional search as well (if when you read this, it still exists!) since these algorithms have decades of tuning and are (in many cases, if not always) designed to surface good results to you.

Also consider the impact of refinements to your search, through an AI's context or some job sites' cookies. These are frequently inclined to show you more of the same, progressively narrowing the scope, when there may be a variety of opportunities that would interest you. An agency can advise you on career options, and search on your behalf.

Towards selecting agencies, a lot of candidates come to ECM via word of mouth. So we would recommend asking around.

Towards job advertisements, a huge number of websites purportedly advertising jobs are essentially ad-laden clones of job sites elsewhere, which may themselves be clones, and so on. A lot is lost in translation. Jobs may be advertised on a clone website which are now filled on the original. Company names, job titles, salaries, locations and detailed specifications may be wrong, cut short, garbled, or confused. (Arguably in some cases, this may be hard to distinguish from some agencies’ job advertisements.)

Our advice would be, find the original job posting, and apply to that. If an AI can help you find the original, great, but if not, you may have to step in.

Should you use an AI to research a company for you?

There can be some merit to this, but it is important to check that what the AI tells you is true. This is an area where AI is more likely to hallucinate “facts” in the spirit of being helpful. If you have prompt engineering skills, you can use them to encourage the AI to fact check.

And of course, ultimately if you are preparing to speak with a company, you will want to be assured this is time well spent. The goal should be to find companies who appeal to you, not companies the AI thinks will appeal to you. And if a company asks what you like about them, don’t give them the AI’s answer, since it is your opinion they are seeking.

Don’t companies already use AI to review my CV anyway?

People are frequently under the impression that the entire recruitment industry from agencies to employers is already AI driven. We can vouch that in our corner of the tech sector, this is not the case.

Here at ECM, technically savvy humans personally review each CV that comes to us, and we frequently discuss CVs between us, as finding the right role for someone can be a collective effort. The decisions we make as a business are all made by humans. If we find we can help someone, we aim to speak with the person as soon as we can.

Our client companies likewise do not replace human decision making with AI. Technology exists to point out interesting facets of a CV to humans, but this is often a “helpful” feature provided by companies’ recruitment software, which the company do not necessarily want or use at all, but cannot get rid of, because software vendors are pushing AI enhancements. Human decision making remains at the heart of tech-sector recruitment.

Why not use AI to tailor your CV?

Candidates mostly do this as a time-saving measure. The question we would ask is, do you want agencies and companies to follow the same path? Should they similarly save time reviewing your CV by having a robot do it? Ultimately, would you like AI to be responsible for hiring decisions? Sauce for the goose, but this ultimately leads to robots talking to robots, when the humans who should be in the loop are the principal actors. In ECM’s opinion, this particular ouroboros does not benefit anyone.

If CVs are AI generated, then human involvement is frankly less valuable. There is an “uncanny valley” phenomenon here. Content is no longer reliable, may be too derivative of a job description, and may be mistaken for “AI slop”. A human reviewer wants to hear things in your words, with your phrasing and your voice. It is you they are considering, not the AI which generated a document for you. Don’t lose the opportunity to express yourself. Your CV doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t need to check every box. But it has to be genuine.

A CV is also your best chance of standing out, to agencies and companies. AI generated CVs can be very samey. This is precisely what you do not want. Checking boxes in the job specification does not help you stand out to a skilled reviewer, especially since in the tech sector, they are as aware of AI technology as you are. Your qualities, and the distinct aspects of your CV versus someone else’s, are what ECM, at least, are keen to see.

For nearly all candidates, this next part is not a concern, but it is also a fact that knowingly falsifying information or experience in a CV to get a job can lead to bad outcomes if (when) this is later discovered. Whilst AI tools may try to mitigate this for you, this is a high stakes situation. Job offers can be withdrawn, and employers may count it as gross misconduct which may lead, in essence, to being fired on the spot. If that wasn’t enough, given this “false representation” is also covered in the UK by the Fraud Act 2006, there may also be legal consequences on which ECM are not qualified to advise.

Why not use AI at interview?

We have certainly heard of cases where candidates have attempted to use AI during a live, video interview with a company in order to help them respond in the way they think is good form.

We would advise against this, for similar reasons we’ve previously outlined. It is also frequently quite obvious to companies. The reason for these calls is that the company want to get to know you and understand your experience. They aren’t interested in hearing what an AI has to say, as it is you, the person, who would be hired. It is most likely such instances will end interview processes immediately, which may be a shame, since you may be just the person the company are looking for – but they never had a chance to find out.

Of course, if you have personal circumstances which a company can accommodate to make your interview easier, you should instead let your agency or company know. The company may be able to make reasonable adjustments to help. Companies already have processes for this; take advantage of them rather than reaching for AI tools first.

Why not use AI for “homework” exercises?

Where they occur, these exercises are a chance for you to demonstrate your skills, and companies ECM work with currently have technical team members review your solutions by hand.

It can be frustrating to a human reviewer to encounter AI-generated code, unless they are looking to assess your prompt engineering skills. For software engineering roles, companies are commonly looking to assess your own coding ability, which very likely far exceeds what an AI can produce for you. If the company wanted an AI, they could rent one.

In another extreme – where the AI can produce a solution which exceeds the solution you might otherwise provide – misrepresenting your skills falls under the “bad outcomes” advice above, and again this is likely to end an interview process at the very least.

The huge exception would be instances where some companies encourage use of AI, and for you also to highlight your own contributions. This will be clearly indicated, if that is what the company want.

All this said, there are valid points of contention here about the amount of time investment companies ask candidates for, to demonstrate their skills. If you’ve started a recruitment process and the first response from the company is to send you a coding exercise, without engaging with you personally, we can appreciate the instinct here. All we would say is, consider whether you are keen enough on the company to engage with their process. It may be safer to withdraw from an interview process that you are not keen to complete, than to produce results that are not your own work.

So what should I do?

AI technology is here to stay in some form. It is a great research aid, it can assist in automating all kinds of tasks. It particularly excels in low stakes, high investment situations. But a hiring process is ultimately is a person to person activity, and often there is quite a lot on the line. Use AI to save you time elsewhere, and focus your time investment on the activities which matter most to you.

AI was not used in the production of this article.

---

---