(…) Companies have long fought off attacks from hackers hoping to exploit vulnerabilities in their software, employees or vendors. Now, another threat has emerged: Job candidates who aren’t who they say they are, wielding AI tools to fabricate photo IDs, generate employment histories and provide answers during interviews.
The rise of AI-generated profiles means that by 2028 globally 1 in 4 job candidates will be fake, according to research and advisory firm Gartner.
The risk to a company from bringing on a fake job seeker can vary, depending on the person’s intentions. Once hired, the impostor can install malware to demand ransom from a company, or steal its customer data, trade secrets or funds, according to Balasubramaniyan. In many cases, the deceitful employees are simply collecting a salary that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to, he said.
I made the mistake of touching up my resume using AI and got rejected everywhere. When I finally figured out that maybe I wasn’t getting any interviews because I used AI to make my resume look better (like 100+ applications later), I went back to my self-written resume and found a job in less than a month. Learn from my mistakes and write your own resume or end up on the ‘fake job seeker’ pile.
Ironic that AI proficiency is increasingly being required for the positions in the first place. Red flag if you use AI, and a red flag if you avoid using AI. Catch 22 lol.
I used LLMs (gpt4.5-preview) to write portions of my resume. But I also used a paid service that uses AI to supposedly scan your resume in the same fashion these HR tools do - and gives recommendations on improving to better get past the filters. I’m early in the process but I’m getting a solid amount of HR interviews scheduled, and a technical interview tomorrow.
My point is, I don’t think using AI in a resume is necessarily a bad thing so long as you go into it with the intention of getting past filters.
It sucks that job searching has devolved to SEO-spam and AI hallucinations but here we are.
And how do companies detect if you have used AI in making your resume? Is it the wording?
They have their software look at all the resumes, and probably filter out the ones it identifies as “ai” . No human will see those resumes that are filtered out.
Plot twist - no human sees any resumes at all these days.