The Human Side of Technology
AI is Preventing Me From Getting a Job: Even Small Sample Sizes Can Be Revealing
If you've been following along, you know that I have been taking a hard look at the current landscape of hiring, resumes, and just how in the world you can explain a long career outside of bullet points.
I have turned my resume on its head, describing the work in a narrative style supported by citing the companies and places that I worked, much like a research paper. Three guiding principles:
Narrative for humans. Structured chronology for machines. Truth underneath both.
TL;DR
I hacked my resume because bullet points are intended for Power Point Presentations, not resumes.
Where we are right now:
So, just a couple of weeks in and we already have some data and anecdotal information that...proves nothing.
Well, maybe not nothing, but nothing Earth-shattering either. By the numbers:
6 positions applied for using the narrative resume (plus a cover when required) 3 field reports from others trying this 3 interviews (all with the same company) 1 rejection within a few hours 1 other ongoing interview process where the standard resume generated the contact 1 other ongoing interview process where a referral generated the contact.
What does this mean?
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” — popularized by Mark Twain, who attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli
We can take this subset of things and compare them to my experience over the past several months on this journey. We can take the subset on its own. Or we can just examine each individual item. Since people will make of this what they will and derive several answers on their own, I've chosen to examine each item here, your conclusions can be your own.
6 positions applied for
Keep in mind that I am not the "spray and pray" job applicant. I try to reasonably assess my fit for a role (and its company) and have several hard gates of my own before I make the call to modify my resume (if needed), write a cover letter (if needed), and send my resume into the machinery. If I were the S&P type, we might have much more data to work with, but I wanted to let you know the reasons for having a limited data set after a couple of weeks of effort.
I continued to find that Workday, and now Greenhouse, may need me to modify the text on the page so these systems can accurately find and report the companies, titles, and dates. It is getting better, but no two WD or GH processes have been exactly the same. (Structured Chronology for Machines) I gather these hiccups as notes.
3 field reports
These brave and adventurous souls have gone through the process and answered the questions, that I know about. Here are the amalgamated responses to the questions:
1. Before trying Career Archaeology, what wasn't your résumé explaining well about your career?
I found that the stories the bullet points in my resume were describing weren't being told. Some of the questions in interviews, like, "Tell us about a time when you resolved a conflict..." could be told in the narrative easily. My executive summary was hitting some of my key characteristics, but not telling how I earned them.
2. What did the interview uncover that wasn't represented—or wasn't represented well—in your existing résumé?
The throughlines of my career, which most definitely show how I approach things like design and problem-solving. How a problem I solved in one position helped to solve a problem in another company.
3. What part of the process was most useful?
The interview itself. Not having a time constraint for having to come up with answers and the questions asked helped me tell my story. For some reason, I felt like I could unload all of my career baggage which turned out to be valuable in how I wasn't describing myself.
4. What part was confusing, frustrating, unnecessary, or simply didn't work?
I felt like some of it got repetitive, you know? Like asking the same question several different ways to see if that changes my answers.
5. Did the resulting narrative change how you describe your value or the kinds of roles you think fit you? How?
Yes, very much so. I was looking at my value in my resumes as bullet points too, because that is what we've kind of been trained to do. But that doesn't really work, now that I see my skills and approach across company boundaries. I can see and describe my story much more clearly.
6. Have you used the resulting résumé in a real application yet? If so, what happened?
I sent one, to a contact who wanted to put me in front of some people he works with. He commented on how my resume looked and was impressed. But it hasn't resulted in any further communication or a call back.
Not yet, but I want to.
I plan to do this on my next application.
NOTE: I wanted to share the response from each. Of 28 requests for the field report, 19 were clearly bots or crawlers. Nine looked potentially human. If that's the case, 6 other people may have gone through the exercise (or not), but I wanted to be transparent.
3 interviews (all with the same company)
I am calling this one out because the overwhelmingly positive response to the narrative resume was stated time and time again. We actually discussed what got me to the point of writing my resume like that and when they understood it fit the pattern of how I approach problems. I did supply them with links to the website.)
After call #3, I was or am being ghosted. C'est la vie.
1 rejection within a few hours
Given the speed of the rejection, I suspect the narrative résumé was never seen by human eyes. But I don't know that. Some hard gate in the application process may have ended things before the résumé mattered at all.
1 other ongoing interview process where the standard resume generated the contact and 1 other ongoing interview process where a referral generated the contact.
I mention this because my standard resume got me these interviews. As it stands on the date of this publishing, I have not been rejected yet from either of these and I have been kept informed by the recruiters in each case.
What does this all mean?
Again, I am going to let you draw your own conclusions because, as it stands, even in this small sample size there are some mixed results.
I do believe that Career Archaeology may already be showing that it works as archaeology. We don't yet know whether it works as a résumé.
Where do I go from here?
I am slowly refining the Career Archaeology process, but I really don't have enough data to make hard changes to the process. I can only do that once I get more data and responses from others while adding my efforts to the stack. I will continue to submit my narrative resume(s) and record the results. If you're doing this and haven't reached out, please let me know.
In the meantime, I will continue to plug along, knowing there is a job out there with my name on it.