I will never apologise for using AI to write my cover letters

By Tom Haynes

Is there an experience more excruciating than writing a cover letter? I’d argue no. Imagine taking all the worst aspects of creating an online dating profile and filtering it through the worst kind of corporate jargon in the English language, and then doing that several times over (the best cover letters are bespoke to each application, so say recruiters).

This week there was a lot of crowing in The Times about how young jobseekers who hate this tortuous process are now using artificial intelligence to write cover letters for them. Hiring managers fell over themselves to say that applicants were also using generative AI software like ChatGPT to improve their CVs and formulate interview answers. The horrors.

To give you a flavour of what this means in practice, DailyRemote’s HR expert Daniel Wolken said he was shocked when a seemingly smooth-talking candidate crashed and burned at interview. “Nothing quite prepared me for the candidate who used AI to get through our screening, he told The Times. “After an initial phone call that went swimmingly, this applicant seemed like a perfect fit on paper.”

Oh boo hoo. Let’s be real: any screening process that’s flimsy enough to be bested by a generative software as smooth-brained as the free-to-access ChatGPT can’t be that good. I once used it to create a CV and the result was a total disaster. The poor robot forgot half the information I fed into it, made stuff up, and threw in a few dozen typos to boot.

And yet, the AI-generated CV – typos and all – secured me an interview for the one job to which I had applied. In the end, I made up an excuse to abandon the application out of embarrassment, but as someone who generally backs themselves at interview, who knows if I might have secured an offer?

I suppose the point I am trying to make here is that screening processes are actually very arbitrary. Despite all the hand-wringing over candidates using ChatGPT to match job descriptions, there was conspicuously little mention of the litany of ways employers equally rely on AI to generate those same job ads. Grammarly, Workable, and Dweet, to name a few, all offer companies tools to create “engaging job descriptions that attract the best talent in seconds”, so there’s a pot-kettle situation going on here.

It doesn’t stop there either, hiring managers receive dozens if not hundreds of applicants for every role they post. If you think they are parsing that many dry cover letters themselves you probably also believe Kate Middleton edits her own photos.

Instead, companies use AI to scan cover letters and CVs for keywords relevant to the role, and filter out the (presumably shoddily handwritten) documents that don’t fit the bill. 

It’s no surprise that jobseekers are gaming the system by hiding white-font buzzwords in their applications, as the Washington Post reported last year. Others will feed a job description into ChatGPT, get it to identify the keywords, and then get it to edit their cover letter and slot them in – ingenious behaviour, I’d argue. If hiring managers are going to be lazy, more power to those willing to exploit them.

I found it ironic that big-name companies so openly begged for the Government to step in and regulate the use of AI in the hiring process because the call is coming from inside the house. Jobseekers and hiring managers are in an AI stalemate, and the simplest solution would be to abolish the cover letter entirely.

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