u/ResumeRory

80% of hiring managers can spot an AI-written resume on sight now, according to a Forbes piece that ran this month. 77% think most of what's appearing in their inbox already looks AI-generated.

That's almost everyone.

The same piece cites data showing 44% of companies already using AI for HR work are running it against resumes specifically. So you've got AI screening resumes that AI wrote, with a person somewhere in the middle deciding who gets a callback.

It also points to a test run earlier this year: 200 applications, mostly customer service and sales roles, split across four resume formats. The unedited AI-generated version, straight from the tool with no editing, came in last...

Makes sense once you've edited a hundred of these back to back. AI language flattens out fast. It's the same rhythm every time, no matter the industry. Recruiters have started reading that flatness as a red flag on its own, separate from whether the person's qualified or not.

What I tell people who draft with ChatGPT first: fine, keep doing that. Just don't skip the pass that puts your voice back in before you send it anywhere.

Fortune ran a piece on Greenhouse's CEO describing the "AI doom loop." People paying around $20 for tools that blast applications to every open role on the platform. Then on average they got recruiters getting over 250 applicants per posting and turning to AI to survive that kind of volume.

Read that and thought yeah... this is pretty much what I'm seeing on my end as well.

When someone tells me they sent a billion applications and heard back from zero, my first assumption isn't that something is wrong with the market (although parts of the market are absolutely terrible as we speak). It's that their resume isn't doing its job.

In my humble experience, 9 times out of 10 it's poor job-description matching. Someone applies to a data analyst role with the resume they used for a business analyst role three weeks ago. Same bullets. Same keywords. Etc. Nothing tailored to what's actually in the posting. The ATS (or a recruiter skimming) has no reason to flag it as relevant.

So... my final take is that mass-applying with a generic resume mostly just means you get rejected 500 times instead of 50. Faster, maybe, but not better.

Six months ago if a post read as too clean, too structured, decent grammar, someone would show up in the first three comments going "this is AI slop!" like that comment was going change something. Not adding anything, not disagreeing with the content, just flagging it and moving on.

I write for a living and I got hit with that constantly on stuff I wrote myself, just because it didn't have enough typos or hedging in it apparently.

Lately I've noticed that it's died down a lot. My theory is people are sorting AI writing into "matters who/what wrote it" and "doesn't matter at all," and the second camp is way bigger than anyone could admit last year. Nobody actually cares if a robot or a human explained how to clean a vacuum filter. Technical docs, data write-ups, instructions, none of that needed a human voice in the first place, people just pretended it did because calling out AI writing felt like a moral stance for a minute there.

The stuff that still gets scrutiny is anything with a POV attached. Opinion pieces, essays, anything where "who is actually saying this and do they mean it" is the point. Which, fair, that's probably where the line should've been all along.

Anyway, mine's gotten noticeably quieter and I'm curious if that's true for anyone else or if I just got lucky... or have I become a master at prompting...? Probably not :)

We tend to see the same education section mistakes pretty constantly, so here's the short version of the advice we give :)

GPA. Include it if you graduated in the last 2-3 years and it's 3.5 or higher. Lower than that... drop it. Recruiters read a GPA on a senior resume as "nothing better to show." Nobody really checks it past your first job anyway.

Major and minor. Major always goes in. Minor only gets a spot if it's relevant to the role. Data science minor on an analyst application, yes. Philosophy minor on a sales resume... just taking up space.

Graduation year. Fine for the first decade of your career. Past 15-20 years, plenty of people drop it, and that's pretty reasonable. The year tells hiring teams your age, and age bias still happens even unconsciously.

Honors. Cum laude, dean's list, scholarships, all worth listing as a new grad when you don't have much work history yet. Once you have other... professional accomplishments, they can become excess.

The bigger pattern: the education section shrinks as your career grows. New grad, it can sit close to the top with these details. But ten years in, one line at the bottom is probably enough. Degree, school, done :)

What's the education question you're never sure about? Drop it below and we'll answer. Anything we might be missing?

I noticed a weird pattern in my client list this year. I keep getting three or four people from the same employer within a couple of months. First wave quit over the RTO mandate. Second wave got laid off.

The quitters get nothing. No severance, no notice period, and on paper it reads as voluntary. The laid-off group at least leaves with a package. Same company, same headcount reduction, very different exits depending on who blinked first!

I assumed coincidence until I read a survey of around 1,500 US managers. A quarter of executives admitted they hoped RTO would make people quit. Almost 40% of managers said their org did layoffs because not enough people quit. So the sequence showing up in my inbox is apparently just the playbook.

The part that actually bugs me is how the quitters talk about it. "I chose to leave." They negotiate like someone who quit, hesitant, half apologetic. They were managed out as deliberately as anyone holding a severance agreement, they just never got the paperwork saying so.

Anyway. If a strict mandate drops out of nowhere at your company, maybe don't resign on principle in week one. Make them do the layoff.

The piece ran June 8, "AI Has Broken Hiring. Here's How to Fix It." The main point is that clean resumes and strong interview answers used to be reliable signals of competence, and generative AI made it both "infinitely scalable and practically free." So the signal is dead whether or not the person can actually do the job.

Worth noting before anyone takes it too much to heart: both authors cofounded an interview-screening startup. The article is partly a pitch for their own category. HBR ran it anyway, which tells you the interview-fraud angle has gone mainstream. A year ago this was a paranoia mainly lurking in recruiter forums... but now it's in the magazine that sits on every VP's desk :(

This argument should probably bother me since I write resumes to pay rent. Honestly it doesn't. A resume was never proof of competence anyways, it was proof you could summarize your work clearly. AI just exposed how much weight hiring put on presentation.

What I do think changes is where scrutiny focuses. If employers stop trusting the document and the interview, verification moves somewhere else. Work samples, references, trial projects, longer probation. None of that is free for candidates either!

Anyone been asked to prove things this year that a resume used to cover on its own?

June numbers came out last week... 57k jobs added, about half what economists expected, and unemployment "improved" to 4.2% probably because 720k people have stopped looking entirely!

An important little detail that might matter if you're trapped searching: almost all the hiring was in three areas. Professional services, social assistance and healthcare. Everything else was flat or shrinking. Hospitality actually lost 61k jobs...

Writing resumes everyday, I see the pattern. My inbox is always the same in markets like this. Someone applies for months, gets nothing, and concludes their resume is defective or they personally did something wrong. I admit... sometimes the resume does need work. But right now a lot of it is just math. The openings are concentrated in sectors most people aren't in.

Not posting this to depress. More the opposite. I just want to highlight that internalizing a structural slowdown as personal failure is how you burn out mid-search!

Anyone manage to pivot into one of these growing sectors mid-career? How was it?

This one landed its owner an interview at HCA Healthcare in Nashville, one of the largest hospital systems in the US. Lead Software Engineer, backend / AI & cloud. Details anonymized.

Worth noting before the teardown: HCA runs an in-house ATS, not Greenhouse or Workday. Custom parsers are the ones people worry about most, and this went through fine. Template is our Ivy League, single column, Volkhov headings with PT Sans body. The user ran it through Resume Tailoring and the Resume Checker (scored 77, not a perfect score, still got the interview) and used Content Improvement and Improve Text along the way.

What works

The headline does the positioning in eight words. "Lead Software Engineer | Backend Systems | AI & Cloud" gives a hiring manager the level, the specialty, and the two keywords half the job descriptions in this space are screening for right now. For a hospital system actively building out AI capability, that third term is probably what got this pulled from the pile.

The numbers are front-loaded where attention actually goes. The current role has five metric-carrying bullets (50% faster response times, 40% latency cut, a legacy API taken from 15s to 1.5s), then detail thins out as the roles get older. That's the correct shape. Recruiters read top-down and spend most of their time on the most recent job.

The "Key Technologies" line under each role handles keyword matching without a bloated skills dump.

And the education section tells a story without narrating it: a Mechanical Engineering bachelor's, then a CS master's finished while working full-time as a lead. That reads as a deliberate pivot someone followed through on.

What we'd fix

The summary closer ("Seeking impactful roles in innovative product teams tackling real-world challenges") is copy-paste. Five hundred other applicants are saying the same sentence this week.

Two proofing misses: the skills labels have double colons ("Languages & Frameworks::", three times) and one bullet reads "Troubleshoot and resolved bugs," a tense mismatch. Neither kills an application at this level. Both are what gets noticed in a tie-break between two finalists.

The oldest role carries one filler bullet ("Examined business, functional and technical requirements to make sure project met expectations"). It says nothing. At three roles deep, cut it and let the automation POC bullet stand alone.

Overall, a resume that understands where scrutiny lands and puts its best material exactly there. A 77 on the checker with two typos still in it, and it worked.

As a resume writer, I talk to a lot of people mid job search. There's something I see a lot of and I'm wondering if it holds outside of my experience.

Under roughly $80k, almost nobody brings up balance. Every conversation is comp, then title, then comp again. Somewhere around $120-130k it flips. Suddenly the first questions are remote policy, PTO, whether the manager emails on weekends...

Part of me thinks it's just Maslow with a paycheck (the pyramid thing from Psych 101). Hard to care about boundaries when rent eats half your income. But I've also worked with people at $250k who still answer Slack at 11pm, so the ceiling clearly isn't universal.

So where was the line for you? Actual number if you're willing to share. Trying to figure out if this is a salary thing or a got-burned-once thing.

Every time overemployment comes up, the thread turns into an ethics debate. Greed, loyalty, whatever.

Nobody tries to really understand it.

Greenhouse's own data put ghost listings at roughly 18-22% of postings last year. Harvard Business School found 88% of employers admit their software screens out qualified candidates. So some of your applications go to jobs that were never real, and another chunk die in a filter before a human sees them. The pipeline is contaminated at both ends and you can't tell which rejection was which.

If your income depended on a supply chain that's unreliable, you'd diversify suppliers and nobody would blink! You carry homeowners insurance and separate flood coverage and no one accuses you of hoarding policies...

A second job is the same instinct. Backup income you can actually verify, in a market where "we're hiring" frequently means nothing.

I keep landing on the idea that OE is the new emergency fund. The old advice of six months of expenses in savings assumed you could replace a job in six months. Not sure that assumption survives contact with what's going on in 2026 :(

Or maybe that's giving it too much credit and it's just burnout with extra speed bumps.

Worked with a client last month, a senior operations manager, 14 years in, three promotions over two companies. She came to me with a one-pager because "that's what you're supposed to do." :( Half her career was gone. The turnaround results, the team she scaled, the system she built that's still running... all cut to make it fit.

Nobody hiring at her level wants a pamphlet. They want proof. One page more than not, forces you to delete that proof.

The one-page rule made sense when resumes were physically mailed and screeners were drowning in stacks of paper. It does NOT make the same sense for a director-level candidate in 2026 applying through a job portal where no one is printing anything :)

Two pages is fine. Two strong pages beats one cramped page every time! If you're early career with under 5 years, sure, keep it tight. But if you've got a decade of progressively complex work, you are not doing yourself any favors by compressing it.

I think the advice spread like human papillomavirus because it's easy to hand out and sounds logical. One page seems focused. Mostly it just sounds like something a career center told you in 2005.

So... what's still circulating out there, because I still see this advice handed out in interviews, bootcamps, university career centers. Where are people even getting it at this point.

About half of all job listings at any given time are either expired, on hold, or were never going to be filled externally anyway. Half of applicants are getting auto-rejected before anyone reads their resume.

So if you're applying to 20 jobs a week and wondering why nothing's moving, That's just how the math works out.

It's not a performance problem. Or ok... sometimes it is. A lot of rejections happen before anyone made a judgment call about you. One wastes your time. The other skips you before someone pays attention. What's left is a narrow window where your resume actually matters.

The people I've seen get through it faster aren't necessarily better candidates. They've just adjusted their inputs to match the actual odds. More networking, fewer cold applications, tighter targeting.

What's actually working for people right now. Networking-only? Volume play? Stopped applying through portals entirely? What's your strategy when the funnel itself is the problem?

44% of hybrid workers admit to coffee badging. Around 5.5% of the workforce holds multiple jobs simultaneously, and that's just what BLS can actually prove. Both numbers have been climbing since RTO mandates started rolling out in real life.

Nobody's connecting these two trends because they look different on the surface. Coffee badging reads as passive resistance. Overemployment reads as a hustle. But the mechanic is the same person, same day...

Badge in. Grab the coffee. Say hi to the right people :) Leave. Open the laptop at the café down the street and clock into your second job.

The office appearance handles the optics. The freed hours handle the income problem. One stone two ducks. Not two strategies running in parallel, that's one system.

What makes this hard to study is that nobody's self-reporting the overlap. They're posting anonymously for a reason. Coffee badgers mostly get caught and shrugged at (59% of employers who noticed reportedly didn't care, per Owl Labs). Neither group is advertising the combination.

But someone figured out that showing face for 45 minutes buys you a full remote workday. And a full remote workday, unscheduled, is exactly what a second job needs.

Nobody's going to admit it anyway.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote the first one in 1482. A personal letter to the Duke of Milan listing what he could build, what he could design, and what he could do. One person proving their worth to another Specific, personalized, human. And it worked.

For the next four centuries almost nothing changed. Resumes stayed close to that simple origin. Then came the Great Depression, forcing documented work history into the administrative system. Corporate America scaled up in the 1950s, and the resume became a sorting mechanism for volume it was never designed to handle.

So they built ATS to manage the volume. Candidates learned to game the keywords. Then AI started writing resumes en masse. Now we're at the point where a Robert Half executive is telling HR Dive that qualified candidates are getting auto-rejected because their application "doesn't look as good as one created by AI." The tool that exists to discover talent is filtering by prompting skill.

It wasn't super surprising when I read in the Willo 2026 Hiring Trends Report that only 37% of employers still consider credentials and work history among reliable indicators of talent. On top of all that, 40% are moving away from resume-first hiring completely.

Here's where I think the discussion becomes an argument. There's a lot of recruiter energy right now around spotting and rejecting AI resumes, as if that's a problem that will ever get solved! It doesn't. Nobody debates whether Word-processed resumes are cheating. Resisting AI-written content is the same argument, just earlier in the cycle. The format changes and everyone needs to and WILL catch up. Eventually it's just assumed.

The more useful question is what makes an AI-assisted resume actually work in the interim. A couple things seem to resurface consistently.

A resume that says "led a team" tells a screener and a recruiter the same amount of nothing. The ones that make it have real numbers in them: ramp time, headcount, revenue, something that couldn't have been invented (at least easily:)).

AI can generate the structure, but the specifics still have to come from somewhere real. And they need to hold up under a LinkedIn cross-check, since that's happening pretty routinely now. Generic language that looks refined but doesn't match anywhere else kills applications that would have otherwise gotten through.

The resume probably ends up as a formality that everyone treats like a cover letter... technically required, rarely decisive. The interview and the skills test do the actual work. The document just gets you in the door. Which is basically da Vinci's letter again :)

What are you seeing on the hiring side? Are skills assessments replacing the resume screen or is it still resume-first with more skepticism layered on top? And do you think the "we can tell it's AI" rejection phase has a shelf life, or does it stick around?

It became known as the Friedman Doctrine. And it rewired how American corporations thought about everyone who wasn't a shareholder.

Before 1970 the dominant model was stakeholder capitalism. The idea that a company had obligations to employees, customers, and communities, not just investors. It wasn't perfect. But it produced a labor market where long tenure was rewarded, pensions were real, and layoffs were a last resort rather than a line item on a quarterly report.

The shareholder primacy model flipped that. Labor became a cost to be optimized. Loyalty became a one-way street. And every mass outsourcing wave, benefits cut, and "we're a family" layoff since then has been the logical downstream of one guy's opinion piece.

Worth knowing next time your company tells you they value their people.

At Enhancv we study resume and career trends, and the OE numbers in our latest research surprised even me. It's not just early-adopter tech workers anymore. Finance, ops, consulting, healthcare admin. The practice has spread into roles nobody expected.

The pandemic is where it started shifting. Remote work proved, at scale, that presence and productivity weren't the same thing. Then the 2021-2022 hiring boom created a window where companies were desperate, remote-first, and not asking too many questions. That's when a lot of people ran the experiment for the first time.

The 2023-2024 layoff wave took out people with a decade or more of tenure, good performers at companies that just didn't care. Real wages kept falling behind inflation. And somewhere in there the loyalty contract stopped feeling like a real contract, because companies made it very clear it wasn't one for them either.

The ethics debate around OE annoys me juuust a tiny bit. It frames this as a worker integrity problem. But workers have been watching companies optimize their labor costs aggressively for years. This looks like people optimizing back!

So where do you actually stand.

Quick poll. Drop your letter in the comments or send them to me telepathically:

A) Yes, already doing it or actively looking for job #2
B) Seriously considering it
C) No. It's an ethical line for me
D) No. It's too much risk