Job applicants are battling AI resume filters with a hack

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Last edited Wed Jul 26, 2023, 05:30 AM - Edit history (1)

TECH AT WORK

Job applicants are battling AI résumé filters with a hack

‘White fonting’ is used to bypass AI and other tech filters. But is it cheating?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/24/white-font-resume-tip-keywords/

By Danielle Abril
Updated July 24, 2023 at 12:44 p.m. EDT | Published July 24, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

This 10-second résumé hack purports to help you land your next job.
Some social media influencers swear by it. They say it helps you get past the first screening when an artificial intelligence bot or digital filter might scan résumés and look for keywords.

“White fonting” in recent years has garnered renewed interest across social media like TikTok with influencers suggesting that it will make a big difference for job hunters. It’s also ruffled the feathers of many recruiters who have publicly denounced it.
The concept is simple: Copy a list of relevant keywords or the job description itself, paste it in a résumé and change the font color to white. The hope is that AI bots or digital filters in applicant tracking systems read the white text and surface the résumé for human review. Because keywords are in white, the résumé will look normal to human reviewers.

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[brush]

1. What happens when the employer finds out you don't have the skills...

white fonted on your resume?

There are stories all the time of that happening, even with pols who got elected but were then found out.

[usonian]

2. My guess is that a real person sees only the regular black-type info, and decides on that basis

but you got past the robo-resume moat to see a human.
You pranked the bot but not the human.
Sounds OK to me, TBH.

[Fiendish Thingy]

3. We had an HR dept. that screened hard for key words

This was 25 years ago, so they were using optical scanners, not AI.

We weren’t getting any “qualified” applicants, so eventually I marched into the office and demanded that they let me look through the resumes myself.

I scheduled several interviews and filled a couple of positions.

[bucolic_frolic]

4. People did that on eBay about 20 years ago

It was finally outlawed. You can't juice search engines with such techniques. You can't even say "my item is not ...." followed by the same whole list of stuff. You might get away with a few words though.