With the variety of job vacancies within the UK having declined lately, job seekers have needed to provide you with latest ways to face out from the ocean of applicants vying for each available role.
New technologies akin to Generative AI and improved digital tools have made it easier and faster to supply sophisticated CVs and canopy letters which might be a far cry from the boring Times New Roman font on an otherwise blank A4 printout.
But there’s a downside. “Everyone is coping with a sea of sameness where the content being created tends to feel and look the identical,” says Govind Balakrishnan, senior vp of Adobe Express, a creative platform. This pattern quickly led to a homogeneity of applications, where most resumes and canopy letters follow an identical format and infrequently lack individuality.
One reason for that is that many candidates simply select certainly one of their software provider's pre-made resume templates. These may be customized with text and pictures, but they typically look similar. Recently, nonetheless, Balakrishnan says, he's seen “an increasing number of users trying latest things,” akin to adding animations to their resumes or creating video applications.
“We all know the way hard it’s to face out and grab people's attention, especially when hiring managers are pressed for time and inundated with resumes that look the identical,” Balakrishnan notes. However, he advises users to be cautious when experimenting with latest application formats. “If you don't get the balance right, it could find yourself looking sensationalist and backfiring like there's no tomorrow.”
One of Adobe's competitors, Sydney-based Canva, offers similar design tools. Last yr, over 900 million users created resumes on its platform. In a survey of over 5,000 HR managers conducted by Canva, 39 percent said their biggest grievance about resumes was that they contained an excessive amount of text.
According to Duncan Clark, the corporate's European head, there’s currently a trend to link to further information or to connect a separate portfolio of labor. This leaves the CV “more of an elegantly set document that is brief and concise, summarising the important thing points in an easy-to-read way”.
“We are seeing a growing desire for visual communication,” says Clark, adding that digital tools allow even people without specific design skills “to present themselves in a visually compelling way… with none training.”
By changing design features akin to colours, layout and graphics, applicants can increase the visual appeal of their submissions, he adds.
Canva's research also found that just about 45 percent of job seekers used generative AI to create, update or enhance their resume, which they said produced positive results.
Over the past yr, AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard have made it easy to make use of generative AI to generate large passages of text comparable to human writing. The technology is especially adept at using natural language since it's been trained on massive amounts of text data. This means applicants can enter a job description into the chatbot and ask it to create a canopy letter or reply to questions. They may enter their very own resumes into the system, ask for feedback or edits, and tailor the text more specifically to the job requirements.
However, generative AI is understood for repeating itself and plagiarizing answers, leading to some applications containing the exact same text as others.
“We're seeing an increasing number of people just pasting the shape into ChatGPT and… we're faced with a flood of comparable structures,” says Khyati Sundaram, CEO of Applied, a recruitment platform. “In the worst cases, we're just getting plagiarized answers. So they've copied and pasted the precise answer.”
Candidates who use AI in this manner are quickly rejected, which leaves them frustrated. However, some employers are overwhelmed by the high volume of applications generated by AI.
Kent-based Neurosight works with firms akin to Virgin Media, the NHS and Auto Trader to create online pre-employment assessments and supply advice on the way to avoid bias in tests.
“There is a few concern that individuals are using generative AI to fake a version of themselves that isn’t the reality,” says Jamie Betts, founder and chief product officer of Neurosight, adding that firms fear this may lead to bad hires.
“Right now we're in a situation where individuals are still using it quite naively and copying and pasting directly from it. I feel once they've been rejected 10 times in a row because employers notice, (they'll learn) the way to use the best prompts to avoid being discovered.”
Nicky Hutchinson, Employability and Careers Advisor at University of Exetersays she has seen students rejected for multiple jobs after using generative AI to put in writing their applications.
“If everyone (uses the identical chatbot), they're using the identical phrases. That's really generic,” she says. “AI is a very helpful tool, but I feel if it tries to do an excessive amount of for you, it form of erases your personality.”
Hutchinson suggests that AI tools are best used to generate potential interview questions or to assist with tasks akin to structuring applications, through which candidates can then “involve themselves”.
She warns that using generative AI or resume templates without sufficient thought or personalization can result in “very boring” results.
If you desire to make your CV more visually appealing, you must ensure that this “doesn’t come on the expense of the content, since the design is typically quite cramped when it comes to space”.
