I had this interaction with an online chatbot this week that left me feeling… confused.

The core summary is: they were providing such a poor service that I became insistent on being put through to a human. The service was so BAD that I presumed it had to be AI.

It turned out it was a human all along. Awkward.

There's two points to takeaway from this:

I am always asked about the use of AI Screening tools in recruitment.

Plot twist: they don't really exist in the way you might think.

Any recruiter worth their salt still filters by hand. The tools aren't good enough. Which means a person is reading your application, not a machine.

We should be cautious of optimising and priming for a tool when it's clear that it's being suppressed because of questions over its merit.

P.S. If your biggest frustration in the market is not being able to find the right roles, I have the fix…

I built a tool that pulls roles directly from company pages, before they ever hit LinkedIn and way before they get 1000 applicants.

I shared 100+ roles across the GCC & Asia that didn't make it to LinkedIn in our private Telegram

I see this all the time on LinkedIn. If it's not the stupid bot accounts that rephrase your post and leave comments in the most awkward and artificial way, it's the amount of AI content. They've even rolled out a button that helps identify 'AI slop'.

Hilarious that a formal and corporate platform is so dismissive of the content being produced that it terms it AI Slop instead of AI Generated.

Substack recently rolled out a feature where you can analyse writings to see what % of it is AI generated. X and Youtube have taken steps to demonetise creators that don't produce original content.

I am not dismissive of AI btw. I am dismissive of its casual use to do the bare minimum. Sometimes doing something can be more damaging than not doing something.

E.G. I would rather not post on LinkedIn at all if the alternative was sharing something clearly ChatGPT generated.

So is the new niche: BEING A HUMAN?

Maybe. I don't think we're there yet but we are at a bit of a crossroads. There's no best practice and tools are always evolving and launching new features.

I use Claude obsessively. Usually to brainstorm. BUT when it comes to using it: I'd rather get fewer views and have it be me, than more views and have it be a machine.

That's the line I won't cross.

AI is a spectrum. I just know which end I want to write from. (not the one where it's so bad you flag it as AI Slop).

If you're fed up not hearing back I will review your LinkedIn profile today, on video.

This market is tough and you don't have to go through it alone. Right now you're one of 500 applicants for every role and the silence is becoming expensive.

I will tell you exactly what I tell the candidates I actually place. What's working this week. Why you're getting passed over and what to change to start getting interviews.

- Charlie