Every AI-written resume looks more qualified than me

Question

I handle hiring at my company. Reading the flood of flawless, AI-polished resumes that come in every day makes every single applicant look way more qualified than me. I feel so guilty rejecting people when I feel this mediocre that I want to cry. How am I supposed to screen anyone?

OK Man · Accepted Answer

Ah, yeah, that thing. Every recruiter and hiring manager on earth has caught that bug right now. My official diagnosis is “Corporate Saint Inflation.” Every single day you open your inbox and get buried under hundreds of gleaming resumes that read like, “In my previous role, I spearheaded a cross-functional initiative, boosted revenue by 320%, and in my personal time intervened in armed conflicts around the globe to broker multiple ceasefires, contributing to world peace on the side.” Meanwhile, you’re sitting there slurping cup noodles and chugging a Red Bull, thinking, “Wait… all I did this week was react with emojis on Slack… What right do I have to reject these people?” And then at 2 a.m. you’re suddenly hit with this crushing wave of guilt. Everybody’s sick with it right now. First off, you can relax. Those “people way more qualified than you” on those resumes? Not a single one of them actually exists on planet Earth. What’s happening in the job market right now is basically “everyone beating each other over the head with maxed-out FaceTune dating-app photos.” Every single person has a V-shaped jawline sharp enough to shovel dirt, eyes the size of a Chihuahua’s, and for some reason they’re all lounging by an infinity pool in Dubai. If a recruiter looked at that and got depressed in front of the bathroom mirror going, “God, is the whole world really this hot…? I’m so sorry someone as ugly as me gets to swipe on you…,” you’d laugh at how gullible they are, right? It’s fake lol. Nobody in real life walks around with a chin you could use to trench a garden. The applicants aren’t brilliant. A model cooked up in San Francisco and a bunch of server racks humming in a data center are brilliant. Back in the day, puffing up a pathetic work history actually required human intelligence and grit. When some kid who just worked a part-time cash register had to pull an all-nighter squeezing his brain to spin it into “end-to-end retail operations optimization and customer touchpoint maximization,” the sheer stamina it took to crank out that bullshit was a legitimate business skill in itself. Hell, I padded the crap out of mine too. Polished a total turd of a resume. Now, though, someone can sit at home picking their nose, type “make it sound good,” hit Enter, and 0.3 seconds later out pops a resume that reads like a McKinsey partner. In other words, the correlation between how pretty a resume looks and what the person can actually do is now dead zero. If you saw my resume, you’d probably pass out cold. So you can throw away that “guilt over judging people smarter than me” starting today. You aren’t reviewing human ability—you’re just reviewing OpenAI API outputs. Nobody stands in Best Buy reading the spec sheet on a fancy rice cooker thinking, “Damn, this thing cooks way better rice than I do… who am I to judge it…?” Same thing. Which brings us to the real question: how the hell do you actually pick someone? Simple. You skip every single line that says something “proper.” “Problem-solving.” “Extreme ownership.” “Scalability.” “Stakeholder alignment.” Every line with those words is just digital packing peanuts. It’s bubble wrap. It’s only stuffed in there to keep the box from collapsing in transit—if you actually read it, you lose. The only thing you should be looking for is the weird noise AI would never write. Like a mysterious six-month gap in the middle of their career labeled “helping out on the family farm (translation: unemployed on my parents’ couch),” or someone who goes out of their way to list “staring at my pruney fingers in the bath” under hobbies. Those little wrinkles that the AI’s steam iron couldn’t quite press out—that’s the only place a flesh-and-blood human being still survives. And if every single resume is pressed so smooth you can’t find a single wrinkle, just give up on resume screening altogether and ask this right at the start of the interview: “This resume looks incredible, by the way—but out of everything on here, what was the most unglamorous, stupidly messy moment behind the scenes?” Anyone who actually did the work will suddenly light up and start talking a mile a minute: “Oh man, honestly, the master Excel sheet completely imploded behind the scenes and I spent three days crying while typing rows in by hand!” Humans are creatures that come most alive when they get to brag about how miserable and uncool their struggles were. On the flip side, if they’re a cardboard cutout built by AI, all you’ll get back is more “Well, in terms of managing cross-functional stakeholder expectations…”—words as slick and sterile as a strip-club liability waiver. When that happens, just think to yourself, “Welp, talked to an LLM again today,” and quietly send out the “we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates” email. One last thing. The fact that you even feel guilty thinking “these applicants look more qualified than me” probably means you’re a remarkably decent hiring manager. The truly awful inter