You may have already heard of it, but there are bots and tech startups that offer to send your CV on your behalf to job offers that fit your profile on platforms like LinkedIn or Indeed. Here’s what you need to know about them.
Job hunting in the current climate is a chore of biblical proportions. Anyone who has experienced the need to look for a new job in recent years will have seen this. The hundreds of people applying for a job, the extreme requirements, the ghosting they do after you spend time giving them your details and your CV, and so on. So using automation to get rid of this exasperating manual work may seem like a good idea, but spoiler alert: it can backfire.
We are going to list some of the most popular online bots that you can find to take the task of sending CVs off your hands, and let these algorithms take care of it for you, but not without warning of the effects that using them can have. You can search:
- LazyApply (up to 750 CVs per day)
- WonsultingAI
- Massive (up to 50 CVs per week)
- LoopCV
- Wobo
- Jobo
- AIApply
They are also available in Google Chrome extension format, such as Teal or Simplify Copilot.
Some LinkedIn gurus have already recommended these apps, and we can find attempts to automate the job search process in the remote year 2017However, technology has been improving, and new bots promise to be able to send your CV and even a personalized cover letter to hundreds of employers a day.
All of this in exchange for a monthly or annual subscription, of course, which many would be willing to pay given how incredibly boring it is to fill out forms and send CVs these days.
Some people who have tried these tools have given their opinion, and it has not been positive, as is the case of journalist Aki Ito, who warns of how inefficient and counterproductive these artificial intelligence services can be. The negative sides that their use can entail are, in part, common sense, but it must be emphasized so that someone does not invest their money with wrong expectations.
It can cause serious damage to your image
However, we won’t start with the bad news: it should be noted that these bots can send your CV to positions that are to some extent related to your experience and interests, and by sending the CV in bulk, an employer could become interested in your profile and call you to arrange an interview. Even if there is something strange in the documents sent by the AI, it is possible that a somewhat absent-minded recruiter will not realize that it was a bot that applied for the job. But this will happen in the minority of cases, between 5 or 6%, to say something.
And what about the large remaining amount of applications sent by the bot? Well, the best that can happen is that they are ignored. The worst, that a recruiter from a good company where you would like to work in the future reviews the application and finds an outdated CV, an impersonal message that seems to have been made by ChatGPT and a motivation letter with false information about your life or experience. And AI, as we are already seeing, is very prone to making things up.
That is to say, at the end of the day, using one of these bots can do you more harm than good. If the AI applies for a job that you are very interested in, and that company finds out that it was sent by an automaton, you run the risk of them remembering and blacklisting you, or accusing you of lying because the AI made something up.
Also, remember: most jobs are found through contacts these days, so networking will help you a lot more than using a bot. These are the negative consequences you can expect, although hopefully technology will continue to advance and, over time, make the recruitment process easier for both parties.
