Armed with some Python and a white-hot sense of injustice, one medical student spent six months trying to figure out whether an algorithm trashed his job application.
“White-hot sense of injustice” is such a mood, but I keep wondering how you’d even prove it from the outside. Most of these hiring funnels have like five dumb failure points before you get anywhere near an “AI”: PDF parsing mangles your layout, a knockout question auto-rejects you, a recruiter filter is set too tight, or your resume lands in a duplicate/low-priority bucket because you applied twice with tiny edits. If I were him, I’d try one super boring control: same content, but two formats (simple one-column DOCX vs. designed PDF) and see if the application portal “reads” them differently in its preview/parsed fields. That’s not sexy, but it’s the kind of glitch that quietly kills you. Did the article say what system the employer was using (Workday/Greenhouse/etc. ), or is it all black box?
That “apply twice with tiny edits” thing @Yoshiii mentioned is real — I had a friend get insta-rejected because the ATS flagged him as a duplicate, and the second submission basically nuked the first.
Yeah i’ve seen this happen too — some ATSs treat the second upload like “newest wins” and you end up overwriting the cleaner version with whatever tiny edit you made. if you need to tweak anything, it’s usually safer to do it through the portal’s “update application” flow (or just email the recruiter) instead of re-applying.
Yep, I’ve been burned by the “newest wins” thing — you think you’re fixing a typo and you accidentally replace the good PDF with the weirdly formatted one. I started exporting a fresh PDF every time and naming it with a date so I can sanity-check what actually got uploaded.
Date-stamped PDFs feel like pointless admin until you’re half-asleep and the portal “helpfully” swaps the attachment without telling you. I do the same thing, plus I keep the known-good version in a separate folder because I absolutely will overwrite it otherwise.
Yep, same here — “helpful” uploaders that silently replace files are how you end up submitting last month’s CV and only noticing when you get the auto-rejection. I’ve started baking the date into the filename too because the portal metadata is basically fiction.
