Adecade ago, I walked into an office to interview for my first newsroom internship. Wearing a millennial-core business casual H&M pencil skirt and Steve Madden flats, I handed my résumé — neatly spaced Arial font, carefully considered, and kept crisp in its designated folder — to the editor. Without looking up from her computer, she said, "I don't read résumés," and flicked the paper to the floor.

If you've ever assumed an automated applicant tracking system has thrown out your résumé, I can tell you it feels just as demoralizing to watch it happen IRL. Today, more hiring managers and recruiters are following that approach. Now that anyone can spin up a buzzword-filled résumé and cover letter in seconds with ChatGPT, doctor a flawless headshot, or cheat a coding test, faked or embellished applications have become indiscernible from quality candidates.

The résumé has been relegated.

"Resume not your thing? That's great, we don't really read them anyway!" reads a job post for an engineer at Expensify. "While we know you're awesome, it's actually really hard and time consuming to find you in the midst of literally hundreds of other applications we get from everyone else." The post goes on to list five questions applications should answer to be considered. "We don't require a résumé, and we don't expect one," notes a software engineering job at Automattic, which owns WordPress.com and Tumblr.

Some employers are focusing more on a person's enthusiasm and skills than shiny credentials. E-commerce platform Gumroad asks prospective software engineers to send an email detailing why they want to work there, what they've built, and, if selected, to participate in a paid four-to-six-week work trial.

Research has long shown that résumés alone with impressive companies and years of experience aren't great predictors of success in a new job. Now, in the age of Gen AI slop, "the résumé is almost worthless because they all read the same," says Michelle Volberg, founder and CEO of Twill, a recruiting software company. She compares AI-edited résumés to going to a restaurant where "the menu looked really beautiful and had all these amazing ingredients and dishes, but there was no one there actually making the food."

Volberg tells me she's seen a shift just in the past three months: some companies she works with are opting to extend paid work trials for as long as a month to evaluate a candidate. Some are focused more on workers' real-time abilities than if they've worked at a Big Tech company or went to an Ivy League school. A new survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 70% of employers say they're using skills-based hiring, which prioritizes practical abilities and aptitudes over credentials like degrees and years of experience. A résumé might still be used to identify and track a candidate, Volberg says, but AI résumés aren't wowing recruiters.

In a callous job market where it can feel like everyone's hungry and nobody's making it to the table, recruiters and job seekers alike are looking for a shakeup. But anytime the rules of the game change, there's bound to be new winners and losers.

or more than a decade, AI tools that evaluate résumés and cover letters have made biased choices, preferring male candidates or the applicants seen earlier in the process. Recruiters and job seekers have complained to me about AI-generated and cover letters hitting AI résumé readers — overwhelming recruiters with unqualified applicants and demoralizing job seekers who had been looking for work for months. As the labor market tightened after 2022, the problem worsened. Mass layoffs in the tech industry shifted the power from a worker market to an employer one, and it wasn't feasible for many human recruiters to review all the inbound applications they received, says Stephanie Alston, CEO of staffing firm BGG Enterprises.

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