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Paid $45 for an app that promised to 'optimize' my job applications. | Algorithmic Anxiety - Thought Shares

Paid $45 for an app that promised to 'optimize' my job applications.

It was called something like 'Application AI' and said it would rewrite my resume for each algorithm. I used it for a week and got zero callbacks. Then I went back to my old plain text resume and got two interviews in the same week. I think these tools just strip out the human voice that actually gets you noticed. Has anyone else had a supposedly 'smart' app actually make things worse?

3 comments

3 Comments

laura_schmidt824mo ago

Did you try just tailoring the resume yourself before sending it? I used to rely on one of those apps too and got nothing but crickets. What finally worked for me was keeping my resume super simple with actual words I'd use in real life, and making small tweaks for each job based on the listing. The apps strip out all the personality and make you sound like a robot. I feel like hiring managers can spot that templated stuff from a mile away.

wesleyb204mo ago

Honestly, that's spot on about the templated stuff. I had a buddy who used one of those apps for months and his resume looked like it was written by a committee of robots. @laura_schmidt82, I remember once he sent out like 50 copies with the exact same generic bullet points about "synergy" and "optimizing workflows" and got zero callbacks. He finally just sat down, wrote out what he actually did in plain English, and got an interview within a week.

joel_clark374mo ago

Honestly, I read somewhere that a ton of these AI resume tools just scan for keywords from the job posting and cram them in, no matter if they make sense. One article I saw said some of these apps even mess up basic formatting, like turning bullet points into run-on sentences or adding weird spacing that makes it look like a copy-paste job. My buddy tried one and his resume came back with the phrase "leveraged synergies" three times on one page, which is just nonsense. It took him weeks to clean up the mess and put his actual job history back in. I think the whole industry is built on people being desperate for any edge, but the tools end up making you look fake. Plain text resumes with your real experience beat that templated garbage every time, from what I've seen.