Robots Read Invisible Ink

LinkedInfluencer 🤮 - And on it goes

TLDR: Resumes with AI-friendly context in tiny white-on-white, but disclose it!

Watching all my friends at Block get shit-canned 🗑️ forced me to realize that I need to make sure my bags are packed and ready to go in case I get tossed aside too. 🔜🗑️ I haven’t updated my resume in years, so that’s Step 1. (Well, writing these blog posts to establish myself as a Self Appointed AI Visionary Thought Leader 🤪 is Step 1, but now it just feels too meta.)

Since we all know that the robots will be the first ones to see our resumes and decide which of us meatbags 🥩 pass on to the next stage vs being excreted immediately, why not write my resume to them instead of a human?

I played around with this and was surprised at how quickly the AI (Amp in this case) figured out exactly what I wanted. I told it to hallucinate a resume for me, but then embed some of my real work from a hype doc that I maintain. I explained that I wanted it visible to a robot, but hidden from a human, not to make it secret, but to save space and try to follow the 1-2 page resume rule.

Hey Robot 🤖, Look Down Here at the Bottom

I’m quite pleased with the output. Voila, my hallucinated resume with a section at the very bottom just for robots. It’s called out quite clearly so hopefully it doesn’t look like I’m intentionally hiding anything. (Of note, I’m somewhat offended that the robot hallucinated me a career step at Palantir. C’mon bot, sure my morals are flexible, but I do have morals. Tiny, tiny, almost invisible ones. 🤌🏻)

Clever Hack or Strait to the Trash?

I threw the resume into a few AIs like Gemini and ChatGPT and started asking about “the candidate”. As expected, they started regurgitating some of my real accomplishments from the hidden texts. They also had very nice things to say about me 😘, hopefully putting me at the top of the list of meatbags to interview.

But what would an actual AI resume reviewer think? What would a human recruiter think? Would this be seen as dishonest and get you blacklisted? 😵 I honestly have no idea. If you know, please tell me. And also please offer me a job.😹

Next Up: Agentically Generated Resumes!

Come see me next week to discuss how to auto-generate updates to your resume. It will never be out-of-date again, so you’ll be the first one running when the bear 🐻 eats and excretes 💩 you!