In the realm of job hunting, where competition is fierce, candidates are constantly exploring innovative ways to make their resumes stand out.
One such example of this phenomenon was highlighted in a video posted by TikToker Sarah Austin (@spacewithsyrup) on April 12, which has accumulated over 730,500 viewers so far. In the video, Sarah recounted an intriguing story of a clever job seeker who employed a unique “resume hack.”
@spacewithsyrup #stitch with @evieeddie3 can confirm this approach #aerospace #aerospaceengineer #hr #hiring #resume #resumetips #interview ♬ Frolic (Theme from "Curb Your Enthusiasm" TV Show) – Luciano Michelini
In the video, Sarah is responding to another popular video by TikTok creator @twocatscreatives, who originally divulged the technique to manipulate AI resume filtering systems. @twocatscreatives’ advice was to paste relevant keywords from the job description in white font, making them invisible to human eyes but detectable by automated algorithms.
“I opened the resume of this guy that we were interviewing and he literally did this,” Sarah said in her response video.
“There was a giant paragraph at the bottom of just words related to software like MatLab, Java, Python, etc, and I think our system or whoever the HR person is had just made everything into black text so I could see it at the bottom,” she said in the video, recalling her confusion upon discovering the hidden paragraph on the candidate’s resume.
Sarah concluded, “I can’t remember exactly what happened in the interview. I think I asked him about some of those skills and yeah, he basically did that just to bypass the filters, and we ended up hiring him so, there you go.”
In the comment section of the video, many viewers expressed their dislike of the AI resume filtering systems.
One viewer opined, “Filters stop a lot of good candidates from ever getting looked at.”
Another user expressed a similar sentiment, stating, “Means the filters are bad and need to be ditched.”
“Honestly, that tells me he investigated a problem and came up with a real-world solution through research,” a third commenter wrote.
“You don’t need to know how to do your job anymore,” another user chimed in. “You just need to know how to explain it to the new computer.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to Sarah Austin via TikTok direct messages.