As Gen Zers Copy-Paste AI-Generated Cover Letters, Career Consultant Shares Hiring Challenges

Making mistakes while using technology is not uncommon even among the younger generations who are digital natives. Shoshana Davis, a Gen Z businesswoman, who founded the consultancy, Fairy Job Mother feels that her generation (people born between 1997 to 2012) has become too reliant on AI tools like Microsoft Co-Pilot and ChatGPT.

In the interview with CNBC Make It, she urges businesses to pay attention to the challenges ahead because of AI's rise. 

Davis talks about how during the hiring process, employers come across hundreds of the same cover letters or identical answers to job applications. Moreover, a Canva survey conducted back in January among 5,000 job seekers from the U.K., U.S., India, Germany, France, Mexico, Spain, and Brazil found that 45% of job seekers have relied on AI to build their portfolios or improve their resumes.

According to a Grammarly survey, Gen Z is the most savvy with AI, and while generative AI skills can prove to be fruitful for them in the future, using it wrong can lead to the hiring wing of a company getting 100 identical responses. One of the main reasons why the chatbot ends up showing the same results is because of the limited data set it receives.

"ChatGPT is not connected to the internet, and it can occasionally produce incorrect answers," says the company. The large language model's (LLM) mistakes are also tagged as AI hallucinations. This occurs when the LLM also takes into consideration the patterns that are not normally visible to the human eye.

In the interview with CNBC Make It, Davis goes on to share an anecdote about an employer's hiring experience. She said that the employer had asked a question in the job application about the candidates' favorite fitness-related product launches in the past year. "They said they got about 100 identical responses of ‘my favorite campaign launch was Peloton’ and the employer was like ‘ultimately that was ChatGPT, but then also equally Peloton was released like four or five years ago,'" she said.

While there are many downsides to the big AI revolution, avoiding it is also not the solution. "In my opinion, you can use ChatGPT in the job search process but it should be used as a tool, not a replacement," Davis added.

Striking a balance when it comes to AI is the only way to unlock its true potential. According to a Harvard Business Study, AI has the potential to add around $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. This means that the technology is set to change how the companies work. 

The US is yet to pass a broad national AI law, and President Joe Biden signed an executive order seeking to reduce the risk that technology poses to workers, consumers, and national security. Meanwhile, many experts stress the importance of regulating AI systems. 

"AI technologies have an impact way beyond the direct user you're designing for… and so we need a new design process that also analyzes the communities beyond the direct users that are going to be impacted by AI systems," James Landay, a computer science professor and vice director of the Institute for Human-Centered AI at Stanford University, said during the TIME100 Talks series in San Francisco, in December of 2023.