Artificial intelligence is now reshaping industries than ever before, it is also changing how people apply for jobs. An advertising agency founder recently opened a writing position and received over 100 applications.
To filter through them, he used a simple but effective strategy he had relied on before, asking two short, opinion-based questions alongside the application. These were not trick questions, just thoughtful prompts to understand creativity and communication, essential skills for any writing role.
What shocked the founder during the process?
More than 35% of applicants submitted identical answers, responses clearly copied from ChatGPT or other free AI tools. Some candidates even pasted the default AI disclaimer: “I’m an AI language model and don’t have opinions.” Another 10–20% skipped the questions entirely.
“It was disheartening,” he shared in a Reddit post. “This was their chance to show a bit of who they are and they outsourced it to a free robot.”
The role was for a creative writer, someone who could craft compelling copy and think independently. But the flood of generic, AI-generated responses made it clear that many candidates were leaning too heavily on tools like ChatGPT, even when asked for personal opinions.
“You might think you’re being efficient,” he wrote, “but anyone who’s reviewed even a handful of résumés recently has seen these same AI responses over and over. You’re not fooling anyone.”
The founder says that advertising demands originality, creativity, and critical thinking, submitting an AI-written answer to a personal question can signal the exact opposite.
‘Please update yourself’
Netizens poured their comments on the post. A user said, “This certainly goes both ways. It doesn’t make any sense for the average applicant to spend a ridiculous amount of time on applications that are going to get filtered out by AI screening anyway. Workday is literally getting sued over this!.”
Another added, ” People are applying for 100+ jobs and not getting called back. And most jobs don’t respond at all to the applicants, they just ghost them. You’re expected to sit and rewrite your resume and cover for each application only to be completely ignored, and never given feedback.
It’s an absolutely ridiculous expectation to think applicants would ignore a helpful writing tool and spend HOURS making those rewrites manually. It is important to check the AI’s work though. Those things will straight up lie.”
“I had an application I spent hours on come back rejected within five minutes of me submitting it. I’m sure a real human being definitely screened that, and it was super motivating to continue putting effort into individual job applications going forward,” wrote a netizen.
“As a writer and editor, the amount of application descriptions that are straight up redundant or have bullet points that don’t make ANY sense…is downright disgusting. So absolutely this goes both ways. You first, companies/corporations. You need to stop using GenAI and LLM to create the job descriptions and to screen candidates FIRST. It doesn’t fact check, it steals, and it does so many tasks incorrectly,” wrote a user.