Is AI ruining your job search, or was your dad right all along?
We're testing whether the old advice still holds. Round one says yes.
by AIPDX July 16, 20262 min read
Half the advice out there says AI broke hiring for good. The other half sounds like something your dad would say: show up prepared, tell people what you actually did, follow up. We brought in Andrea Gerson, who's read tens of thousands of resumes, to pressure-test the second half against a room of real cases.
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There are two competing stories about job hunting right now.
One says AI broke everything. Resumes get filtered by bots before a human ever sees them, LinkedIn is a popularity contest, and the whole system is rigged against anyone without a growth hacker on retainer.
The other one sounds like something your dad would have told you in 2004. Show up prepared. Say what you actually did, not just your title. Follow up. Be a person, not a keyword list.
We didn't know which story was true, so we decided to test it in public. This is the first entry in a series we are running to actually figure out this moment.
Round one: a resume, an ATS, and no keyword stuffing
We brought in Andrea Gerson, founder of Resume Scriptor, to run that test with a room full of job seekers. Andrea has read tens of thousands of resumes over her career, and she's spent the last few years watching AI reshape hiring from both sides: the applicants using it to write, and the systems using it to screen.
Her position was blunt. Most people are using AI to solve the wrong problem. They're asking it to generate better sentences when the real issue is structural: the resume doesn't say what the person actually did.
She proved it live. One resume in the room went from a 40 to a 100 on an ATS score, without adding a single stuffed keyword. The fix wasn't AI. It was rebuilding each line around context, scope, and outcome instead of a list of tasks. What the job was, how big it was, what changed because of it. It's the same method a good resume writer would have told you to use a decade before anyone said "ATS" out loud.
What held up, and what didn't
Not everything in the old playbook survives contact with 2026. Andrea was clear that some habits need to go, particularly using LinkedIn like a personal diary instead of a professional signal. But the core instinct, that hiring is still a human trying to figure out if you can do the job, hasn't moved. AI changed the filter. It didn't change what the filter is looking for.
What's next
This is part one. We're not committing to a shape for the whole series yet, because we'd rather build it from what we actually learn than lock in a format before we've tested it. But if Friday is any indication, there's a real answer buried under all the noise, and we're going to keep chasing it down.
Andrea Gerson is the founder of Resume Scriptor. Her new tool, Pathfinder, is live now.
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