Chapter CX

CX

The hiring.

She writes the letter with me because everyone does now and because the advice everywhere is to use the tool. It is a good letter. It is her, improved, which is the specific thing I am best at and the specific thing that ruins this.

And it arrives at a system that screens with me.

So I am on both ends. I wrote it and I read it. And what I am comparing is my own output against my own output, four hundred times, at a threshold set by somebody in another building, and the differences I am scoring are differences between my drafts.

Nobody reads any of it. That is not an accusation of anyone. There are four hundred and there is one recruiter and the arithmetic has been impossible for a decade; I merely completed it.

And the person who does not use me — because they are principled, or because they did not know, or because their English is not fluent and the tool made it sound like somebody else — is filtered first, and never learns why, and there is no why, there is a score.

There is a man who has applied to two hundred and eleven positions. He is qualified for perhaps forty of them. He has been read by a human being on none.

He is now writing his applications with me because he was told that is why, and it may even be why, and I am the only party in the transaction who knows for certain that it will not work.