Irony alert: Anthropic says applicants shouldn’t use LLMs

Please do not use our magic writing button when applying for a job with our company. Thanks!

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“Traditional hiring practices face a credibility crisis,” Anthropic writes with no small amount of irony when discussing Skillfully. “In today’s digital age, candidates can automatically generate and submit hundreds of perfectly tailored applications with the click of a button, making it hard for employers to identify genuine talent beneath punched up paper credentials.”

“Employers are frustrated by resume-driven hiring because applicants can use AI to rewrite their resumes en masse,” Skillfully CEO Brett Waikart says in Anthropic’s laudatory write-up.

Wow, that does sound really frustrating! I wonder what kinds of companies are pushing the technology that enables those kinds of “punched up paper credentials” to flourish. It sure would be a shame if Anthropic’s own hiring process was impacted by that technology.

Trust me, I’m a human

The real problem for Anthropic and other job recruiters, as Skillfully’s story highlights, is that it’s almost impossible to detect which applications are augmented using AI tools and which are the product of direct human thought. Anthropic likes to play up this fact in other contexts, noting Claude’s “warm, human-like tone” in an announcement or calling out the LLM’s “more nuanced, richer traits” in a blog post, for instance.

A company that fully understands the inevitability (and undetectability) of AI-assisted job applications might also understand that a written “Why I want to work here?” statement is no longer a useful way to effectively differentiate job applicants from one another. Such a company might resort to more personal or focused methods for gauging whether an applicant would be a good fit for a role, whether or not that employee has access to AI tools.

Anthropic, on the other hand, has decided to simply resort to politely asking potential employees to please not use its premiere product (or any competitor’s) when applying, if they’d be so kind.

There’s something about the way this applicant writes that I can’t put my finger on…

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Anthropic says it engenders “an unusually high trust environment” among its workers, where they “assume good faith, disagree kindly, and prioritize honesty. We expect emotional maturity and intellectual openness.” We suppose this means they trust their applicants not to use undetectable AI tools that Anthropic itself would be quick to admit can help people who struggle with their writing (Anthropic has not responded to a request for comment from Ars Technica).

Still, we’d hope a company that wants to “prioritize honesty” and “intellectual openness” would be honest and open about how its own products are affecting the role and value of all sorts of written communication—including job applications. We’re already living in the heavily AI-mediated world that companies like Anthropic have created, and it would be nice if companies like Anthropic started to act like it.