r/edtech • u/Artistic_Telephone16 • 10d ago
AI Screening
Hi all,
Understand I am a 35 year vet of the tech sector, struggling to land a role in a job market almost all seasoned professionals, even recruiters, agree, "...never seen anything like this before."
I am encouraged by the fact edtech seems to see something in my resume submision. Three different companies seem to be nibbling. Two have requested AI screenings. The third, I was notified by LinkedIn the company had viewed my resume, so I located the recruiter based on the company's people page and dropped him a note.
AI screenings are the new element of this for me. While I am an AI user (Copilot, Claude, Gemini & chatgpt), there are some aspects I find rather annoying and some capabilities lacking.
Example: Claude exists on both my phone & desktop, it generates something for me (say a text file), but if I switch to a different device, it can't seem to wrap its brain around that download in the chat from the other device. It apparently has a Snapchat-like expiration. Seems a bit shortsighted that productivity is tied to a single device, and the use case of mobility overlooked, or is severely limited.
I'm also seeing 50% of candidates are ghosted after the AI screening. To me, that sounds more like data harvesting - building a roster of potentials.
Has anyone here actually made it past one of these screenings to get to an offer?
9
u/s_s_n_e_g 10d ago
For a 35 year tech vet you sure struggle a lot with a simple Claude local/cloud concept.
-7
u/Artistic_Telephone16 10d ago
And you know all there is to know about every nook and cranny of a tech stack?
That's the typical assumed arrogance of a developer.
As an implementation professional - customer facing on the front lines - messages like "yeah, we're AWS compliant" comes out in a wash with a bigger storage vendor - also AWS compliant with a higher standard applied (like they actually spoke to someone at amazon rather than taking liberties to fill in the blanks after reading online documentation before writing code which your response pretty much discloses you're that type) .... that's the shit that derails an implementation, pisses off customers and sends em packing to the competitor.
I'm the one that has to provide cover for that arrogance, fucktard.
You probably work for a company that tells you it would fold were it not for your brilliance.
...right before they outsource your role because they know developers are a dime a dozen.
8
u/s_s_n_e_g 10d ago
The amount of butthurt per square foot of this message is insane 🤣
→ More replies (6)
2
u/cram213 9d ago
But if you’re concerned about the particular actual interview with an AI, you can try to sign up with Micro1 or Mercer. I forget which one but one of them has a virtual AI called Zara.
Just upload your résumé and practice with it. At least you should see what kinds of questions they give you.
0
u/Artistic_Telephone16 9d ago
Good suggestion. Thank you.
I've not been at my desk to click through the links provided to flesh out additional details, and I'm sure it will open Pandora's box and help me decide if I wish to proceed.
The marketing on these tools indicate 70-80% faster hiring timelines. That's impressive, but the rubric I'd be measured on is the mystery I'm trying to solve.
Call me a skeptic. I'm not desperate for work - yet - but instead trying to absorb the lot of information in hiring.
Nobody's ever seen this degree of crazy before. Thus, I think it important people compare notes!
1
u/cram213 9d ago
I think that resumes need to be changed.
The goal is not to fill it with buzz words. You do not want to just copy what the job description says.
You want to go through and pull out all of the explicit things that they say in that job description, and then you structure your resume around that.
Let’s say it’s for a teaching position
How I Match the Learning Engineer Role K-12 classroom experience
• K-12 classroom experience: Grade 3 classroom teacher at Bangkok International School (IB PYP), Bangkok,
2017–present; 20 years of teaching in total.
• Understanding the problems educators are trying to solve:
every engine I have built began as a specific
problem in my own classroom: math skill gaps, research with young readers, vocabulary and morphology, and planning lessons from assessment data. •
Classroom results:
in 2025–26, my 19 Grade 3 students used my Math Skills Engine to practice across MAP math domains at their own RIT levels.
Their median math RIT rose 16 points (195 to 211), compared with 11 and 9 points in the school’s two other Grade 3 classes, and their median math percentile rose from the 67th to the 76th..
——-
And then you do the same thing for the next hard gate they mention.
You need to make it easy for the AI to see what you’ve done, and provide evidence or numbers that show that you’ve actually done what you were claiming. And the AI screener will just do check, check, check and rate you highly…..
0
u/Artistic_Telephone16 9d ago
I think you're a step behind where I am with the question.
Info you don't have that may help with understanding:
My AI usage has been to build a repository of career stories/experiences. I spent about a month composing the history for the repository.
I then see a JD, have AI audit the JD with my career repository to aim for a 70% match or better - this includes skills, education, salary expectations, etc. This may prompt a little extra research based on whether salary is included in the JD or not.
I also evaluate based on glass door & indeed ratings, and seek a few other cultural keywords that give me a good indication where they land on a diversity scale.
All this BEFORE I have AI generate a resume and cover letter to even apply. It utilizes the JD to select the most appropriate data out of my repository to marry up with the job description. I may have 50 bullets under one employer, but the job description is what drives which 5-7 go into that resume. The format also includes the title of the role I'm applying for, even though the most recent roles - as titled by my past employers - remain intact. There is also a top facts section & pro summary that nabs a few experience <> JD highlight matches.
This is also the point at which AI and I debate its assessment of fit.
My ATS keyword matches are based in actual facts from my experience. It is built to NOT overstate a word, although, I may interact with AI's audit with a new submission to the repository, "oh hey, I do have that experience, and here's the lowdown - add this to the repository, and generate the resume & cover letter."
You're in the neighborhood. Also, my repository has STAR stories for interviews as well.
My questions/concerns lie beyond this stopping point.
Applications have been submitted. Two of three submissions have resulted in a request from the employer to do an AI screening.
EdTech is the first to hit me with these AI screenings, and I'm not sure how I feel about it from the perspective of being an industry vet, and knowing Agile = good enough, which also means flaws make it through the cracks more often than other methodologies that don't have room for error. Financial institutions, Defense & Airlines are great examples of no room for error.
My concern is whether the tech doing the screening is well vetted. Case in point: litigation is proceeding against Workday on claims of built-in bias in their AI/ATS hiring systems.
I've been around long enough to know some technologies get adopted because it's new and shiny, not because the buyer has actually thought through whether it's a well-vetted tech to adopt or not. Insider experience: overpromise & under deliver is a legit issue. My success has come at the opposite: under promise and overdeliver, which tends to be associated with more established brands because they've lived, learned and adopted the structure to support it.
Now, I'm trying to understand if anyone has successfully gotten past these systems to receipt of an actual offer, or .... is this a data collection exercise?
The numbers (overall, not just EdTech) suggest it's about half & half that candidates get ghosted after an AI screening.
Is that because it's data collection, or because the candidate scored poorly on the screening, or due to a flaw in the screening tech?
We don't know, thus the ask if someone's an actual AI-screened hire.
A great education analogy: how would you feel about being tested or testing your student in the absence of a rubric?
I don't think we're talking about the same thing.
0
u/Objective_Basket_645 10d ago
i'm right there with you on the device switching mess with Claude, it's like the thing has no concept of cross-platform state. drives me up a wall when i need something i generated at my desk and it's just... gone
the 50% ghosting stat tracks with what i'm seeing across tech, feels like a massive data farming operation disguised as hiring. half these posts never had a real role behind them
1
u/grendelt 10d ago
when i need something i generated at my desk and it's just... gone
Are you just using the free tier?
I'm over in the OpenAI garden right now. I have Codex on one machine and then I can access it from my laptop and from the phone app. If I'm doing something with ChatGPT, Codex can pull that and begin working on it. It doesn't go the other way because then that would be giving the cloud AI model access to a local-running process and, thus, a security risk. But my local and privileged access can pull down from the cloud (and push things to the cloud if requested)
1
u/Artistic_Telephone16 10d ago
No, and I'm still learning. I'm but a mere user - who made the switch from gpt to claude when gpt ran out of juice to keep going with the paid tier I was at (typical.... I've seen it with a previous employer trying to build something using Google analytics... the "free" tier Peter's out, and "oh... if you want thaaaat.... prepare to drain the bank account). I reached that wall with chatgpt. Claude seems a little more robust in this regard, depending on the model you use. Opus will chew it up quick. Fable I've gotten trial exposure, but I'm not willing to make that jump yet.
That's kinda what I do IRL- Implemetation/onboarding - herding cats and managing fragile egos, "oh, sales told you it could do that, but you didn't buy the enhanced license to get that feature/functionality? Well, here's the options... <speed, quality, cost factors>".
Ya, the bidness side is my jam.
8
u/gamesterdude 10d ago
How are you a 35 yr vet in tech but lack a basic understanding of how these AI service function?