Your CV is now a conversation between two machines

Yuri is looking for work. It is no secret, and it should embarrass no one: sixteen years on the road exempt nobody from the queue.

The ritual looks much as it always did. Adjust the CV, write the introduction, fill in the form that asks for everything the CV already said. What changed is who reads. It used to be safe to assume a busy person skimming. Today the first reading is almost always done by a program. A filter decides whether any human ever sees his name.

Across the table, the scene repeats itself in reverse. A good share of the openings he reads were written with the help of artificial intelligence. So were a good share of the CVs competing with his. The advert comes out of one machine, the CV is polished by another, and a third compares the two. Somewhere in that conversation, one assumes, there are two people who would like to work together.

The silence has changed too. Absence of reply used to mean someone read it and passed, or that nobody read it at all. It stung, but it was a human silence. Today's silence is of another kind: the application may have been discarded in less time than it took Yuri to attach the file. It is not rejection, it is sorting. Knowing this does not make it hurt less. It makes it hurt differently. And understanding the difference helps one not take it personally, because there is nothing personal in there.

The standard advice now is to use AI for all of it. Yuri does, without guilt: to organise, to trim, to translate. The tool is good at that. But the weeks of searching left him one observation worth more than the tool: when everyone uses the same assistant to look better, everyone begins to look the same. The texts converge on the same confident tone, the same safe words, the same generic competence. And what looks the same is invisible.

There is a cruel irony in it. The filter exists because too many applications arrive. Too many applications arrive because producing them became too easy. The same tool that promises to make each candidate stand out drowns them all in a sea of similar texts. Each person acting reasonably, the whole producing an outcome that serves no one well. Yuri spent years watching that pattern inside companies, under other names. Watching it from the outside, from his own place in the queue, has been more educational than he would have liked.

What he decided was to divide the work. The machine gets the format: the order of sections, the trimming, the version in another language. What cannot be delegated is the specific. The project that failed and what it taught. The system nobody wanted to use and what was done so they would. The things that happened only to him, told the way only he would tell them. No filter searches for that, it is true. But the person who exists on the far side of the filter does. And that is who you end up working with.

Perhaps the larger reflection is this: when writing becomes cheap, ornament loses its value. What remains valuable is precisely what cheap writing cannot reach. Lived experience. Opinions that cost something to form. The detail that is only true in one particular life. Job hunting merely made this more visible, because it is the market where everyone describes themselves at once.

Meanwhile, Yuri keeps filling in forms that ask for what the CV already said. Some things no revolution fixes.