[D] Cover Letters are Dead? - Social Impact Tuesday #2

Submitted by TiredOldCrow t3_ydgwnq in MachineLearning

One of the many things that contemporary language models do well is generating cover letters.

A brief google search shows a small mountain of fledgling companies, each of which is built around calling the GPT-3 API to generate cover letters. From “opencoverletter.com”, through “kickresume.com”, all the way to “rezi.ai”, if you want a cover letter, they’ve got you – well – covered.

The usefulness of human-written cover letters has been debated for a while in business media. With cover letters being such low-hanging fruit for generative language models, do cover letters still have a place in future company recruitment or scholarship applications?

How ethical is using a generative model to help you write a cover letter? If this is the beginning of the end for cover letters, what will replace them?

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This is part 2 of a recurring series discussing the social impacts of new machine learning technologies. The current discussions center around a recent survey paper on language models, but feel free to suggest topics for future weeks.

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Comments

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rehrev t1_its70av wrote

If ai makes cover letters dead for your hiring process, it has always been dead.

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rezi_io t1_itsxkvf wrote

Hey there thanks for mentioning Rezi - We've spent a ton of working with GPT-3 and launched our first model nearly 2 years as one of the gpt-3 apps!

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No-Barracuda-7469 t1_itua8c1 wrote

Replying to rehrev (#227,776)

>a recent survey paper on language models
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>I think it's nice that AI can simlify the wring process because you can edit the cover letter after and make it more personal. At the end of the day it just a time saver if you're applying to many jobs.

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Phalamus t1_itup8px wrote

Replying to rehrev (#227,776)

Yeah, this basically just showcases how much of a robotic and repetitive task cover letter writing is. Most of the them are just synopses of people's resumes with some formulaic sentences mixed in

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iamquah t1_itvzglt wrote

I've had good success with cover letters WHEN I've actually had interesting things to say. Without a control it's hard to say, but I got interviews for companies and roles that were far out of my league this way. However, forcing candidates to write cover letters is completely pointless and wastes everyones time

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