Why

Résumés are fundamentally broken. Before the first pair of human eyes are laid on a résumé, it must pass through an applicant tracking system or ATS. Most ATS systems are terrible. They can make mistakes in both directions!

• They might discard a great résumé because they didn’t understand the format and couldn’t find the key words they’re looking for. This favours résumés that are tailored to pass an ATS by looking homogenous and bland. A weird, quirky, and interesting résumé that reflects the personality of the candidate is punished with rejection.

• They might let a lot of terrible résumés through if they’ve been crafted to fake the key words and phrases they’re looking for. It’s been well known that just including the job description and changing the font so that an ATS can see it but a person can’t will get the résumé to reach the next stage.

This step is largely automated and opaque in most ATS software. Usually, the applicants whose résumés were discarded are ghosted and never hear back. If they do, its usually a template rejection email.

With LLMs being introduced into the mix, both to write résumés, and to review and filter them, this problem is going to get worse. Companies receive a barrage of bad résumés so they have to use an ATS. This encourages the worst kind of résumés to proliferate.

This is the problem that Récivi is trying to solve.