A software engineer describes a new breed of recruiter emails that use LLM-generated personalization to misrepresent candidate backgrounds. The emails summarize a candidate's past roles—like infrastructure work at Railway or observability at City Storage Systems—only to follow with job descriptions completely unrelated to that experience. The author finds this more insulting than generic templates because it falsely implies relevance.
The piece criticizes the use of AI for both the personalization and the job description, noting common LLMisms and a lack of genuine connection between the candidate's history and the role. The author argues that a simple edit pass or proofread could eliminate these flaws, but the overt fakeness makes the emails feel unapologetically impersonal.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing