I Used a Bot to Get Myself a Job

You should have received a memo regarding the fact that we're all about to become redundant. If not, check your junk, it might be the algorithms. This relentless march towards automation is great news, of course, because without jobs we'll finally be able to get on with charcoal drawing, willow weaving and writing pastoral poetry, like we always wanted.

One of the sweetest ironies is that HR and recruitment – those most meta of jobs – are among those becoming automated fastest. Even back in 2016, a survey found that 40 percent of employers were using technology to pre-screen applications. Given that this technology's now available for free, even prospective paper boys will soon be unlikely to escape automated screening.

In the long-term, this trend will indeed be sweet. It'll remove those interminable silences when you ask someone at a party what they do and they reply: "Oh, I work in HR." Instead, they'll just show you one of their lovely charcoal drawings, or read you a few lines of pastoral poetry, written on scraps of paper they produce from a handwoven willow basket. In the short-term, though, it's annoying. Because one of the few shreds of comfort left in tapping out another shit cover letter is the belief that someone may have suffered as much reading it as you did writing it.

An Application Tracking System can't suffer. No more could it suffer than a Parser – those algorithms that mercilessly strip away all your lovely adjectives and adverbs and leave you staring at the picked bones of your pitiful existence. Those seeking to defend such tools argue that they free up time for HR departments' charcoal drawing classes and – as an afterthought – that they eliminate human bias and create a more meritocratic system. Nevertheless, the overwhelming reaction from applicants seems to be one of unease at the idea of a non-sentient being dictating their career prospects, frustration at the fact that their elegant prose and careful font choice (of Garamond) can produce no effect on a digital reader, and anger at how much better their HR Executive friends' charcoal drawings are than their own, what with all that newly liberated time for classes.

One logical solution, then, would be for HR departments to revert to the old methods, hire more staff and take the time to appreciate the lovely serifs and cadences of your cover letter. You know, and I know, however, that the minute they start to see a dip in the quality of their charcoal drawings that'll all go up in smoke. So, wouldn't a much better option be to level the recruitment playing-field?

I'm proposing that applicants make use of the algorithmic resources available to us as well, for such resources do exist. If you're looking to set up a fully automated job scraper and applier for Indeed, for example, then you need only search for it on AskJeeves or Yahoo, or wherever. You'll basically need a coding qualification to use it, though, and if you have one of those, you don't need help applying for a job. You can just 3D print a badge announcing your coding qualification, walk around Shoreditch for a few hours wearing it, and someone will bundle you into a car and take you off to work for their tech start-up in Lisbon.

For the rest of us – those of us who had to lie about Microsoft Office competency on our unread CVs – there is another option: Botnik, "a community of writers, artists and developers using machines to create things on and off the internet". The lazy person's solution to semi-automated writing.

Here's how it's going to work:

Treat yourself to a fresh Word doc. and drop in a previous cover letter – an early draft, before you moved the paragraphs around too much and overcomplicated things. The OK Computer of your cover letters. Tie a rope securely around your waist and descend into the depths of Indeed. Find an ad for a job that you wouldn't be embarrassed to mention between sips of a Doombar outside a pub in Covent Garden at 6ish on a Thursday. I, for example, have found a desirable role at the seemingly prestigious Mongoose Gray – a company that either witnessed the branding success of comparethemarket.com and thought: 'What other large small mammals are there?' or believed that their wanky management consultancy would be the perfect tribute to Riki Tiki Tavi.

Here's their actual genuine ad:

Pint of Doombar please, mate.

It's immediately clear that no human could possess all the contradictory characteristics Riki Tiki expects of them, even for the princely sum of £35,000. The only option, then, is to weave together a gaudy cloak of language and use it to disguise your many shortcomings. If you succeed in accurately mimicking their manner of communication, perhaps they won't notice that you have no concept of what they do.

Get on the company's About Us section; this will periodically appear under the guise of What We Do or Our Vision or Why we're the best at what we do. Then, the Who We Are section and any LinkedIn and Twitter accounts you stumble upon subsequently. Harvest all the information about the current employees' skills, passions and hopes for the future. Throw it into the word soup.

Once you've chosen your file as the source for the writer app, simply pick from the words you're offered and watch as the perfect cover letter materialises before your very eyes. Get creative. But ensure your letter makes grammatical sense. Have fun. But do meet the deadline.

Here's how I got on:

For the purposes of this article, I created an alter ego: Florian Venn. A name suggesting an ability to simultaneously overlap with others while also remaining different. From the initial covering letter, it was possible to distil the essence of the character.

Here is Florian's impressive life reduced into a more digestible format for the time-pressed, indigestion-suffering recruiter:

Then, one Sunday night in late August, I fired off a dozen perfectly-pitched cover letters to a whole spread of companies.

Monday dawned cloudy with a chance of employment. The first email to hit the inbox was from British and American Tobacco, knowing a morally upstanding citizen when they saw one and giving Florian a look-in for Europe & North Africa Commercial Finance Intern. Shortly afterwards, I had Ella at Deverell Smith Property Recruitment on the phone, gushing over Florian's promising CV. I took stock over honey nut cornflakes and a Ribena, before Shane from Together Fundraising – a "face-to-face communications agency" – swooped in to fill the noontime lull. After a lunch of split-pea soup and Quavers, Gillian at GiveAGradAGo stuck her oar in, flattering Florian over his "interesting experience", and then, quick as a wink, Cara from Meltwater Media Intelligence was in my face about a phone interview. Even Mongoose Gray couldn't spoil my day with this actual genuine gloating reply:

Sitting down to Snickers pie that evening, I had no fewer than seven tasty job leads, and I wasn’t even a real human being.

So, look, what can we take from all this?

What's clear is that sub-optimal applicants need all the help we can get. Be that from your employed mate who promises to read your application, but who – when you send it to them the night before it's due – is holding a Doombar outside a pub in Covent Garden; or from a robot, who arguably cares about your long-term prospects just as much.

And listen, I'm not trying to be Robin Hood here. All I'm saying is that he and his team had a lot of transferrable skills which could have been put to better use if the Sheriff of Nottingham and the Nottingham City Council had taken a different approach to recruitment.

And you may be saying: you're never going to succeed in a job you couldn't get legitimately.

But all you need is a foot in the door. A foot in the door and some sturdy brogues to withstand all the slamming on your foot that’s going to occur over the 30 to 40 years of your career.