Did Anyone Read Your Résumé?

By Gary Payne, MBA Founder of FuneralCostOntario.ca The Fine Print You can spend an hour on a job application and never know if anyone actually looked at it. You adjust the résumé, change a few words so it fits the position, check the spelling, attach the file and hit submit. Then you wait. A week goes by, maybe two, and eventually the posting disappears. Most of the time, you’re left to assume somebody else got the job. The question you rarely get answered is even more basic: did a person ever see what you sent? Ontario has quietly answered part of that question this year. Since January. 1, new requirements under the Employment Standards Act say employers covered by the rules have to disclose when artificial intelligence is being used to screen, assess or select applicants. You may already have seen the sentence and scrolled right past it. The Ministry of Labour says employers don’t have to describe the system in detail or tell you exactly how it is being used. A statement that AI is involved can be enough. And these aren’t just words sitting in a regulation somewhere. A recent Staples posting for a sales position in Ajax included a notice saying artificial intelligence may be used at certain stages to screen, assess or select applicants, while adding that a human reviewer makes the final decisions. That one little paragraph in a job ad tells you quite a bit. The first set of eyes you imagine looking at your résumé may not actually be a set of eyes. Software could be part of deciding whether your application moves forward far enough for somebody to look at it. That doesn’t mean the machine necessarily hires or rejects you on its own, and the Staples posting specifically says a person makes the final call. But it does make you look at that submit button a little differently. There’s another part of the new rules that may matter even more. If an employer interviews you, it generally has to tell you within 45 days whether a hiring decision has been made. Anyone who has gone through a job search knows why that matters. You have the interview, think it went reasonably well, check your email for a few days and then for a few more. Eventually you realize you may never hear anything. Except the 45-day rule has a door in front of it. Under the regulation, preliminary screening doesn’t count as an interview. So the clock doesn’t start simply because you applied or because your résumé went through a screening process. It starts once you’ve actually been interviewed. If AI helps screen out your application before you ever get that far, the 45-day requirement never starts for you. That’s the part I think most people will care about. Someone applying for a warehouse job, a sales position or something at the local shopping centre probably isn’t going to research the artificial-intelligence system behind the application. They want to know whether their experience was considered, whether they have a chance and, eventually, whether somebody else got the job. The rules give applicants more information, but there are limits. Even after an interview, the employer only has to tell you whether a hiring decision has been made. You aren’t necessarily going to learn why you didn’t get the job, what role the software played or how your application was assessed. These particular requirements also apply only to employers with at least 25 employees on the day the job is posted. Before we get too sentimental about the person who used to read every résumé, the old system wasn’t exactly a fireside chat either. A manager with hundreds of applications could skim, miss good experience, favour something familiar or simply run out of time. Good people were overlooked long before anyone started calling the software AI. For an employer buried in applications, using technology to narrow things down isn’t particularly hard to understand. What has changed is that some of that machinery is becoming visible. That sentence buried near the bottom of a job ad is worth reading now, because it tells you something about what may happen to your résumé after you press submit. If you get through that first door and into an interview, Ontario now says you’re entitled to an answer of sorts. If you don’t, the old answer can still arrive the old-fashioned way.