It takes hours for some folks to craft a résumé and canopy letter, itemizing previous expertise and accomplishments on a sheet of paper—particulars your interviewer is prone to ask you to elucidate face-to-face anyway. That redundant, time-consuming course of has pressured many to ditch the profession supplies, and Elon Musk is main the cost.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is now asking anybody who needs to affix his AI5 chip design workforce to nix the traditional cowl letter and résumé in favor of simply three brief bullet factors.
In a January X publish Musk mentioned he was in search of candidates to affix Tesla because it restarts work on the AI supercomputer challenge Dojo3. To be thought-about, all candidates should do is to submit “3 bullet points on the toughest technical problems you’ve solved,” Musk wrote within the X publish.
Musk additionally tends to go for dialog over credentials. In a February interview with Stripe cofounder John Collison and tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel throughout a joint episode of their podcasts, the tech CEO mentioned “the résumé may seem very impressive,” Musk mentioned. “But if the conversation after 20 minutes is not ‘Wow,’ you should believe the conversation, not the paper.”
Whereas a résumé remains to be required to use for many different jobs at Tesla within the U.S.—with some positions even calling for an “evidence of excellence” assertion—Musk’s unconventional request follows a rising development in skills-based hiring. Nearly three-quarters of corporations are utilizing skills-based assessments in the course of the hiring course of, in line with a report from abilities evaluation platform TestGorilla’s The State of Abilities-Based mostly Hiring 2023 report. Surveying 3,000 workers and employers from world wide, the outcomes marked a pointy uptick from solely 56% of corporations using skills-based assessments from the prior yr.
AI is making each résumé look equivalent, and that’s a nightmare for recruiters
AI has thrown contemporary fireplace on that development. In keeping with hiring consultants, AI has had a democratizing impact on the applying course of. Due to the know-how, all résumés and canopy letters look the identical, spelling a hiring nightmare for recruiters who’re left to emphasise different elements of the hiring course of to distinguish amongst candidates.
“AI is killing the résumé and the résumé has been bad for a long time, but AI makes it so much worse,” hiring knowledgeable Dr. John Sullivan, dubbed the “Michael Jordan of hiring” by Quick Firm, advised Fortune. “When every résumé is perfect, has no spelling errors, flaws of any kind, imagine how many you have to sort in order to determine who you’re going to interview.” Sullivan mentioned AI permits candidates to good their résumé, including key phrases that bypass ATS résumé checkers and test for spelling and grammar errors which in any other case are inclined to disqualify candidates.
Sullivan mentioned the résumé has been out of date for fairly a while, particularly in the case of discovering prime expertise. “There’s just no correlation between a great résumé and being good on the job,” Sullivan mentioned. From his time in recruiting, together with work with Agilent Applied sciences and HP, he mentioned it was truly one of the best workers who typically had the worst résumés.
“Top-tier employees are often so busy performing high-level work that they don’t have the time or the need to look for a job or update their career materials,” Sullivan mentioned.
A model of this story was printed on Fortune.com on Feb. 20, 2026.
Extra on Elon Musk:
- The billionaire is escalating a feud with a Delaware choose over a LinkedIn publish response.
- Musk’s Boring Firm is tunneling below Nashville, and it’s attracting backlash from residents.
- It seems DOGE used ChatGPT to flag DEI-related grants, which led to the cancellation of a museum’s HVAC substitute.
