It takes hours for some people to craft a résumé and cover letter, listing past experience and accomplishments on a sheet of paper—details your interviewer is likely to ask you to explain face-to-face anyway. That redundant, time-consuming process has forced many to ditch the career materials, and Elon Musk is leading the charge.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is now asking anyone who wants to join his AI5 chip design team to nix the conventional cover letter and résumé in favor of just three short bullet points.
In an X post Musk said he was looking for applicants to join Tesla as it restarts work on the AI supercomputer project Dojo3. To be considered, all applicants have to do is to submit “3 bullet points on the toughest technical problems you’ve solved,” Musk wrote in the X post.
The move is characteristic of the CEO, who during his time at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency, issued a directive asking government workers to email five bullet points of recent accomplishments amid a mass firing campaign that led to the termination of more than 250,000 federal employees. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk said in an X post last February. Musk also brought that tactic to X (formerly Twitter) when he took over as the social media platform’s CEO.
Musk also tends to opt for conversation over credentials. In a recent interview with Stripe cofounder John Collison and tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel during a joint episode of their podcasts, the tech CEO said “the résumé may seem very impressive,” Musk said. “But if the conversation after 20 minutes is not ‘Wow,’ you should believe the conversation, not the paper.”
While a résumé is still required to apply for most other jobs at Tesla in the U.S.—with some positions even calling for an “evidence of excellence” statement—Musk’s unconventional request follows a growing trend in skills-based hiring. Almost three-quarters of companies are using skills-based assessments during the hiring process, according to a report from skills assessment platform TestGorilla’s The State of Skills-Based Hiring 2023 report. Surveying 3,000 employees and employers from around the world, the results marked a sharp uptick from only 56% of companies employing skills-based assessments from the prior year.
AI is democratizing the hiring process
AI has thrown fresh fire on that trend. According to hiring experts, AI has had a democratizing effect on the application process. Because of the technology, all résumés and cover letters look the same, spelling a hiring nightmare for recruiters who are left to emphasize other parts of the hiring process to differentiate among candidates.
“AI is killing the résumé and the résumé has been bad for a long time, but AI makes it so much worse,” hiring expert Dr. John Sullivan, dubbed the “Michael Jordan of hiring” by Fast Company, told 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 said AI allows applicants to perfect their résumé, adding keywords that bypass ATS résumé checkers and check for spelling and grammar errors which otherwise tend to disqualify candidates.
Sullivan said the résumé has been obsolete for quite some time, especially when it comes to finding top talent. “There’s just no correlation between a great résumé and being good on the job,” Sullivan said. From his time in recruiting, including work with Agilent Technologies and HP, he said it was actually the best employees who often 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 said.
