Loving your imperfection in the age of AI

For those who don’t know, Meetic is a French dating app / service and they ran a brilliant, (in my humble opinion), brand campaign in 2014 called “love your imperfections”. In the ad, you see a series of scenes where daters find themselves stumbling upon their imperfections: being late, not being strong enough, dancing some weird and ridiculous moves. Each behavior is seen through the lens of the other dater interpreting the so-called imperfections as something touching : you run because you’re eager to see me, not because you’re late. You don’t show your strength to let me win. I love the way you dance, however weird it is…

I recently applied to a job in one of the big gen AI players. Yeah, I know, it’s like trying to date the hottest girl (or boy) in the party when everybody else wants too. But who knows, sur un malentendu...What struck my attention when applying was the fact that the company, building world class, frontier generative AI models, was, in the application process, specifically asking not to use their services or competitors’ ones to prepare your application, particularly your cover letter. The note read : “We want to understand your personal interest in (XX) without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills.” Funny right ? It’s as if they were saying “Please don’t use the technology built by the company you’re applying for”.

This, more than the tech awesomeness of the company, impressed me. If a company is smart enough to publicly recommend not to use a core feature of its tech in one of its core processes (hiring), it shows how humble they might be in front of a technology and its potentially flawed usage? If it’s a sign of wisdom, who doesn’t want to work for a wise company? Or it’s a cry in despair from HR hinting that they are flooded with automatically generated applications. There are so many services out there that do the job search on your behalf, the application, the resume adjustments and the cover letter for one click and 2,5$. Yes, I had a look, it’s tempting but I’m pretty confident it’s a dead end. 

At the time, I was faced with two options : automatically generating a cover letter and adjusting it by adding typos, some wrong English phrases and many of my favorite mistakes. Or writing it from scratch and leaving it as such with some basic proofreading options. I chose the second option. The temptation was really high to go fast knowing that my odds to hear back were close to 0. Why waste my time if I’m pretty confident nothing will come back from this effort? Instead, I chose to write it from “the bottom of my heart” and unearth some real, clunky but sincere motivations. It was painful, to some extent.

This experience shows the tension between fast-fooding and the importance of a 3 course meal. On one hand: quick impact, probable results and the ability to multiply by 10 your application machine gun. On the other, a bit of sweat for unlikely results but progress made on the core: your personal why and your motivations (+ some English writing practice). Quick satisfaction expressed as sprayed (and prayed) applications vs lasting returns through introspection. Not to mention the creative power of writing, that I’m enjoying as I’m typing.

Another word from the application guidelines caught my attention :  “We want to understand your personal interest in (XX) without mediation through an AI system”. Mediation is what will stand in between yourself and the recruiter, between yourself and your target date. It’s that useless artificial 3rd party that acts like a mask on your face. It’s as if in an application process, there were 3 different characters, yourself, your target HR and the artificial intelligence. It’s as if in a relationship, there were 3 different roles : yourself, your target and your artificial gimmicks. In all cases, it’s an added distance between your goal and its achievement. Let’s kill that 3rd party for real and promote real one-to-ones. 

A little bit of effort (without automated generation) and a lot of authenticity are probably the best ingredients for the winning combo : doing your best, by being your best self. A perfected practice expressed with the depth of your personality, necessarily imperfect, as perfection is nowhere to be seen around here. Strive but let it go. At the same time.

Have I heard back from them ? No. But when I will, I’m pretty sure the rejection email will have been “AI generated”.