Elon Musk discards resumes to hire his chip team and uses different criteria

It takes some people hours to put together a resume and cover letter, listing past experiences and achievements on a sheet of paper — details that the interviewer will probably ask you to explain in person anyway. This redundant and time-consuming process has led many to abandon these career materials, and Elon Musk is leading this movement.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is now asking anyone who wants to join his AI5 chip design team to set aside the traditional cover letter and resume and instead submit just three short bullet points.

Also read: Musk: SpaceX prioritizes lunar “self-sustainable city” over Mars project

In a post on X, Musk said he was looking for candidates to join Tesla as the company resumes work on the Dojo3 AI supercomputer project. To be considered, all a candidate needs to do is submit “three topics about the hardest technical problems you’ve ever solved,” Musk wrote in the post.

The initiative is characteristic of the CEO who, during his time in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, issued a directive asking public servants to email five topics with recent achievements, in the midst of a mass layoff campaign that led to the dismissal of more than 250,000 federal employees.

“The lack of response will be considered a resignation,” Musk wrote in a post on X in February last year. Musk also took this tactic to X (formerly Twitter) when he took over as CEO of the social media platform.

Musk also tends to prefer conversations over credentials. In a recent interview with Stripe co-founder John Collison and technology podcaster Dwarkesh Patel during a joint episode of their podcasts, the technology CEO stated, “The resume can look very impressive. But if after 20 minutes of conversation the reaction isn’t ‘Wow,’ you should believe the talk, not the paper.”

While a resume is still required for most other Tesla jobs in the U.S. — with some positions even asking for a statement of “evidence of excellence” — Musk’s unconventional request follows a growing trend toward skills-based hiring.

Nearly three-quarters of companies are using skills assessments during the hiring process, according to a report from skills assessment platform TestGorilla titled The State of Skills-Based Hiring 2023.

With a survey of 3,000 employees and employers around the world, the results showed a sharp jump from the previous year, when only 56% of companies used skills-based assessments.

AI is democratizing the hiring process

AI has added even more fuel to this trend. According to recruitment experts, technology has had a democratizing effect on the application process.

With it, all CVs and cover letters end up looking the same, creating a nightmare for recruiters, who start to emphasize other stages of the selection process to differentiate candidates.

“AI is killing the resume, and the resume has been bad for a long time, but AI makes it much worse,” said recruiting expert John Sullivan, dubbed the “Michael Jordan of hiring” by Fast Company, in an interview with Fortune.

“When every resume is perfect, with no spelling errors or flaws of any kind, imagine how many you need to analyze to decide who to interview.”

Sullivan said AI allows candidates to polish their resumes by adding keywords that bypass automated screening systems (ATS) and correcting spelling and grammar errors that otherwise often disqualify candidates.

Sullivan said the curriculum has been outdated for a long time, especially when it comes to finding top talent. “There is no correlation between having a great resume and being good at your job,” he said.

Based on his recruiting experience, including stints at companies like Agilent Technologies and HP, he said that, in practice, the best employees were often precisely those with the worst resumes.

“High-level professionals are often so busy performing complex work that they have neither the time nor the need to look for a job or update their career materials,” said Sullivan.