65% of Korean firms penalize ChatGPT-crafted resumes

A majority of large companies in South Korea disadvantage applicants who craft their resumes using artificial intelligence services, such as ChatGPT, according to a survey released Sunday.

The Labor Ministry and the Korea Employment Information Service unveiled a report on employment trends in the second half of 2023, which was based on a survey of human resource managers at the nation’s top 500 companies by sales. The survey was conducted from Nov. 20 to Dec. 22 last year, with 315 out of the 500 firms responding.

The survey revealed that 65.4 percent of respondents indicated that if an applicant uses artificial intelligence technologies to write their resume, they would either downgrade their evaluation (42.4 percent) or outright reject the application (23.2 percent). Also, 64.1 percent of those surveyed viewed the use of artificial intelligence for resume writing negatively, citing a “lack of originality and creativity” as the main reason for their assessment.

Despite companies viewing AI-assisted resumes negatively, 73 percent of them did not attempt to determine whether a resume had employed AI. Only 18.7 percent of companies outsourced the task of identifying AI-written resumes to third-party agencies, and a mere 8.3 percent had their own systems in place to filter out resumes assisted by AI.