It finally happened—sooner than expected. Team Ursus is sourcing a GoLang software engineer, and we encourage candidates to send thank-you notes within 24 hours of their interviews. Recently, two candidates sent identical, AI-generated thank-you notes an hour after back-to-back interviews.  The notes were polished, grammatically correct, error-free, and almost certainly generated by AI. 

There is nothing wrong with this.  I’m sure both candidates saved time and felt confident in the grammatical accuracy. But I believe a personal touch might have made a difference. If another equally qualified candidate had added some personality and unique tone, would that have stood out more to the hiring manager?

The power of AI is phenomenal.  I’m an advocate, a regular user, (full disclosure: I ran this blog through ChatGPT for grammar and clarity), and genuinely curious and fascinated by how this is changing the world.  But I also maintain that regardless of the technical advances, often, final hiring decisions will be determined by a human who selects another human because of their unique humanness.  But that’s just my unique, authentic voice talking.