I want to share some observations from a recent recruitment process for a PhD position that may be interesting for other future candidates 🧵
I want to preface it by saying I've seen many great, well thought through applications, and making decisions in this process was hard because of the 💯 quality 💯 of the candidates
Apr 4, 2025 07:19I posted an open vacancy for a PhD position, asked people to apply with a CV and motivation letter, and published about it here and on some other platforms - all standard stuff
When the first applications started coming in (many, even on day one), I was very excited: the letters were well-crafted, to-the-point and clearly matched my vacancy 🤩
But as I was reading more and more letters (nearly 100 in total), I started recognising the same phrases, the same order of sentences, the same overall structure, that would come back again and again 🤔
I've used ChatGPT enough to recognise its "voice". To test my hypothesis, I uploaded my own vacancy and pre-PhD CV and asked it to write a motivation letter ✍️
Sure enough, out rolled a beautiful letter that addressed each of the points I had included in the vacancy. It was quite convincing!
But having read so many of the same letters, the power of that conviction sank. To the point where I rated "flawed" letters, those clearly written by a person because there were small errors, higher than those obviously produced by AI 📝
🙅♀️ Does this mean you should not use these tools when you are applying? Of course not!
I know it's not easy to find a position, and when applying you may not be able to spend hours specifically tailoring each letter.
My recommendations
💡 add some personality or info to your letter that is not obvious from your CV
💡 use AI tools for brainstorming, drafting, and improving flow and grammar, but DO NOT let it write the entire letter
💡 remember that vacancies are about people, and hiring committees want to see you 👉
