And they’re getting better at it…
In this issue
- The resumes landing on my desk written line by line off the job advert
- The online bank that apparently runs a SCADA system
- Why the genuinely good engineers are getting filtered out by the same screen
- What two clients told me they’d rather do than hire a six out of ten
- Ten minutes with the resumes your system threw out
The resume that reads exactly like your job advert
A handful of times every week a resume lands on my desk that reads almost exactly like the job advert it’s applying to.
The platforms are listed in the order the advert listed them, the industries are the same industries and every so often a phrase has been lifted straight out of the job description and dropped into a bullet point as if the candidate wrote it about himself. Then you get them on the phone and ask about the last project, where the site was, how big the system was, who else was on the job and what they personally did, and it comes apart inside about four minutes. Some of them aren’t who they say they are either. The name, the location and the person on the video don’t all line up.
Not one of them has made it through to a client. But it’s a waste of everyone’s time, theirs included, and every month they’re a bit better at it than the month before.
The online bank with a SCADA system
The clearest one this month came in on an Ignition role at the start of September. His resume had Ignition and Wonderware down as core skills. When I looked at where he said he’d used them, one employer was an online bank and another was a company that sells fraud monitoring software.
So I asked him why a virtual bank would need Ignition. He told me it ran infrastructure monitoring for the bank’s facilities. I told him I’m not an engineer but I’ve worked with controls engineers for a long time, and I couldn’t see why there’d be telemetry and PLCs in an online bank. The second answer was longer than the first and said less. His LinkedIn didn’t mention Ignition, Niagara or Wonderware anywhere and read like a software developer’s profile.
He said he held a certification and would share it “in the next step”. I told him I’ve seen people take a job description they like the look of and have an AI tool rewrite their resume so it looks like they’ve done the work. Without a certificate I could show the client I wasn’t putting him forward. He promised it within five minutes. His record in our system now reads “fake candidate, do not use”.
The team heard versions of the same thing all month. An applicant for a remote applications engineering role at a mid sized US facilities and energy business had two named SCADA and building automation platforms on his resume as core skills. All of it was attributed to two years at a software company working in identity governance, with nothing industrial anywhere in his history. When he was asked why the platforms were on there he said he lists the widely used ones “to get spotted”. The client’s response when we told them was “that happens to us too”. On a separate client call their TA team described interviewing people who were clearly running live AI help. They could hear the pause before every answer and the question being read back out loud while the answer loaded, and they’d seen it more than once, in person as well as on video.
I’d had the same thing on my own phone a few months earlier. Every question I asked got the same gap before the answer, the same length every time, and then an answer that was far too tidy for someone talking off the top of their head. About halfway through the call I realized I wasn’t really talking to him, I was talking to whatever he had open on his screen.
I’ve also been caught out once already. Earlier this year I hired someone into my own team through an offshore partner and found out on day one that he’d lied in the interviews. He didn’t have the experience he said he had. The partner put it right and owned it, but it still cost significantly in time and money and it emphasizes why I put so much rigor around the sourcing of candidates for my clients.
The engineer the screen throws out
The same month produced the opposite issue. An automation technician working in the South East had three years of hands on experience on the exact platform the client was hiring for and had left it off his resume entirely. The client runs its applications through a tracking system that picks out keywords, so he’d have been binned without anyone reading his name. He only survived because we asked him on the phone what he’d actually been working on.
A week later the team spoke to an engineer who holds the Ignition certification and has used the platform for eight years across three employers. None of that responsibility was written on his resume. The client’s HR team needs it on paper before a hiring manager will see him, so he’d have failed the screen with the certificate sitting in his drawer.
That’s the half clients should worry about more. A leader of a life sciences integrator with around ninety billable engineers told me that she’d rather hire someone with GMP experience who can cross train onto her platform than someone who has the platform but has never worked in life sciences. A keyword screen written against the platform bins exactly the person she’d hire.
Failing both ways
So the document is failing in both directions at once. The LLM generated resume sails through a keyword screen because it was built from the keywords. The honest engineer who describes his work the way he’d describe it to a buddy gets dropped for not using the advert’s language. The one thing that catches both of them is a conversation with someone who knows what the work sounds like when a person has actually done it.
This isn’t a hunch. Gartner went on record last year predicting that by 2028 one in four candidate profiles worldwide could be fake, with 6% of the candidates they surveyed admitting to some form of interview fraud and 40% using AI somewhere in their applications. That was August 2025. What I’m seeing a year on is less crude. The resumes are better written and the stories hold together for longer.
What clients want from the screen
The tracking system exists because a controls role posted on a job board can pull a couple of hundred applications in a week and no engineering manager has time to phone them. My own industry helped cause this too, because a decade of agencies firing resumes at anything with a job title in it taught candidates that volume works and that a keyword gets you seen. The answer to volume can’t be a filter the fakes are specifically built to pass, and that’s what a keyword match against a job description has become.
The clients I’m closest to have already worked this out. That same life sciences leader put it plainly: “I would rather say no to an opportunity if I can’t get an excellent person than just give them somebody that’s like a six or seven out of 10.” She had a line for recruiters too, that this is “a very relationship based process, don’t over process this process because it’s a human based thing”. A Massachusetts based automation firm told me “we can never find enough DeltaV engineers, that’s a given” and in the same conversation “we’re still so picky”. Neither of them is short of applicants. Both would rather wait than take the risk.
A founder I know who recruits engineers across the US and the Middle East put the other half of it together. He doesn’t send five or six candidates, he says “Here’s two. When are you meeting them?”
Which is why I’d argue as a recruiter that a large portion of our value is the screen now. My qualification calls run thirty to forty five minutes before a resume ever gets sent, and with the rise of automated screening that’s exactly the part people are trying to automate away.
What I notice from here
I’m not inside your hiring process and won’t pretend to know how you should run it, but I’m on the phone to both sides of this most of the week, and here’s what I notice from where I sit.
- The keyword screen now favours the people you least want. A resume written from your job description will match your job description better than any real engineer’s ever will, so the tighter the filter the more it rewards the copy.
- Certification is turning into an identity check. One client this month started cross checking submitted engineers against the platform vendor’s own public certification directory, which does as much to prove the person exists as it does to prove what they know.
- Your rejections folder has good people in it. The underclaimer who left his platform off is still out there, and on this month’s evidence that’s pretty common.
Worth reading this month
Kyle Edwards, formerly of ABB. “A company can hire another person. It cannot hire twenty years of judgment,” set against more than a quarter of US manufacturing workers being 55 or older, and the reason getting the screening wrong costs more every year the experienced people keep leaving. Automation.com, 15 September 2026.
On my desk
The one I’d most like to talk about is a first hire into a brand new operational technology cyber practice at an integrator in the north east. They want a solution architect who’s come up through production or utilities rather than the academic route, local to their head office, and the role has no pipeline at all right now, which makes it the most interesting blank page I’ve got.
Alongside it there are several controls application engineer roles at a building and energy automation business that’s grown fast on data center work, and a sixty megawatt data center program in the South East that’s hiring through its phases rather than one role at a time.
This goes monthly from here, so you’ll get one of these a month rather than two. And I’m out in Louisiana and across the Deep South from late October into early November, so if you’re down there and fancy a coffee, reply and we’ll get something in.
Jon
Sources
- Gartner via HR Dive, 8 August 2025. By 2028, 1 in 4 candidate profiles will be fake, Gartner predicts
- Kyle Edwards, Automation.com, 15 September 2026. We’re building new factories. Who will remember how to run them?
