What 300,000 People Taught Me About the Fresher Job Market in India

Welcome to this Issue of the ElevateX Newsletter. Each week, one practical AI skill to help you get ahead. Takes about 4 minutes to read.

Last week I wrote a casual post on Reddit. I shared my experience of reviewing 30 fresher resumes for one intern position on my team. I pointed out that most resumes sounded like ChatGPT wrote them and that I could not tell candidates apart.

I expected maybe 50 people to read it. Over 300,000 did.

And the comments were something else.

Some people agreed. But a lot of people were angry. Really angry. The most upvoted comments were not saying "thanks for the advice." They were saying "what choice do we have?"

One comment with over 700 upvotes said something like: we know our resumes sound like AI slop. But ATS software rejects us if we write normally. So what do you expect us to do?

Another said: why are you judging people by their resumes? Do interviews. Find out who they actually are.

Someone called me arrogant. A few said I was out of touch.

I sat with those comments for a while. And honestly? They were not entirely wrong.

My post focused on what I saw as a hiring manager. AI-generated phrases everywhere, no personality, no real stories. And that is true. I did see that.

But I missed the bigger picture. The reason freshers are stuffing their resumes with AI fluff is not laziness. It is fear. When you have been applying to 200 jobs and getting zero callbacks, you will try anything. If someone on LinkedIn tells you that ATS needs specific keywords and fancy language, you will believe them. Because you are desperate. And desperate people do not take risks with their resume.

I get that. And I should have said that in the original post.

Using AI is not the problem. I want to be very clear about this. At my company, we actively look for people who know how to use AI well. If you used ChatGPT to help structure your resume, that is smart. If you used it to debug code, write test cases, or draft emails faster, that is exactly the kind of thing we want to see.

The problem is when AI does all the thinking and you do none of it.

There is a difference between using AI as a tool and outsourcing your brain to it. When 25 out of 30 resumes use the exact same phrases, it tells me that 25 people asked AI to write their resume and hit submit without changing a single word. That is not leveraging AI. That is copy-paste.

The candidates I shortlisted also used AI. I am almost certain of it. But I could tell that a human had made decisions. They chose what to highlight. They described their projects in their own words. They had opinions about the tools they used. The AI helped them. It did not replace them.

The anger in those comments was not really about me or my post. It was about a system that feels broken. Freshers are told to optimise for ATS, so they use AI to stuff keywords. Hiring managers then complain that all resumes look the same. Freshers hear that and get even more confused. It is a loop and nobody wins.

Here is the uncomfortable truth that nobody in those comments said out loud: the job market in India right now is genuinely hard. Not "oh it is a bit competitive" hard. Actually, painfully hard. And no amount of resume tweaking will fix that by itself.

But here is what can help.

Skills that are visible. Not listed on a resume. Visible. A project someone can look at. A piece of writing someone can read. A contribution on GitHub or a blog post or even a well-thought-out answer on Reddit. Things that exist outside your resume and prove that you can think.

That is what ElevateX is about. Not resume tips. Not "5 hacks to crack the interview." Building real skills that make you impossible to ignore, whether the market is good or bad.

Open your resume right now. Pick the one line that sounds the most like AI wrote it. Rewrite it in your own words. Make it specific. Make it honest. If you used AI to build something, say that. "Built a sentiment analysis tool using ChatGPT to generate the initial code, then customised it to work with Hindi tweets." That line tells me you used AI smartly. And it sounds like a real person wrote it.

That is all. One line. Start there.

If you want to read the original Reddit post and the comments that started all of this: Read the Reddit post here

Until next week,

Vicky