inc.com ‘AI Likes to Use AI’: The Shocking Quirk All Job Applicants Need to Know Kevin Haynes 3–4 minutes

If you’re looking for a job, you’d be wise to retool your resume using a few different AI models to increase your chances of making the initial cut and getting called in for an interview.

And if you’re part of the recruitment process, you might appreciate a heads-up about the AI screening tools that now single-handedly determine which applicants deserve a closer look.

The reason is simple—and a sign of the times.

“AI likes to use AI,” says Jonathan Ross, Nvidia’s chief software architect.

Corporate recruiting software, he explained recently at the Sohn Investment Conference 2026 in New York, apparently share the all-too-human trait of gravitating toward the familiar. As a result, AI scanners seem to prefer resumes that were written by the exact same Large Language Model utilized by the HR executive or headhunter spearheading the search.

“Recruiters are now using LLM to determine who to interview,” said Ross, the Groq founder who joined Nvidia last year after the tech giant licensed his company’s blazing-fast AI chips for $20 billion. “So, you should build one resume with Claude or Opus 4.7 and one with ChatGPT, and you’ll have the highest probability of being selected, basically.”

Ross’ advice jibes with a 2025 academic study that uncovered a glaring flaw in automated HR systems. Researchers from three universities found that job applicants who share the same AI agent as the recruiter were 23 to 60 percent more likely to make the shortlist of potential hires than equally qualified applicants who wrote their resumes with a different tool or, especially, without any AI assistance whatsoever.

“LLMs consistently prefer resumes generated by themselves over those written by humans or produced by alternative models,” said the report, titled “AI Self-Preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights.”

“The bias against human-written resumes is particularly substantial,” the authors added, because it taints the recruitment process with “algorithmic unfairness, one that advantages users of specific AI tools and disadvantages others based on their tool choices or access.”

According to a 2025 survey by Resume.org, 57 percent of companies now use AI when hiring. Nearly 80 percent of those employers said AI is the first step in reviewing resumes and 74 percent reported that their AI agent is authorized to reject candidates without human input.

That last statistic lends credence to the growing notion that Claude and his fellow AI chatbots have a narcissistic tendency to green-light one of their own when sifting through resumes.

That’s why Nvidia’s Ross is urging job candidates to play matchmaker by building a curriculum vitae with the same AI tool that a potential employer has integrated into the hiring process.

There’s just one hitch.

“You’ve got to figure out which LLM the recruiter’s using,” Ross said.