I just used Claude Code to do something that would have taken my wife 3+ days

She has to go through about 100 resumes for a position at her college. Each resume is essentially a form the candidate filled out and lists their detailed academic scores from high school > PhD, their work experience, research and publications.

Based on the declared data, candidates are scored by the system

Now this is India and there's a decent amount of fraud, so an individual has to manually check the claimed experience/scores/publications against reality

A candidate might claim to have relevant experience, but the college might be unaccredited, or the claimed salary might be way too low for a relevant academic position. Or they might claim to have published in XYZ journal, but the journal itself might be a fraudulent pay-to-publish thing

Going through 100+ resumes, each 4 pages long is a nightmare of a task. And boring too.

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So I asked Claude Code to figure out the problem. I gave it a PDF with the scoring guidelines, a sample resume, and asked it to figure out the problem

Without me telling it, it figured out a plan that involved checking a college's accredition and rating (the govt maintains a rating for all colleges), the claimed salary vs actual median salary for that position (too low is a red flag), and whether the claimed publication is in either the SCOPUS index or a govt approved publications index

(I emphasize govt approved because this is in a govt backed institution)

Then I gave it access to a folder with all the 100 resumes.

In less than 30 minutes, it evaluated all candidates and added the evaluation to a CSV file. I asked it to make it more readable, so it made a HTML page with data from all the candidates and red/green/yellow flags about their work-experience, publications, and employment

It made a prioritized list of the most promising candidates based on this data

My wife double checked because she still "doesn't trust AI", but all her verification almost 100% matched Claude's conclusions

This was a 3 day, grinding task done in 30 minutes. And all I did was type into a terminal for 20 minutes

This is good work. When a task is of critical importance, I give two different LLMs the same task. And then ask them to review each other's output and validate all claims. I do this with Codex and Claude Code. It is very rare for them to find some valid fault in the other LLM's solution. And they are generally good about admitting mistakes and then creating a single unified solution that addresses identified issues. This result is better and ready for human review.

Applying for a job is an action that can change the entire course of your life. A job is something somebody spends ~30% of their time at, and every individual job contributes to a career trajectory and determines the opportunities one will have available throughout their life. Not only from the candidate's perspective, making the correct hires is something that will determine the course of a company's future; I would argue that there is literally nothing more important in running a business than hiring the right people. You would think, given these considerations, maybe the person who is paid money to review these applications should actually review them with the thoroughness that is warranted by such a task. Did the university approve of the work being outsourced to a chatbot instead of the person they were paying the salary to do the work?

To say nothing of the flagrantly immoral and likely illegal data privacy violations, of course.

I'm very skeptical of using AI in this way. I've given Claude access to calendars and travel plans and asked it to do similar analytical tasks cross referencing documents that would take days for me to do manually. Since it was about my own plans and life that I knew well, it was possible for me to spot subtle errors that seemed correct at the surface level but actually weren't the conclusions I would make. I've attempted these types of tasks 10-20 times with similar experiences each time. In the end, it's made me very skeptical, like your wife. I don't trust any AI output without a thorough review. Hallucinations are still a frequent problem.

> My wife double checked because she still "doesn't trust AI", but all her verification almost 100% matched Claude's conclusions

She's right not to trust it for something like this. The "almost 100%" is the problem (also consider that you're sending personal data to anthropic without permission) especially for something like this where it might mean discarding someone's resume, which is something that could have a significant impact on a person's life.

Given the data exfil vulnerability a few stories down HN's front page I would be extremely hesitant to ask Claude to process a document someone else produced and sent to me

Was the double-checking done in that 30 minutes? The fact that it wasn't 100% right means that the human in the loop was still important, so I'm just trying to understand the actual time saved.

Doesn’t submitting the resumes to Anthropic violate India’s data protection laws?

> And all I did was type into a terminal for 20 minutes

Well, and learning how to do that in 20 minutes

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