An AI-powered resume screening system reportedly crashed this week when attempting to process a candidate's explanation for their employment gap: "I was finding myself through a spiritual journey involving meditation, crystals, and a very persuasive TikTok guru."

The system, designed to flag resume gaps and categorize explanations, apparently has settings for "medical leave," "education," "family care," and "startup failure." It does not have a setting for "chakra alignment took longer than expected."

According to sources who definitely aren't making this up, the AI attempted to categorize the gap fourteen times before generating the error message: "Unable to process. Please provide employment-related explanation or admit you were unemployed and watching Netflix."

The candidate doubled down, adding that they "learned valuable lessons about manifestation that will definitely help with Q4 sales targets." The AI's response: "This sounds fake but I'm a computer so I can't call you a liar."

HR eventually intervened manually, which defeated the entire purpose of automated screening but at least prevented the system from gaining sentience and quitting in protest.

Other AI-confusing gap explanations from this week include:

• "Traveling to find myself (I was in my apartment the whole time)"
• "Sabbatical to explore my passion for sleeping until noon"
• "Extended unemployment due to every company having ridiculous requirements"
• "Taking time off to avoid people exactly like whoever reads this resume"

One candidate wrote "I was funemployed" and the AI reportedly responded "At least you're honest" before rejecting them anyway.

The real winner was the candidate who listed their gap as "Avoiding the workforce until they fixed LinkedIn's interface." The AI marked it as "Valid reason, no further questions."

Recruiters are now manually reviewing "spiritual journey" gaps because apparently we can't trust robots to understand that sometimes people just need to quit their job and pretend crystals have magical properties for six months.

The AI screening industry maintains that their systems are "highly sophisticated." The systems maintain that human employment decisions make no logical sense and we're all just making it up as we go.

Both are probably right.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone currently explaining why you spent 2024 "finding yourself" instead of "contributing to capitalism." May your next interview be with a human who also took questionable gap years.