Taming AI Agent Uncertainty: What Resume Screening Taught Me About Reliability
· 9 min read
Same resume. Same job description. Two different scores: 78/100, then 68/100.
I had built a resume-jd-matcher agent to automate candidate screening. On a whim, I ran the same resume through it twice. The inconsistency wasn't just frustrating—it was dangerous. How could I trust hiring decisions based on unpredictable evaluations? How could I ensure fairness to candidates when the same resume might score differently depending on when it was assessed?
The core challenge: AI agents complete tasks differently than traditional programs. They're probabilistic, not deterministic. The same input can produce different outputs due to sampling and contextual variations. In many ways, AI behaves more like human judgment than code execution.