Elon Musk has introduced a different hiring approach for a specialized engineering team at Tesla, asking candidates to submit brief evidence of technical achievements instead of traditional résumés and cover letters.
The change applies to recruitment for Tesla’s AI chip design effort linked to its Dojo3 supercomputer project.
In a post published in January 2026 on X, Musk had said applicants should provide “3 bullet points on the toughest technical problems you’ve solved.”
Musk has for some time questioned the value of résumés in identifying strong candidates.
In a February 6, 2026, interview with Stripe cofounder John Collison and podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, he said hiring decisions should rely more on direct interaction than on written profiles.
“The résumé may seem very impressive, but if the conversation after 20 minutes is not ‘Wow,’ you should believe the conversation, not the paper,” Musk said.
He added that employers should look for “evidence of exceptional ability,” which may be seen in a small number of meaningful accomplishments rather than a full career summary.
Recruiters continue to report the growing difficulty of distinguishing candidates based on written applications. The use of artificial intelligence tools has also enabled applicants to produce polished résumés and cover letters at scale, often with similar language and formatting.
According to a 2023 report by TestGorilla, about three-quarters of companies globally now use skills-based assessments, up from 56% the previous year.
Hiring expert John Sullivan said the trend has been reinforced by AI, “When every résumé is perfect, has no spelling errors, flaws of any kind, imagine how many you have to sort,” he said, noting that strong performance at work does not always correlate with a well-written résumé.
Musk’s preference for concise evidence of performance has appeared in other settings. In early 2026, while heading the Department of Government Efficiency, he asked public-sector employees to submit five bullet points on recent accomplishments, warning that nonresponse would be treated as resignation.
Reports indicate that more than 250,000 federal employees were affected during that period.
Across his companies, Musk has emphasized execution as the main criterion: “If somebody gets things done, I love them, and if they don’t, I hate them,” he said in the February interview.
