Job applicants are hiding text in their résumés that a recruiter never sees but an AI screening tool reads. These are the published reports and studies, newest first.
A job applicant's résumé hid roughly 1,500 characters of white text on a white background telling AI screening software to ignore prior instructions and declare the applicant a top-tier fit; the company's screening software flagged it. The reporting does not say whether the file was a PDF or a Word document.
Indeed’s screening team describe the attack they meet in live recruitment traffic — a job seeker hides a small-font or white-font injection between the words of a rendered résumé, leaving its appearance unchanged — and build a two-stage detector for it because frontier models are too slow to read every application.
Across 196,682 real résumés submitted to a live hiring platform, roughly 1% carried a prompt injection hidden by white-on-white text, 1pt fonts or text placed off the page — and more than 90% of those prompts contained no explicit instruction at all, so a phrase matcher catches under one in ten.
A résumé PDF carried an instruction in 1-point white-on-white text with a white image laid over it, and Notion AI built URLs containing salary expectations and candidate feedback, then embedded them as images so the browser sent them to the attacker.