[HN Gopher] Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI applicat...
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       Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload
        
       Author : chapulin
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2024-05-05 18:32 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
        
       | datadrivenangel wrote:
       | https://archive.is/I3WjA
        
         | neonate wrote:
         | https://web.archive.org/web/20240505164924/https://www.wired...
        
       | datadrivenangel wrote:
       | To summarize the article though: Online hiring continues to be
       | overwhelmed by huge numbers of low quality applications, now with
       | some extra AI tools that make it easier to lie about your
       | experience.
       | 
       | Same issue as before, now wrapped up in OpenAI API calls.
        
         | mistrial9 wrote:
         | you forgot the second part -- a rush by industry management to
         | open the gates to low-skill people for lower pay, while
         | specifically and exactly firing or replacing more experienced
         | people who ask for higher compensation and employee rights (for
         | example working parents or a slower pace over a long time)
        
         | dang wrote:
         | We detached this subthread from
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265635.
        
       | yieldcrv wrote:
       | I think this is conflating some things,
       | 
       | I've had interviews where AI use was encouraged. I've used a
       | coderpad screenshare that had an LLM tab you could write with.
       | 
       | so in this article, where they mention some of the respondents
       | disclosed using AI, it doesnt say if that was a "good" or "bad"
       | thing _for that company_
       | 
       | its not accurate to assume, despite the article reinforcing a
       | bias towards it being a problem
        
       | Simulacra wrote:
       | Serves them right. Employers have been using AI and algorithms to
       | weed out resumes/applications for years. To the point that the
       | only way to get seen by an actual human is the game the system.
        
         | bastawhiz wrote:
         | Exactly, I came here looking for this comment. Many companies
         | have been using AI tools for years to power recruiting. Now
         | they're upset that candidates are using the same technology.
         | The recruiters turned their profession into a tit for tat arms
         | race.
        
         | ToucanLoucan wrote:
         | Hard agree. It's infuriating that automation is continually
         | added to human centric processes that it is ill-suited and
         | anti-social to be used in, very much including most LLM
         | applications, always in the name of more bloody cost-cutting
         | that almost never leads to lower prices for consumers, just
         | more yachts for the executive class.
        
         | LikelyABurner wrote:
         | The thing that especially infuriates me is recruiters in this
         | article turning around and trying to throw LinkedIn under the
         | bus.
         | 
         | No one likes the nightmare dystopia of a platform that is
         | LinkedIn. The only reason most people I know have LinkedIn
         | accounts in the first place is because HR types have outsourced
         | so much of their job to LinkedIn that it's viewed as
         | professional suicide to _not_ have a LinkedIn profile with 100s
         | of contacts in this industry.
         | 
         | Recruiters don't like the GenAI and Easy Apply features on
         | LinkedIn, it makes their jobs more difficult? Then stop making
         | LinkedIn a mandatory account for tech workers. You have NO ONE
         | to blame but yourselves.
        
           | Simulacra wrote:
           | It would be interesting if they just went back to paper
           | resumes and applications. That takes effort, only a little
           | bit, but it takes effort.
        
           | surfingdino wrote:
           | What gets me is that they request a CV even though my whole
           | work history is already on LI. My CV is just a reformatted LI
           | profile. But then again, recruiters are mostly sociology,
           | political science, or philosophy grads who chose an easy
           | degree thinking they were clever and found themselves being
           | used as a mop in the Victorian sweatshop that is the
           | recruitment industry.
        
           | IshKebab wrote:
           | I like linkedin. It got me my current job. I get a constant
           | stream of recruiters looking for people in my field; if I
           | want a new job I'm pretty sure I can just reply to a few of
           | them and not have to actually apply at all.
           | 
           | Just don't read any of the nonsense that people post.
        
         | KallDrexx wrote:
         | Two wrongs don't make a right.
         | 
         | AI being weaponized on the application side hurts us all, and
         | leads to an environment that's extremely difficult to get
         | noticed in as a job seeker. Yes, networking helps but that's
         | not always possible, especially if you are trying to change
         | industries or have generally worked with smaller companies
         | where your networking doesn't expand out much.
         | 
         | It also leads to less diverse environments where hiring
         | managers only look at resumes given by friends or friends of
         | friends.
        
       | neilv wrote:
       | > _That came after LinkedIn began rolling out a new set of
       | generative AI tools for recruiters to source candidates in
       | October. With the sourcing tool, recruiters can search a phrase
       | like "I want to hire engineers in Texas," and profiles of people
       | that may meet those criteria appear, as do other specific skills
       | that may be related to the role. They can also send messages
       | written with generative AI and set automatic follow-up messages._
       | 
       | What are better alternatives to LinkedIn, for people who want to
       | get that rare serendipitous message from a recruiter?
       | 
       | (Not just another company that wants to behave like LinkedIn when
       | they can get away with it, but that wants to be and is a lot
       | better.)
        
         | Euphorbium wrote:
         | Go rockclimbing and meet cto's there.
        
         | xw38011 wrote:
         | > What are better alternatives to LinkedIn, for people who want
         | to get that rare serendipitous message from a recruiter?
         | 
         | The only one I know of is to have a personal social network of
         | people who know you and are directly familiar with your work.
         | Every rare serendipitous message from a recruiter I've received
         | resulted from a referral from someone I directly knew.
         | 
         | But rare is probably the correct qualifier. I have 25 years
         | experience, I've received four, followed up on two and only one
         | resulted in me changing jobs. None came before I had 10 years
         | of experience. YMMV
        
         | joshstrange wrote:
         | Hacker News monthly threads for "Who wants to be hired" and
         | "Who is hiring". That's how I got hired for my current job
         | (2019) and that's how I'm hiring currently.
        
           | ohthatsnotright wrote:
           | All I got from that was some spam and "defi" recruiting for
           | whatever Ponzi scheme the cryptocoin community is hot on
           | right now.
        
             | CogitoCogito wrote:
             | I got my current job from it.
             | 
             | No idea which experience is more typical.
        
             | mvdtnz wrote:
             | Yeah I'm still getting spam from sketchy crypto orgs months
             | after I put my email into a HN hiring thread once. Don't
             | recommend.
        
               | everybodyknows wrote:
               | Consider a "burner" email alias for such situations.
               | Fastmail makes creating them easy enough.
        
               | herpdyderp wrote:
               | Apple's iCloud+ also includes "hide my email" which
               | creates randomized addresses that forward to your main
               | account.
        
         | nradov wrote:
         | Most industries have some kind of private discussion forums,
         | which could be sponsored by a professional organization or
         | related media company or just some guy. Those used to be email
         | lists and web discussion forums but now some have moved to
         | Slack or Discord. Find those forums for industries where you're
         | interested in working and start actively participating.
        
           | elicksaur wrote:
           | +1! think your local tech scene (my city has a general dev
           | slack), language or framework specific chats for web or
           | mobile dev, hackathons/conferences, etc.
           | 
           | Would personally stay away from anyone offering to be part of
           | a "community" for a fee
        
         | neilv wrote:
         | Is there an alternative we can practically move to that will
         | turn LinkedIn into an abandoned property like MySpace?
         | 
         | (Ideal would be a distributed approach with semantic Web and
         | such. But I'd settle for a centralized site that wanted to be a
         | lot better, and was capable of that.)
        
       | altdataseller wrote:
       | This problem is exasperated by the fact that recruiters are often
       | the ones getting laid off first in a downturn or cost effiency
       | initiative. So there's even less humans filtering through
       | applications.
       | 
       | Even though it's an issue I really don't see companies spending a
       | ton of time and energy fixing it. As mentioned in the article,
       | they could simply stop posting jobs on LinkedIn or rely only on
       | inbound candidates. It's not rocket science. Just like dating, if
       | you get bombarded with peoole knocking on your door, simply stop
       | putting yourself out there.
        
         | kthejoker2 wrote:
         | Exacerbated*
        
           | mathgeek wrote:
           | Both words are appropriate, as exasperated means "made worse
           | or more intense". They are synonyms.
        
             | ics wrote:
             | Exasperated, or exasperation, is a feeling experienced by a
             | person. Exacerbation describes a change in quality of
             | something (usually inanimate).
        
               | mathgeek wrote:
               | Correct, although IMHO it's also fine to use exacerbation
               | in this specific example (if you see the problem from a
               | process standpoint instead of the frustration faced by
               | job seekers and recruiters).
        
       | kthejoker2 wrote:
       | Fo any other professions have thse challenges?
       | 
       | Our lack of basic professional certifications has just led to
       | nonsense in every corner of the hiring and job seeking process.
        
         | zarzavat wrote:
         | There are professional certifications they are just useless.
         | The same goes for university degrees. The field moves too fast
         | for certification to have any value. Perhaps if you do
         | something very "enterprise" it might be useful.
        
           | AnthonyMouse wrote:
           | The uselessness of professional certifications isn't because
           | things move too fast. The fundamentals don't really change.
           | 
           | The certifications are useless because they're paper mills,
           | driven by the same incentives as grade inflation. People get
           | upset if they pay for the certification and then fail the
           | test -- and those are the certification mill's customers, so
           | that can't be allowed or people would get some other
           | certification. Or worse, some other _vendor 's_
           | certification. So they make something easy enough for the
           | 10th percentile to pass, or publish a study guide that
           | effectively gives you the answers to the test, and then it
           | isn't serving as a useful filtering mechanism.
           | 
           | Meanwhile the strongest applicants rightfully see it as a
           | waste of money because they can get in on their other
           | qualifications or find a job through their networks, or use
           | _not_ having it as a reverse filter to eliminate excessively
           | bureaucratic employers that use it as a prerequisite, causing
           | anyone who requires it to be filtering out more of the best
           | applicants than the worst ones.
        
             | zarzavat wrote:
             | The fundamentals change all the time. When I learned to
             | code everybody was high on Java, you had to know your
             | design patterns, craft beautiful inheritance hierarchies
             | and all kinds of other things that we now laugh at as being
             | very silly. But people were dead serious about it!
             | 
             | This art is still young, we are still finding our feet and
             | I don't think certifications are beneficial until we do.
             | What we need is more experimentation and free thinking not
             | a general ossification.
        
               | AnthonyMouse wrote:
               | The things that change aren't the fundamentals.
               | 
               | Meanwhile people still read the papers that came out of
               | Bell Labs in the mid-20th century, boolean logic is
               | boolean logic, exponential time algorithms are slower
               | than polynomial time algorithms for large N, the lambda
               | calculus is still taught, etc.
        
         | Uehreka wrote:
         | What are you talking about? We have tons of professional
         | certifications. We also still have all of these problems.
        
           | dang wrote:
           | Can you please make your substantive points without swipes?
           | Your comment would be just fine without that first bit.
           | 
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
         | eikenberry wrote:
         | The challenge for certifying in software engineering seems
         | similar to the challenges you'd face in any creative, building
         | oriented professions. That is you can't test for it with some
         | sort of standard exam. You need to have the person build
         | something and then have established masters of the field
         | evaluate it. But that requires a professional structure we
         | don't have.
        
           | ghaff wrote:
           | Relatively few engineers of any kind (outside of Civil
           | Engineering)--much less other STEM--have PE licenses in the
           | US. They're mostly required if you're going to be signing off
           | on things for regulators etc. You _could_ do it but now you
           | require a 4+ year degree, exams, and some years of working
           | under a certified engineer.
        
           | vunderba wrote:
           | Many other engineering disciplines have a PE exam, including
           | mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. I'm not
           | sure why you believe that software engineering is somehow
           | more difficult to test in a rigorous manner than those
           | fields.
           | 
           | In point of fact, computer science did at one point have an
           | official equivalent PE exam, but it was bafflingly removed a
           | few years ago though I'm not entirely clear on the reason.
           | 
           | This is exactly what happens when you don't gate keep enough
           | - employers lose all trust in potential candidates core
           | competencies, and thus we have the increasing arms race of 40
           | hour multi project 12 course interviews.
        
       | mead5432 wrote:
       | My partner has been searching for an SDE job for 8 months and
       | recently received an email requesting her to do a recruiter
       | screen. She responded and got a call instantly where the
       | "recruiter was a text-to-speech AI.
       | 
       | Presumably the entire process was automated; I'm assuming if
       | they're using text-to-speech, the selection and initial email was
       | all AI.
       | 
       | It's an arms race on both sides.
        
         | the_snooze wrote:
         | It's the curse of scale. Automation allows there to be plenty
         | of job postings and job applications, but it sidelines the
         | human part of actually talking to someone. Those in the know
         | will end up sidestepping this altogether and using their
         | networks to get a direct line to a real hiring manager or
         | applicant. I've done this myself where I talk to past
         | collaborators and professors I know and ask "Do you have an
         | intern/soon-to-graduate-student you recommend with skills X, Y,
         | and Z?"
         | 
         | This is admittedly unfair to outsiders, but if you talk to
         | someone, there's a high reputational pressure that assures
         | you're dealing with a real person who's likely a decent match
         | for the job/applicant. This is valuable precisely because
         | there's high friction and doesn't scale.
        
           | Danaemp wrote:
           | That's why we're building Touvlo.co (for hardware engineers)
           | - human engineer interviewers, interviewing humans on real
           | world applicable engineering skills, more fair to outsiders,
           | standardized, scaleable!
        
           | mead5432 wrote:
           | I generally agree that relying on a network and human
           | referrals is the way to go but building an effective network
           | is much harder than it used to be. Meetup groups and local
           | conferences were a good source to make connections pre-
           | pandemic but that has really withered in the last couple
           | years.
           | 
           | Past collaborators are also a great source but she is junior
           | and doesn't really have any she can leverage.
           | 
           | My initial advice to her was do some real projects, document
           | her work and insights in a blog and engage with others on
           | social media but that's mostly screaming into a void.
           | 
           | My approach to hiring is to focus on competencies (what do I
           | need them to accomplish) rather than skills (how many years
           | of JS) but that doesn't cut down on the number of applicants
           | any, just makes initial eval a little easier. I was pondering
           | the idea of leaning in more on AI to screen on competencies
           | which might incentivize higher information density on resumes
           | but the quality of that eval might not actually be any better
           | and only increase the "black box"-ness of it all.
        
             | JumpCrisscross wrote:
             | > _building an effective network is much harder than it
             | used to be_
             | 
             | If you're in an American city, go to cafes and bars. Be the
             | annoying person who asks what someone does and persist.
             | It's absolutely annoying. But I'll also always follow up on
             | it, because that skill in itself is differentiating.
        
               | Citizen_Lame wrote:
               | Absolutely pathetic. Might as well become worm.
        
               | JumpCrisscross wrote:
               | > _Absolutely pathetic_
               | 
               | It seems to be a class-based social more. Among the rich
               | and upper-middle class, approaching someone to introduce
               | yourself isn't unfavourable. If anything, it's seen as a
               | right and children are taught to do it. Among the lower
               | classes it's seen as uncouthe.
               | 
               | You see it strikingly at _e.g._ birthday parties and
               | galas. (Particularly in the U.K., Western and Southern
               | Europe. Though there, unfortunately, such cold
               | introductions usually aren 't enough to cross the
               | barrier. Hence my qualification for this only working in
               | American cities. Also Nordic countries. It even extends
               | to the design of social spaces, with private clubs and
               | even elite airline lounges having chairs face each other
               | while tables at fast food places are more isolated.)
        
               | wormius wrote:
               | You rang?
        
             | nnurmanov wrote:
             | My suggestion is to focus on a fewer number of companies,
             | instead of sending resume in bulk. When you narrow your
             | choices you can study well and notice bugs or issues that
             | need to be addressed. Fix them, send the results to someone
             | in the company, it will increase your chances
             | substantially.
        
               | fwip wrote:
               | It's a sad day when the answer is "do unpaid labor for a
               | chance to be noticed."
        
         | justahuman74 wrote:
         | I can understand having to respond if it's been 8 months, but
         | this is a pretty big red flag that the company doesn't respect
         | humans.
        
           | mead5432 wrote:
           | It's a giant telecom company that already had some pretty big
           | red flags around how they treat employees from my own
           | network.
           | 
           | The best part is that she already interviewed there a while
           | back. She got a backend interview and didn't pass (she's
           | primarily frontend); not a big deal but she gets a message
           | from a new recruiter about every 2-3 months about the same
           | role. This time it was just AI doing it.
        
         | conradfr wrote:
         | AI startup idea, CaaS, candidate as a service.
        
         | RobotToaster wrote:
         | Anyone have a text-to-speech AI to talk to recruiter text-to-
         | speech AIs?
        
           | mead5432 wrote:
           | I love that idea. Record the messages and use that to fine
           | tune your own language model to improve the chances of
           | talking to a real person? If she does that and can't get a
           | job, the market is officially broken.
        
             | euroderf wrote:
             | Yeah but if it's a local minimum and legal too, nothing
             | will change.
        
             | selimthegrim wrote:
             | This is _Real Genius_ but on the job market
        
           | moneywoes wrote:
           | yes interested
        
         | kgermino wrote:
         | Yep, I just had this happen too. I'm not looking nearly that
         | seriously but the position as described was nearly perfect. The
         | AI phone call plus a couple other minor details (slight changes
         | in the description/requirements) which could probably be easily
         | cleared up with a human made me distrust the entire process and
         | walk away.
         | 
         | It's incredibly annoying
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | > It's an arms race on both sides.
         | 
         | In my experience, the AI-vs-AI hiring battle takes place in
         | parallel to normal hiring pipelines. Even before ChatGPT went
         | mainstream, recruiting for key roles was largely happening via
         | referrals or scraping LinkedIn for people at target companies.
         | 
         | When I posted jobs (for a moderately well known company name)
         | on public job boards, we'd get 1000s of applications within the
         | first week long before people were using ChatGPT to fill out
         | applications. The majority of the submissions were absolute
         | junk: People spamming their resume to every job out there,
         | resumes from people completely unqualified (like tech support
         | people applying for Staff Software Engineer roles), or mad-libs
         | style resumes where people threw word salad into a PDF while
         | forgetting to tell me what they actually did ("spearheaded
         | initiative to reach across the company and leverage synergies,
         | increasing company revenue by 23%")
         | 
         | It has been like this for a long time. ChatGPT only seems to
         | have emboldened more people to switch to spamming resumes and
         | sending vacuous applications everywhere.
        
       | typeofhuman wrote:
       | Please let this become a trend elsewhere as well.
        
       | yinser wrote:
       | Is it possible to waste a recruiters time?
        
         | chad_strategic wrote:
         | Out of pure frustration, I have written code to do this.
        
       | robertclaus wrote:
       | My experience the last few months is that the saying "It's who
       | you know, not what you know." is alive and well. For jobs where I
       | met the hiring manager (referral, networking, etc.) I had 2 out
       | of 3 applications lead to offers. For resumes submitted online I
       | had 1 out of 50 even respond.
       | 
       | Obviously there's some alignment - I know people working in the
       | area I know best - but from what I've experienced the hiring
       | teams at small companies are struggling almost as much as
       | candidates to figure out this brave new world.
        
         | chipdart wrote:
         | > For jobs where I met the hiring manager (referral,
         | networking, etc.) I had 2 out of 3 applications lead to offers.
         | For resumes submitted online I had 1 out of 50 even respond.
         | 
         | I don't think this means what you think it means. In fact, I
         | only see survivorship bias in your personal anecdote.
         | 
         | Meeting the hiring manager usually takes place after resume
         | filtering. This means that you received offers in processes
         | where you weren't rejected at the very first stage. That's
         | what's expected, isn't it?
         | 
         | Also, it's quite plausible that those hiring processes where
         | you received no feedback happened to be fake job postings
         | where, even though a job ad is posted, there is no job offer at
         | all.
        
           | ghaff wrote:
           | I don't know. Every job since the one out of grad school--
           | admittedly only a few (I tend to stay at jobs for a long
           | time)--involved pinging someone I knew well (former co-
           | worker/client/consultant who worked for us). HR or recruiter
           | was never involved until later in the process so no HR
           | filtering involved.
        
           | kgermino wrote:
           | I think the question is how are you meeting the hiring
           | manager?
           | 
           | If you submit a resume to a recruiter (or worse, online job
           | posting) and get to the hiring manager you've absolutely gone
           | through a bunch of formal screening steps. However if, as I
           | believe GP is describing, you're able to connect with them
           | through a side channel (such as a referral) you usually
           | haven't gone through the formal screening so much as you've
           | skipped it entirely. That obviously will dramatically
           | increase your odds of success but it's not the same as
           | getting through the resume scan and HR filter
        
             | chipdart wrote:
             | > I think the question is how are you meeting the hiring
             | manager?
             | 
             | In each and every single time I met a hiring manager, that
             | took place after the early interview rounds where the bulk
             | of applicants were filtered out.
             | 
             | In some cases, the hiring manager was the very last
             | interview.
             | 
             | To me, claiming that meeting the hiring manager is somehow
             | the key step to get hired is like stating that the key step
             | to get hired is to not be rejected.
        
               | bddgyrdfv wrote:
               | The entire point was that you meet the hiring manager via
               | personal referral and _not_ by running the gauntlet.
               | 
               | Otherwise, yes, it's tautological.
        
           | meristohm wrote:
           | > referral, networking, etc
           | 
           | Presumably not through the bottom-up filtering process.
           | 
           | All of my current jobs (I'm in my 40s, been working for money
           | outside the family since my teens), and most of all the jobs
           | I've ever had, were thanks to reaching out to individuals to
           | make a connection, or leveraging an existing connection.
        
             | lolc wrote:
             | I got my first job through family. From then on, I found
             | all jobs through job ads.
        
       | euroderf wrote:
       | > So far, over 3,000 people have applied to one open data science
       | vacancy at a US health tech company this year. The top candidates
       | are given a lengthy and difficult task assessment, which very few
       | pass
       | 
       | Obviously the company should select one large project, break it
       | down (with the help of AI) into 1500 steps, and farm it out to
       | candidates as "task assessments" that can be cross-checked and
       | then folded together into an app.
        
       | hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
       | The interesting thing to me reading this is that it's basically
       | saying how much _recruiters and hiring managers_ dislike /are
       | wary of this AI-infused job application process. On the flip
       | side, I've heard tons of complaints on the other side from job
       | seekers: not just that job hunting is hard in a down market, but
       | that the reign of modern ATSes means that it's a constant "battle
       | against the algorithm" to even get noticed, tons of fake or
       | outdated job postings, and rarely even an acknowledgement about
       | the state of the application.
       | 
       | I mention this because this seems like an area where lots of
       | people wanted to throw AI at the problem, but I have a tough time
       | finding anyone, on either side, that thinks that automation and
       | AI improves the process in any way.
        
         | dangus wrote:
         | You hit the nail on the head there.
         | 
         | All these applicant aid products like AutoApplyAI are solving
         | the problem that _employers_ created. It's been a huge burden
         | for applicants to go through the process. Any tool I can use to
         | automate my job application process is something I'm going to
         | immediately be interested in.
         | 
         | Plus, applicants need the job to survive, while the employers
         | aren't really on that same level of desperation.
        
       | Dah00n wrote:
       | If they use recruiters, I'm out. They are part of the problem.
        
         | mmcconnell1618 wrote:
         | Do you differentiate between a full time recruiter employed by
         | the hiring company and 3rd party recruiting firms? A recruiter
         | on the payroll can be a useful first screen and usually has
         | good knowledge about what the company is seeking.
        
           | knallfrosch wrote:
           | I have to say that recruiters are worthless _to me_ because
           | they don 't have the authority to actually decide something.
           | They know nothing about the role, they don't disclose their
           | salary range, I don't trust them with mine either.. but hey,
           | if it's a short call, it a hoop you have to jump through.
           | 
           | At least the company recruiters never call you again.
        
       | noobermin wrote:
       | To dang, is this a bug? This was posted 8 minutes ago with 8
       | points yet has 40+ comments
        
         | erik_seaberg wrote:
         | Some of the comments were from 2-3 hours ago. I think someone
         | bumped the story's time by resubmitting.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265420 made the front
         | page but chapulin was the first user to post the article and I
         | wanted them to get the credit. Their original submission was
         | too old to re-up (a la
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308) so I made a
         | fresh copy of it and moved the comments.
         | 
         | It does make the timestamp thing (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateR
         | ange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) even more confusing than
         | usual. Sorry!
        
       | nnurmanov wrote:
       | Attention is all you need. This is the success formula. You can
       | get attention via referrals or some other hacks.
        
       | Aurornis wrote:
       | I've participated in a coaching and resume review program for
       | many years. Most college students always struggled to write
       | resumes, but at least they were aware of their shortcomings and
       | reached out for help.
       | 
       | Something about ChatGPT has convinced a lot of them that they
       | don't need help or even to put much effort into the process. They
       | hate writing resumes, so they just dump some words into a ChatGPT
       | prompt and copy-paste into a resumse.
       | 
       | To the inexperienced, the ChatGPT structure feels like brilliant,
       | polished content magically appearing on their screen. They aren't
       | looking at the content, but rather the structure, which ChatGPT
       | can formulaically provide.
       | 
       | Then recruiters get their resumes and instantly recognize ChatGPT
       | garbage, because it's their job to read resumes and they've
       | become good at recognizing low signal to noise ratio ChatGPT
       | output.
       | 
       | One of our local college programs had a company reach out and ask
       | to be removed from their referral pipeline because the majority
       | of the resumes submitted by their students were clearly ChatGPT
       | drivel. It was a real blow to the people who had been working
       | hard to set up these relationships and give the students
       | opportunities to apply for.
        
         | marcosdumay wrote:
         | The exact same dynamic used to happen with Word templates, and
         | I'm sure there were something similar before it.
         | 
         | Then entire idea of a resume is garbage, the thing is useless
         | for filtering candidates, and everybody that actually succeeds
         | at either side of the hiring game does it by not relying on
         | resumes. Yet hiring professionals insist this is the way,
         | worldwide.
        
       | esafak wrote:
       | A new problem I'm facing on the hiring end is an influx of
       | imposters from Asia. Everything they claim is a lie, from their
       | name, citizenship, location, picture, to their job history. They
       | even set up fake company sites. And of course they use LLMs to
       | help them pass the interview. I assume it's so they can bilk
       | gullible companies and perhaps do some corporate espionage. I
       | don't know. I haven't encountered anyone try to deepfake their
       | voice and appearance but I assume it's a question of time.
       | 
       | Telltale signs: stilted English, poor internet connection, lack
       | of LinkedIn connections, and an inability to drill down on their
       | fake histories. One claimed to have contributed to an open source
       | BI project while working at Facebook, so I pulled up its GitHub
       | repo and said "Let's see your code". "It's on Gitlab!" he
       | protested. No, it's not; I'm staring at it on GitHub. Another
       | claimed to have worked as a front-end engineer at Netflix. Great,
       | I have friends there. Which team? "The front-end team". I
       | understood that you were a front-end engineer, but which team?
       | Again: "The front-end team!"
       | 
       | In that instant I recalled the scene in _Coming to America_ where
       | Eddie Murphy 's character is asked about his education and he
       | confidently replies that he's attended "The University of the
       | United States".
       | 
       | https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/4378beae-fdfb-4e6b-a7a9-667f365...
        
         | surfingdino wrote:
         | Last year I was reviewing about a dozen answers to the
         | questions we were sending candidates to complete at home. In
         | all cases those a*holes used ChatGPT to write answers and what
         | did ChatGPT use? Original Python docs recombined with blog
         | posts. I was able to verify this by copying passages from their
         | answers and pasting them into Google. When I showed this to the
         | hiring manager they had a serious conversation with the agency.
         | It would have been hilarious if I did not know that some of the
         | candidate were real people with good experience but too lazy to
         | write simple code.
        
           | esafak wrote:
           | You can't assign homework any more. I was never into them
           | anyway.
           | 
           | One clumsy candidate accidentally revealed his cards by
           | pasting the prompt he'd used in our chat window, like that
           | paper whose introduction began "Certainly, here is a possible
           | introduction to your topic." https://www.reddit.com/r/China/c
           | omments/1beaqya/obvious_chat...
           | 
           | Another was unable to explain why his code was structured the
           | way it was. I asked a multipart question that required
           | refactoring, knowing that these tools are not good at that,
           | or enforcing a consistent style. His initial code was a self-
           | contained class and the refactor introduced a function
           | outside of the class that also should have been a method. I
           | asked him why he did that and, of course, he froze.
        
           | knallfrosch wrote:
           | Did you tell them that AI was not allowed?
        
       | vundercind wrote:
       | This has long seemed like the obvious solution, to me, for
       | publications that saw an untenable spike in submissions for the
       | same reason.
       | 
       | Just make 'em print and send a it in the mail. Instant reduction
       | by 95+%, most of the best stuff still comes in.
        
         | williamdclt wrote:
         | > most of the best stuff still comes in
         | 
         | I don't see why "the best stuff" would be more acceptant to
         | printing than the rest. Actually I'd expect that the best
         | candidates won't bend over backwards to submit their
         | application, they have choice
        
           | patrickmay wrote:
           | I suspect it's not the printing but the postage that adds the
           | most friction.
        
           | vundercind wrote:
           | If you can provide much-faster decisions, that's huge. You'd
           | not turn off serious submissions that way. Many of these want
           | to have an exclusive option at the story for _months_ because
           | their workload is so high. Cut that to even 60 days and you'd
           | make writers very happy.
        
       | robbyiq999 wrote:
       | still waiting for the LLM driven 3d avatar robot voice during my
       | 10th hr zoom interview "can you eve scale bro? Can you even AWS
       | firehose kafka kubernetes bro? Good! now show me how the minimum
       | subsequence of this array in Ologn"
        
       | dangus wrote:
       | > ...in one case when the person moved on to the next interview,
       | they couldn't answer questions about the task. "Not only have
       | they wasted their time, but they wasted my time," says the
       | recruiter. "It's really frustrating."
       | 
       | I'm on the prospective employee's side here. If I had to do a
       | complex task for every application I'd be driven mad. That's a
       | waste of the applicant's time.
       | 
       | Plus, the employee you should want to hire is the employee that
       | can do tasks in the most creative low effort way. Why should I
       | hire the employee who takes 8 hours to grind through a task when
       | the employee who uses ChatGPT to bust it out in 1 hour gets the
       | same correct output?
       | 
       | Company recruiters have had the leg up on applicants for years
       | with ATS systems. I'm glad the applicants have flipped the script
       | and forced the recruiters to actually do work to find good
       | candidates.
        
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