[HN Gopher] I automated my job application process
___________________________________________________________________
I automated my job application process
Author : paul-tharun
Score : 210 points
Date : 2024-12-28 15:26 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.daviddodda.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.daviddodda.com)
| ghjfrdghibt wrote:
| This seems like an excellent use of LLM.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| One of the major reasons why applying for jobs sucks so much is
| that companies are flooded with more garbage applications than
| they can process.
|
| So hurray for the tragedy of the commons, I guess. It was nice
| knowing everyone.
|
| On a personal level, I consider the practice espoused by this
| article of flooding the world with automated messages without
| care for how it impacts anyone else to be narcissistic and
| morally reprehensible, not admirable, but whatever floats a
| person's boat.
| qoez wrote:
| Time to go back to handing out resumes in person
| artursapek wrote:
| Exactly. It's funny someone would be so self-unaware as to brag
| about doing this in a blog post
|
| It doesn't matter though. The way to get actual good jobs is to
| be poached. And to get poached, you need to build real projects
| of your own that get peoples' attention. Resume spamming is for
| the plebs.
| kamikazeturtles wrote:
| All the jobs I got over my career, I got by filling out a non-
| conventional long job application form.
|
| I always assumed it's because that's where most job seekers would
| drop off.
|
| It's how I got a job as an HVAC tech without any trade school exp
| and how I got a software dev job without any college, bootcamp,
| or professional exp.
|
| Just some advice for any job seekers out there. The more annoying
| the job application process, the more likely you are to get
| hired.
| lokimedes wrote:
| While agents and HR may be looking to match the bare
| requirements, the hiring manager is likely also looking for
| "alpha" the stuff that escapes formal requirements. My hires
| are usually those that passes the base reqs and provide that
| unique something that the cover letter seems to reveal.
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| > The irony? I got a job offer before I even finished building
| it. More on that later
|
| Nothing succeeds like success. If you are on n attempt, and you
| are geared up for what you will do for n+2, usually the problem
| surrenders its self on n.
| gamerDude wrote:
| It will be interesting to see a SaaS that applies to jobs come
| up.
|
| I wonder if the application process will switch up in the near
| future to people posting their profiles for then company
| recruiters/AI to reach out and contact since if they post a job
| they just get 10k automated applications.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| A fun variant:
|
| - scrape linkedin and apply to jobs based on the result
|
| - take the responses with "positive sentiment" and then contact
| the linkedin person
|
| Service is now connecting people with companies that already
| thought their generated CV was close enough to what they want.
| Call this a "recruitment agency".
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > - scrape linkedin and apply to jobs based on the result
|
| That was my first thought when looking for jobs, but maybe I
| am naive, wouldn't this break their ToS?
| maeil wrote:
| Whoopsie, guess OpenAI et al broke a few million ToSes
| while training their models!
| modmodmod wrote:
| do you really care though?
| Oras wrote:
| There are many, search for jobs copilot or job application
| copilot.
| xianshou wrote:
| One of those cases where the act of building the system serves as
| sufficient qualification in itself, even when the results of the
| system are mediocre.
| DavidDodda wrote:
| that's how I got my new job offer!, I talked about this system
| I was building during a technical interview.
| euvin wrote:
| I've thought about the optics of talking about my own
| automatic job application system or including it on my
| resume, but I thought it'd be risky given the topic (like how
| listing your own startup is frowned upon, if I'm not
| mistaken?). Is it normally considered a bit risky or taboo?
| DavidDodda wrote:
| well, it was during the technical interview, and it was
| just a couple of engineers doing the interview. I was just
| geeking out on all the problems I was solving (and
| creating).
|
| and to be honest, I was too nerves to think about if it was
| risky or taboo.
| the_arun wrote:
| Is cover letter important? Do hiring managers/recruiters read
| those?
| codegeek wrote:
| Depends. As a Hiring Manager, I love cover letters but only if
| it is not a generic copy paste. Don't get me wrong. I don't
| mind a Cover letter that may have some generic stuff about you
| but you must add something specific about the role/company that
| you are applying for and why you will be a good fit. This will
| get you miles ahead of others in the queue.
| DavidDodda wrote:
| how would you rate this?, this email was written by the
| system from the article.
|
| Dear Hiring Manager,
|
| I hope this message finds you well. My name is David Dodda,
| and I am writing to express my interest in the Software
| Engineer position at WIA Software Systems Inc. I am a Senior
| Software Developer with extensive experience in full-stack
| development, and I believe my skills align well with the
| requirements outlined in your job posting.
|
| With a Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communication and
| over 5 years of professional experience, I have honed my
| capabilities in various programming languages and
| technologies, particularly in React, Node.js, AWS, and SQL.
| At Black Beard Development Group, I led the development of a
| privacy-focused AI platform and played a pivotal role in
| establishing CI/CD pipelines that improved efficiencies
| across our team.
|
| Your job description emphasizes the importance of developing
| software solutions by studying systems flow, data usage, and
| work processes. In my previous roles, I have consistently
| evaluated user feedback to improve system designs and have
| successfully executed the full lifecycle of software
| development. Additionally, my involvement in agile
| methodologies and my proficiency in AWS aligns perfectly with
| your requirement for cloud and DevOps experience.
|
| Furthermore, I have experience collaborating with teams to
| coordinate the development and integration of computer-based
| systems, ensuring optimal functionality and performance. My
| recent project involving a fantasy sports DApp required me to
| coordinate with various stakeholders, manage expectations,
| and lead technical efforts, making me well-equipped for the
| responsibilities at WIA Software Systems Inc.
|
| I am particularly excited about the hybrid work arrangement
| offered for this role, as I believe it allows for both
| collaborative in-person engagement and the flexibility of
| remote work, which enhances productivity.
|
| Thank you for considering my application. I have attached my
| resume for your review and would welcome the opportunity to
| discuss how my background, skills, and enthusiasms align with
| the goals of WIA Software Systems Inc.
|
| Best regards, David Dodda https://daviddodda.com
| codegeek wrote:
| Honestly, this is a typical generic one where may be you
| just edited the pargraph a bit about "Your job description
| emphasizes the importance of..". I would rather have you
| give me concrete examples. Instead of saying "I have
| consistently evaluated user feedback to..", give me an
| actual example.
|
| Also, a bit too long. Make it shorter.
| DavidDodda wrote:
| thanks for the feedback!
| lostlogin wrote:
| I'm in a completely different field, working in
| healthcare. This letter would rank well above the average
| one I get.
|
| I receive cover letters with typos, the wrong word used,
| poor punctuation etc. If candidates could use a spell
| checking it would be a good start.
| jdbdnej wrote:
| While I would not mind getting a cover letter like that, I
| would not score any points.
|
| It just has zero value. A well written cover letter on the
| other hand would net you a big plus
| Volundr wrote:
| It's highly dependent on the manager I'm afraid and impossible
| to guess who's on the other side of that.
|
| The process outlined in the post also isn't a path to writing a
| good cover letter. You don't want to just go over your resume
| again you want to either talk about things that wouldn't be
| there (e.x. why you want this job specifically, because your
| 100% applying because this is the unicorn job for you, not
| because you need money to feed yourself) or expanding on how
| something on your resume uniquely qualifies you (I worked on
| this project that's very similar to what your doing)
|
| If it's lining up your resume to the job description (you want
| someone who can write Scala, I have used Scala in my past 3
| jobs) a resume is a better format for that. But that's all the
| LLM has context to do.
|
| Oh yeah, ideally you'd also tune your resume to the job too.
| maeil wrote:
| > (e.x. why you want this job specifically, because your 100%
| applying because this is the unicorn job for you, not because
| you need money to feed yourself)
|
| In 99.9% of jobs in the world, there are zero applicants for
| who this truly holds. You might be working at a company
| hiring for a job that's part of the 0.1%, not sure.
| Otherwise, you're just selecting for those who are willing to
| lie as blatantly as required.
| petesergeant wrote:
| When I worked as a recruiter, I'd make candidates write two
| paragraphs of prose to summarize what they could do. Much
| easier to read than picking through a CV looking for clues.
| hansvm wrote:
| I have no clue in general. When I go through applications, I go
| through all the material and anything else I can find about the
| candidate, and cover letters are sometimes helpful. Put
| yourself in my shoes:
|
| - If the cover letter is a rehash of your resume, it's a waste
| of your time and mine. It certainly isn't helpful to your
| application, and if I have too many well-qualified applicants
| then it might be harmful.
|
| - Poorly written cover letters suggest that the applicant
| doesn't care much about this specific opportunity, it's some
| sort of AI/oversees/... scam, or the applicant can't write
| well. They're very helpful for me when there are already other
| data points suggesting identity theft or similar automation
| (nail-in-the-coffin material). Otherwise, they're not
| necessarily a negative, but it's rarely advantageous to
| advertise a lack of some skill, and it does disqualify
| applicants from some roles.
|
| - Some cover letters are especially compelling. Suppose your
| resume just has you as a pizza delivery driver, but your cover
| letter goes over the app you wrote and the data science behind
| it to optimize your hourly earnings. Suppose your work history
| is in web tech, but you're actually better at low-level
| optimizations and are applying here because you think that
| skill set is a good fit. I prefer varied backgrounds anyway, so
| you'll probably get some form of screening interview unless
| there's enough other evidence that you aren't qualified (e.g.,
| junior experience for a senior role) -- I try to bias toward
| giving everyone a chance while not wasting too much of anyone's
| time, and I'm fine having a busier calendar to make that
| happen.
|
| None of that helps you get the job though; it helps you get an
| interview. If your experience is that you're well qualified and
| usually land the job once you get into an interview, and if
| your cover letter has some information your resume lacks, you
| should definitely add one. If you normally struggle through the
| interview process, it'd be surprising for you to have an honest
| cover letter which would help you land the job in the first
| place, so I probably wouldn't bother.
| gaws wrote:
| In most cases, they are not important. All the offers I
| received asked for a cover letter, and I always submitted a
| one-line PDF that said I would discuss my work history and why
| I'd like the job only in an interview.
| thih9 wrote:
| This is some next level bs spam. I know job search in IT is
| difficult these days but this kind of automation will not make it
| better; if anything, the opposite.
|
| The most recent place where I applied and my earlier workplace
| both asked for a video recording early during the recruitment
| process. I guess employers will ask for in person interviews
| next.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Yup, in person and worst, only in network.
|
| So you end up using technology to de-evolve society back to
| tribes.
|
| Still, at least we are other people who are creating this AI
| technology and all of its application ... so we see the pain up
| close and we can start to steer it in a better direction that's
| more healthy for society.
|
| But you know we have to find our integrity first.
| codegeek wrote:
| Nice. But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want.
| Flooded with auto submitted Resumes. I posted a job recently and
| got 100+ resumes in 2 days and 99% were not even remotely close
| to being a good fit. I struggled to sort through so many Resumes
| to find someone worth interviewing.
|
| The problem is that with so much noise, good candidates may get
| ignored or rejected by mistake. And the cycle continues.
|
| I get that the market is bad right now and there are lot of
| people looking for jobs but auto submissions and flooding job
| sites wont work. Not for the ones that matter anyway.
| zachthewf wrote:
| Were you able to find good candidates from your post
| eventually?
| codegeek wrote:
| Not yet. It has been a week and I have 500+ resumes sitting
| in the inbox. Not fun.
| dazed_confused wrote:
| Good luck! Sounds terrible
| ArlenBales wrote:
| Just curious, do you use LLMs in your reviewing process?
| e.g. Summarization, prioritization, etc.
| codegeek wrote:
| Thinking about it. Might build my own tool.
| cbsmith wrote:
| That's okay. You can just use a bunch of LLMs to filter through
| to the few resumes you would have gotten before people used
| LLMs to find jobs... ;-)
| zwnow wrote:
| Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. You are the reason people
| go for these kinda solutions. Hiring process is complete bs.
| imnotjames wrote:
| What do you suggest?
| petesergeant wrote:
| Add a tiny captcha-like task that takes a real candidate
| who read the job ad 20 seconds to do, but won't get done by
| spray and pray candidates.
| feznyng wrote:
| Bunch of services that can do captchas now. It'd maybe
| lessen the load on employers but then job seeking becomes
| pay to play. The candidate who can afford one of those
| services + automation beats out those who can't. It's
| already an arms race of sorts.
| narnarpapadaddy wrote:
| If one is not currently employed as an engineer?
|
| Frankly, seriously consider a career change. The ladder has
| been pulled up for entry-level positions due to AI,
| interest-rates, etc. This will come back and bite us as an
| industry, but it'll be 10 years from now and most people
| can't wait that long.
|
| I can't speak for everyone, but 3000+ applicants for a
| single opening is typical at my org. The odds of any given
| individual getting in are essentially zero. Referrals get
| priority over everyone else, even candidates that are on-
| paper better qualified.
|
| It sucks for everyone involved, especially for job hunters.
| But from the hiring side, truthfully, there's no end in
| sight.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Resumes must be dropped off at the office in person.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Have you tried using AI to screen the AI generated
| applications?
| programjames wrote:
| The issue is, if you're looking for only one hire out of a
| thousand applicants, you need a 99.9% accurate AI. HR isn't
| that good, so it'll be mildly difficult to train an AI to be
| that good.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| What's our alternative? It doesn't seem to be "carefully
| consider and apply to a handful of highly relevant postings". I
| don't see the downsides for candidates to play the numbers
| game.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Hiring and placement agencies that do prescreenings and
| provide CVs in standardized formats to employers and them
| getting paid according to how much salary the hire will get.
|
| win-win-win situation for every party, they got me my last
| two jobs in Vienna
| codegeek wrote:
| Yes but now you need these agencies to prescreen for you
| which is a very expensive and time consuming process. Also,
| I have used some before and not all agencies are worth the
| time or money. Most of them are glorified Keyword scanners.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| We only ever used body shops when we were really desperate.
| _blk wrote:
| Don't look at it as us vs them. Recruiters are part of your
| (future) team. Maybe not your direct team, but once you get
| bad people in your team you'll want them to do a better job..
| Chicken vs egg. Apply where you actually want to apply and
| trust that the recruiter does his job.
| saulpw wrote:
| I have trusted in the past, and verified that the recruiter
| does not in fact do their job.
| codegeek wrote:
| The downside is that if all candidates are thinking like you,
| you are now hoping that the hiring team can sort through 100s
| of garbage Resumes to may be find you who may be a good fit.
| Your odds of being called for Round 1 is now much lower due
| to all that noise. Doesn't matter whose fault it is. Your
| probability of being called for Round 1 just went down
| significantly and this hurts you.
| petesergeant wrote:
| I can't stop other people doing this, and not doing it if
| other people are is a disadvantage for me. Imprisoned in a
| dilemma of our own making.
| imnotjames wrote:
| What happens when you get an interview and spend time for
| a company you don't want to work for?
| petesergeant wrote:
| I'll turn it down if further research shows I don't want
| to work there? Why upfront my research if I'll be ghosted
| anyway? Turning down interviews because "circumstances
| have changed" is hardly unusual
| kmac_ wrote:
| Ghost jobs on one side, ghost applications on the other.
| Some people will just send automated applications
| everywhere, every day, and check for responses. That
| leads to ghost responses, and the cycle continues.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Responding to someone to say you got their message but
| have changed your mind isn't ghosting. Job hunting would
| be less miserable if rejections happened in a reasonable
| time frame
| em-bee wrote:
| interview practice
| drillsteps5 wrote:
| Nice wordplay! (see Prisoner's dilemma)
| ruchirp wrote:
| +1
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I would have thought the one thing these ATS systems could
| do by now is filter the obvious garbage resumes.
| pixelsort wrote:
| The hiring teams are employed. If they aren't in a position
| to fix the dynamics then nobody can. HR enjoys a vaulted
| position under which their suffering KPIs allow them to
| point their fingers at the market and shrug the blame from
| their shoulders . It isn't like they are going to suddenly
| band together and boycott AI. We've all had our sip from
| the fountain of eternal laziness and now we all want more.
| em-bee wrote:
| that ship has sailed. companies already get 100s of
| applications for every job post even without candidates
| automating applications.
| cess11 wrote:
| Sorting a few hundred documents don't seem like a very hard
| task for a software company.
| pishpash wrote:
| Referrals and networking? When has submitting a resume to a
| portal ever been the way to find a job other than a cookie
| cutter one?
|
| Apply like a bot, work like a bot.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I haven't seen the power of referrals for 10 years now. At
| work I can give you a "referral" by uploading your resume
| to our ATS. That's it. It receives no more consideration
| than if you were to click Easy Apply on LinkedIn as far as
| I'm aware.
| yuliyp wrote:
| That type of referral indeed is mostly worthless (it
| might get you actually looked at by a human instead of
| rejected before that). Useful referrals are the kind
| where you go chat with your friend, figure out what they
| want in a job, then go find the hiring manager and tell
| them about this amazing ex-colleague who's a perfect fit
| for the role. That gets the candidate treated seriously.
| Sometimes it doesn't work out, but definitely gives the
| candidate a fair shot.
| ghaff wrote:
| At a former employer, I sort of hated the referral
| ambassador or whatever it was called thing (with
| financial rewards attached I think). I always felt it
| encouraged quantity over quality. I actually sent a
| couple people I knew off on their merry way and suggested
| a couple others just go to the job site. On the other
| hand, I got several jobs through people I actually knew
| and had worked with in some manner.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| I referred two friends at my former employer and the
| process has changed in the span of 5 years; first one
| needed at least a short recommendation, second was pretty
| much fire and forget (and hope for the bonus if they get
| hired)
| Terr_ wrote:
| I wonder if we might see the rise a broad but weak "yes
| that's a real person" referral system as opposed to "I
| know that person will be good for the job" referrals.
| sensanaty wrote:
| Referrals in my company basically just guarantee that the
| resume isn't immediately thrown in the trash, doesn't
| really help anyone's odds otherwise. I suspect in most
| companies it's similar, if they even get that much of a
| benefit (unless you're upper management (aka nepotism) I
| guess)
| ghaff wrote:
| Nepotism is most associated with relatives although I
| guess it doesn't have to be. But I've definitely gotten
| several jobs through senior managers I had worked with
| which largely bypassed the whole HR system where it
| existed.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Nepotism is most associated with relatives although I
| guess it doesn't have to be.
|
| IIRC "nepotism" is specifically family/relatives, and the
| larger Venn-diagram circle would be "favoritism."
| mhb wrote:
| Charge $x for a candidate to apply for your job. Put the
| money in an escrow pool. Pay it to the person you hire for
| the job.
|
| Idea 2: Bid to have yourself reviewed for the job. Money goes
| in escrow pool.
| icedrift wrote:
| Betting currency is a terrible solution, especially at the
| junior level when people are trying to start their careers.
| On the other hand, forcing candidates to invest time and in
| exchange guaranteeing their application will be reviewed
| could work well.
| burnerthrow008 wrote:
| Candidates aren't going to apply until you can _actually_
| guarantee that their application will be reviewed and
| given due consideration. And that will never happen
| because the fakers will invest an unlimited amount of
| time, so your review process will fall over.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Meanwhile, I am flooded with recruiter "opportunities" that are
| nowhere near my capabilities.
|
| There's noise all around happening.
|
| Maybe the problem is that spamming people is free.
| _blk wrote:
| Absolutely. I mean I remember 20y ago when someone's solution
| to spam was paying a small fee. Not what you want, but it's
| gotta be somewhere there. There has to be a cost to it, but
| it probably shouldn't be directly monetary. Submission delay
| might work.
| drillsteps5 wrote:
| Requiring applicants to pay a fee will mean that the
| positions that I have to apply for that either do not
| exist, or are opened "just in case", or are market
| research, or the COA positions to push internal candidates,
| or any one of countless similar positions, will require me
| to pay out of pocket. Not exactly fair from my perspective.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Agreed, while paying to reduce spam may work in other
| contexts, in this setting the incentives don't align.
| Imagine if Linkedin got paid every time you applied for a
| listing, the pile of ghost jobs would be practically
| infinite.
| nickff wrote:
| Some of the listing services actually do charge employers
| per applicant, unless they are rejected within a certain
| amount of time (usually 48 or 72 hrs).
| Etheryte wrote:
| The critical distinction here is that the employer pays,
| not the applicant. This direction works, that's roughly
| how all job boards work if you squint, but if it was the
| applicant paying, the incentives would be opposing.
| nickff wrote:
| This system still does incentivize the board to accept
| (or at least not deter) junk or fraudulent applicants.
| programjames wrote:
| Isn't this Musk's solution to stopping Xitter spam? Promote
| subscribed accounts more, so it costs money to speak.
| programjames wrote:
| Isn't a better solution to create a reputation score _just_
| for email addresses? You start out very low, and sending
| emails further lowers your score. However, every email that
| is read (and not marked spam) increases it a little more.
| If reputations start out just marginally above the
| "straight to spam" tolerance level, then spam accounts can
| only get out a few emails.
| jstanley wrote:
| And you can create a new address for every spam message
| you send and never get blocked?
| cherryteastain wrote:
| This situation is basically equivalent to the prisoner dilemma
| and requires jobseekers to spray and pray
| mhb wrote:
| More like tragedy of the commons.
| cess11 wrote:
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/governing-the-
| commons/A...
|
| Enjoy. It's Nobel prize material.
| imnotjames wrote:
| I've run into the same thing.
|
| We don't even have the job posted publicly anywhere and we get
| >100 submissions per day. Many are duplicates. I've found some
| that with some minor research turn out to be foreign organized
| crime. A large number of them had the exact same cover letter
| with changes in the names and past jobs.
|
| Not only is it difficult to find candidates that actually fit
| the job role, it's hard to go through any that are even real
| people.
|
| I've told many friends of mine to use connections and not
| online job postings because it's basically impossible right now
| with the automated resume submission companies.
|
| And then the candidate management tools such as lever told me
| that no, every one of those candidates that applied were real
| people -- even when I provided proof that at least 40 of them
| were linked to a single organized crime group out of China.
| narnarpapadaddy wrote:
| This is my experience as well. The candidate management tools
| (even the AI-powered ones) I've tried have been next to
| worthless.
| cute_boi wrote:
| It seems that many processes, from interviews to real work,
| are increasingly manipulated. I've noticed a pattern with
| candidates employed by certain consulting companies,
| especially in Texas and New Jersey. These companies often
| recruit low-cost labor from India, craft fake resumes, and
| submit them to platforms like LinkedIn.
|
| During interviews, candidates use tools like HDMI dual-screen
| setups, ChatGPT, Otter AI, or Fathom AI to cheat and secure
| jobs. These consulting firms even fabricate green card
| verifications and other documents, enabling them to crack
| most interviews unless the candidate is exceptionally
| unskilled.
|
| Once hired, these companies often delegate the actual work to
| individuals in India, paying them as little as $500 while
| profiting $4,000-$5,000 per month from the arrangement.
|
| We uncovered this issue when we began conducting on-site
| interviews. While these candidates can handle medium-level
| LeetCode problems during virtual evaluations, they struggle
| with basic tasks, like implementing a LinkedList or solving
| simple LeetCode problems, in person.
|
| Alarmingly, these consulting companies are becoming more
| sophisticated over time. This raises a critical question: how
| can genuinely experienced candidates compete in such a
| landscape?
| lostlogin wrote:
| What's the outsourced work from India like? Anything worth
| having?
| citiguy wrote:
| I've done this. It can be hit or miss. Get a great team
| with a strong lead and you'll love them. Unfortunately
| there's quite a bit of opportunity over there so once
| you've trained them up, they're always looking for their
| next (better paying) gig with their new skills. It's rare
| if folks last past a year on your team.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Time difference is tough, unless you're ok with 7am or
| 10pm zoom calls.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I keep holding out hope that one day my totally genuine,
| slightly rusty, slightly nervous, takes all 40 minutes to
| solve the Leetcode medium style will be seen as so
| refreshing and honest I'll be an insta-hire.
|
| Not yet!
| carlosjobim wrote:
| They are taking advantage of the incompetence at the
| workplace you're at. That's just what business is and has
| always been. If you're a fool, you'll be separated from
| your money.
| itronitron wrote:
| why would you ever task an employee to implement a
| LinkedList?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Unfortunately so many people lie about experience that
| you need to so some sort of whiteboard test just to see
| if the candidate really is fluent in the language they
| are claiming 5 years experience with. It can be a really
| simple test.
| itronitron wrote:
| In my two decades of experience, I've never seen another
| software engineer implement a linked list or even _use_ a
| linked list. There are better, and more interesting,
| questions to be asking.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I personally wouldn't expect someone to implement one
| (end cases easy to mess up if they are stressed), but
| writing a function to reverse one (foreach, pop front,
| push front) is enough to catch the liars. You can argue
| about how often a std::list vs std::vector is a
| performance win, but I'd run a mile from any developer
| who wasn't highly familiar with the basic data structures
| provided by any language they are claiming to be fluent
| in.
| cute_boi wrote:
| Creating linked list is very simple in Java. It is just a
| simple class with next method.
|
| I am sure 12+ years of experience should be able to do it
| easily.
| trentnix wrote:
| _" Please don't flood us with auto-resumes"_
|
| ...
|
| _" Click here to submit to having your resume processed by a
| bot that will do all the filtering for us"_
|
| This might not be you and your company, but it seems to be most
| of them.
| codegeek wrote:
| Agreed. Both sides are bad. Most of these "bots" are useless
| and do a terrible job. I have seen that side as well. Many
| years ago, I was applying at IBM (don't ask) for a role and
| the recruiter told me that the online portal will reject me
| anyway. But not to worry because he knows what buttons to
| click to get me the interview because I was a really good
| fit.
| sensanaty wrote:
| > IBM (don't ask)
|
| Lol I dipped out of further consideration once they sent me
| what the interview process was gonna be like. Like 6
| rounds, whiteboard coding, leetcode crap, "behavioral"
| interviews, a talk with some pencil pushers and some extra
| stuff. I don't know how desperate you have to be to put up
| with that.
| welder wrote:
| What do you think of https://wonderful.dev? You get
| notifications when candidates are interested in your jobs, then
| you can choose to reach out to the ones you want to apply.
| thedougd wrote:
| I'm at a point where I'm almost willing to ignore the first few
| days of applicants. They're all spray and pray junk. A week or
| two in and the applicant quality is significantly better.
| codegeek wrote:
| Really good point. But the issue is that some job sites
| (indeed for example) wants you to pay to play. If you reduce
| the sponsorship or daily cost, the resume count also goes
| down. But regardless, I have seen the same. 1st few days are
| nightmare. I am 1 week into the job posting and have 500+
| resumes. This after I have rejected at least 100 already.
| Madness.
| programjames wrote:
| Ah, now I know to do my spray and pray on week-old job
| listings ;)
| Plasmoid wrote:
| The current advice meta is that you want to apply asap since
| "many" companies ignore the stragglers.
| voidr wrote:
| Hiring agents have been spamming potential job seekers for
| years with garbage and then came up with the abomination known
| as ATS, which makes it very difficult to argue that job seekers
| should not use automation.
|
| Either the market needs to come up with a good solution that
| encourages good behavior from both sides or the governments can
| step in and start regulating.
| robocat wrote:
| > both sides or the governments can step in and start
| regulating
|
| How could regulations help?
|
| Both sides already have good incentives to match positions to
| candidates; yet we are collectively failing.
| Plasmoid wrote:
| Only sort of. Lots of employees are only looking for any
| job and the adverse selection nature of hiring makes the
| typical job seeker pool look worse than average.
|
| On the company side, only some people in the organization
| are strongly aligned with hiring. The vast majority are
| indifferent or even somewhat negative as new hires mean
| more work.
| voisin wrote:
| I haven't hired in years but I am surprised there aren't AI
| agents that can intelligently rate the compatibility of resumes
| to your job posting
| bostik wrote:
| There are recruiting agencies who have tried this method:
| "Use AI to match the most relevant candidates to the job spec
| you gave us."
|
| Spoiler alert, it doesn't work. The result is a mountain of
| overfitted garbage, with keyword spamming like there was no
| tomorrow. And they all find the _same_ unqualified
| candidates.
|
| If you're a recruiter, you're supposed to find the qualified,
| non-trivial to surface candidates. And yes, unfortunately
| that means it's a lot of hard work. (The top-notch agency
| recruiters value their personally built candidate networks
| for a good reason.)
| the_snooze wrote:
| As a hiring manager, I've chosen to opt out of this system
| altogether. Instead of public postings, I just poll my network
| and post job announcements in private channels in my
| professional community. Much higher signal-to-noise ratio.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of people here hate this but the few jobs I've
| gotten in the past 25 years or so were always directly
| through people I knew. The resume was pretty much pro forma.
|
| But, yeah, if you don't have a network you're in a more
| difficult position.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I wish I knew how to find one of these channels. My real
| human professional network has slowly evaporated over the
| last decade.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Advice from an old guy that went through this after moving
| to a new area and loosing my phat California income
| eventually. If you aren't working, pickup consulting gigs.
| They will probably suck and be high stress low reward, but
| it will help you build connections locally. Look for ones
| that don't just need a body but that really need help so
| you are in a position where your work is visible. Heck once
| I got in most of the 'come in and clean up our mess' jobs
| wanted to hire me to manage their teams/projects. Not ideal
| but it paid well and I have a pretty limited pool of bog
| standard dev work (or worse, internal IT dev) where I live
| anyways.
| DavidDodda wrote:
| I am with you on that. applying for jobs indiscriminately is
| bad. but right now llms have got to a point where they are
| pretty good at pattern matching job requirements with skills in
| my resume. it's smart enough to not apply for php heavy
| projects/jobs when given a MERN stack developer resume.
|
| I saw this as a marketing kind of problem, your conversion is
| based both on number and quality of your leads.
| vunderba wrote:
| With automated hiring spam and our industry's _tenuous grasp_
| of basic integrity with actual HN posts proudly boasting of
| their apps to help you cheat during interviews using LLMs,
| several of my friends who assist in hiring at their companies
| have already returned to "on site" interviews to cut down on
| the proverbial chaff.
|
| The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are
| being performed at shared workspaces. That's the world we live
| in now.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Thinking that "in person" will stop or prevent cheating is
| laughable.
|
| For god-sakes, the chess world is freaking out over an ANAL
| BEADS cheating scandal! https://kotaku.com/chess-champion-
| anal-bead-magnus-carlsen-h...
|
| https://github.com/RonSijm/ButtFish
|
| A candidate who wants that job will figure out some way to
| have ChatGPT help them in a way you can't detect, even if it
| also has an impact on their ass health.
| dustyventure wrote:
| If you are dumb enough not to hire someone who is able to
| integrate ChatGPT from analbeads into a conversation while
| looking natural then that is on you.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| As long as the interviewee also reports to work with their
| anal AI interface, what's the problem ?
| godelski wrote:
| You're right, you can't ever stop cheating. That's not the
| point. The point is to make it harder & more expensive. To
| make it not worth it.
|
| Your comment is like "why use AES256? People can still
| brute force it." Sure... good luck
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I'd be absolutely fine going in person to interview for a
| remote job if I thought I had any reasonable chance of
| success with your process. We are talking about where I'm
| going to be working for at least the next few years. That's
| kind of a big deal.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Yeah, it's not about the in-person trip, it's about the
| trip multiplied by the probability that your application
| will be seriously considered as a near finalist.
| vunderba wrote:
| Yeah I get that. My friends (the hiring managers) are in
| relatively large tech hubs (Austin and Seattle), so from
| what I understand 90% of the applicants have been "locally
| sourced". It'd be another story entirely if you had to
| travel a significant distance just for an interview.
| salomon812 wrote:
| > The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are
| being performed at shared workspaces. That's the world we
| live in now.
|
| Nah, if I was running a 100% remote job company ten years ago
| before all of this, I would still absolutely want to meet
| each of my hires in person before inking a deal. Maybe I'm
| old-school but I've been very successful and lucky with
| hiring.
| neofrommatrix wrote:
| What I find most infuriating is that people just don't care,
| even when faced with enough evidence that their strategy of
| mass applying even when they are not a good fit is failing. It
| just makes it harder for everybody else as you said.
| plagiarist wrote:
| This is the human condition. "If everyone would just," but
| everyone will not just. All of civilization is full of these
| tragedies of the commons.
| uncomplexity_ wrote:
| it's number's game anyway on who gets the initial interviews
|
| hate the game playa ;)
| ghaff wrote:
| It all ends up being a nasty feedback loop. (Especially) junior
| people in a somewhat tough market for tech end up spamming
| resumes so companies respond with pretty crappy algorithmic
| filters which basically somewhat randomly toss most of the
| resumes into the bit bucket. Rinse and repeat.
|
| But per downthread comment, applicants don't care if their
| actions make things worse for the market as a whole. And it's
| not clear if they should as a one-turn game. (As someone else
| remarked, Prisoner's Dilemma and all that.)
| programjames wrote:
| There's actually a solution around this: name and shame! Just
| like bad companies get called out on GlassDoor, companies
| should create a reputation system for prospective employees
| (e.g. a professional credit score). This already exists for
| potential tenants, so I don't really understand why it
| doesn't exist for potential employees given they occur at
| about the same frequency and have a similar amount of money
| trading hands.
| ghaff wrote:
| Applicants have long sprayed and prayed even when it
| involved sending physical letters. Some of the current
| systems have decreased the effort per company applied-to
| but, for entry-level employees, it was rarely a carefully-
| targeted thing for new professionals. It was always a
| numbers game to some degree although admittedly the scale
| and tools involved have changed.
| programjames wrote:
| The smaller scale in the past made it so managers either
| knew (at least by reputation) the person submitting the
| resume, or it was not too expensive to find out.
| Nowadays, jobs are getting 100x as many applications,
| most of which are far lower in quality.
|
| University admissions has followed a similar trend, going
| from 5-10 being "spray and pray" twenty years ago to
| 20-30 applications nowadays. However, it didn't increase
| as much because (1) each application costs money, and (2)
| most universities expect a cover letter. It still costs
| quite a bit to filter the applicants, but the fee helps
| pay for that.
| ghaff wrote:
| The "solution," such as it is, is that companies strongly
| bias towards referrals and managers towards people they
| personally know. And, from some conversations I've had,
| that is exactly what is happening. With the result that
| it's tough for junior people with no real networks (OK
| maybe their school is a signal) because companies really
| don't want to sift all the junk they're getting and I
| don't really blame them.
| programjames wrote:
| That's a solution, but I'd prefer a system that, when
| ideal/efficient, is optimal.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure what other solutions look like: Gatekeeping
| of various forms including institutions and
| certifications, letters of introduction like essentially
| the US service academies, standardized tests, informal
| networks, etc.
| programjames wrote:
| There's two distinct reasons why more qualified
| candidates might get skipped over:
|
| 1) There is too much noise occluding their signal.
|
| 2) There is a form of gatekeeping going on.
|
| Gatekeeping only really works in exploitative systems
| (e.g. "me and my children are the masters, and you and
| your children are the slaves") or when the noise is so
| high that companies wouldn't gain much from not
| gatekeeping (e.g. Harvard admissions in the late 1800s).
|
| So, if you don't exist in an exploitative system,
| providing more signal is going to both benefit deserving
| candidates and punish gatekeeping companies. I don't see
| why a reputation score would increase gatekeeping.
|
| At the end of the day, every applicant could be ranked on
| their ability at the job. Wouldn't it be best for
| everyone--companies and prospective employees--to know
| where they rank up, so they don't waste time applying to
| hundreds of jobs or sifting through hundreds of
| applications?
|
| The only people who are hurt are the hustlers: people who
| spend far more time hustling for a position than gaining
| the skills needed to do well in that position. Their goal
| is the extreme limit of noise, where success rate is
| directly proportional to how many applications are filled
| out, and I have no sympathy for the destruction of the
| commons (that I have to live in).
| the_snooze wrote:
| >OK maybe their school is a signal
|
| "School" is quite variable.
|
| Weak signal: you only went to class and did OK in them.
|
| Strong signal: you had an internship, or undergrad
| research experience, or part-time employment as a
| TA/tutor, or have a completed project to show off, or
| some kind of non-trivial community/group/club/fraternity
| leadership.
|
| Really strong signal: you published a paper with someone
| I know and they recommend you to me.
| ghaff wrote:
| Typically, undergrads aren't publishing papers. I did co-
| author a paper in grad school though it was irrelevant to
| my eventual job.
|
| Most people are looking at whether you just went to
| (whatever they consider) a top tier university.
| the_snooze wrote:
| Absolutely, it's very rare for an undergrad to be on a
| paper. But that's what makes it such a strong signal: it
| shows they had the grit and maturity to contribute to a
| research effort to completion, in a team with people more
| experienced than they are. In an interview, it gives them
| something non-trivial to talk about and be proud of.
| That's very likely a strong junior candidate.
| andylynch wrote:
| You're talking about blacklists.
|
| They are not a new idea, in fact they are well known, but
| also prohibited by law in many places because of their
| widespread abuse.
|
| There's also a more general idea in competition law that
| companies shoul, well, compete their fields, and allowing
| cartel-like behaviour on the labour market is contradictory
| to this.
| programjames wrote:
| A reputation score is only a blacklist if you target
| specific people to tank their reputations.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Yes, that's what happens.
| programjames wrote:
| Is this also your opinion on credit scores used for
| loans?
| lstamour wrote:
| Define the objective metric that you would use to assess
| a candidate's work ethic or reputation credit score.
| Would LinkedIn issue it, as if it were a popularity
| contest?
|
| And come to think of it, actually, credit scores can be
| gamed. It's well known that when companies and
| territories get credit scores they are largely a con
| game, as in based on the conifdence the raters have on
| your future performance, and not objective reality.
|
| Likewise, credit scores can be juiced and tools exist to
| help you improve them and track them. But a bad credit
| score doesn't always mean fiscal mismanagement. It could
| be loans from a predatory lender or due to a medical
| expense or something completely outside the context the
| credit check is to be used for. Credit scores tell you if
| someone has lots of money first, and if they are smart
| with their money second. People with financial means
| often have good credit scores but can be as likely to
| default if their circumstances change. Perhaps more
| likely if the amounts of money at play are greater.
| People got those subprime mortgages with great credit
| scores, somehow.
|
| So... Yeah, credit scores for loans are a form of
| outsourcing of responsibilities. But the point is
| somewhat well taken. The equivalent in hiring to a credit
| score isn't to ask banks but to do reference checks and
| ask a network or former manager about a hire.
|
| Credit scores can easily be discriminatory as much as
| criminal charges (without due process, at least) and
| other unfair systems. We just normalize it because it
| works for most people. We poke fun at it when other
| countries try to come up with e.g. a social credit score,
| though.
| CactusOnFire wrote:
| Just like how many companies have methods available to them
| to remove bad glassdoor reviews (or make fake 5-star
| reviews), this system is even more rife for abuse.
| programjames wrote:
| Credit scores seem to be pretty robust? Maybe this kind
| of system would work:
|
| 1. A third-party assigns everyone a hidden score, and
| gives them a cryptographic signing key.
|
| 2. They can sign off on one-time lookups to companies
| they apply to. Every time their credit score is looked
| up, it decreases to disincentivize "spray and pray".
|
| 3. Companies are incentivized to go directly to the
| third-party (to ensure truthiness), and not divulge the
| score to other companies (since they are in a
| competition).
|
| 4. The actual algorithms used to determine scores should
| stay hidden to avoid manipulation. However, how do you
| also ensure accuracy? Maybe have several dozen reputation
| companies, and apply Shapley values based on hiring
| decisions. To avoid correlation, you should only update a
| reputation's weight when the hiring decision didn't query
| it.
| randomifcpfan wrote:
| College degrees from reputable colleges used to serve
| this purpose, but grade inflation has greatly weakened
| this signal.
| programjames wrote:
| You also want colleges to signal to their applicants, not
| force them to also signal for their alumni. The two will
| naturally be correlated, but you can do better by
| specializing.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Maybe not your company, but it seems hiring companies brought
| this upon themselves with immediate AI rejects of qualified
| candidates, ghost jobs, ghosting candidates after interview,
| etc, etc.
|
| If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to land
| a single interview, then can you blame someone for automating
| it? I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate
| it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already
| found a job!
| xingped wrote:
| 100%, this is a natural reaction to the situation companies
| have created. When you get a rejection response mere minutes
| after submission that claims "after careful consideration..."
| then of course I'm not going to spend any more time than that
| applying to any jobs anymore. Prove a human actually took the
| time to review my resume and I'll actually apply to your
| company like a human.
| maccard wrote:
| If I get 500 applications to a role and spend 1 minute
| writing each person a personalised no sorry, that's 20% of
| my week just writing rejection emails (never mind actually
| reviewing the resume).
|
| I've hired for 3 companies for engineers from entry level
| to staff level, and for non technical candidates for other
| departments. Applicant tracking systems like greenhouse
| send me an email for every application that comes through,
| you get the resume and cover letter attached. There's a
| reject candidate button where you choose why, and it auto
| fills in the template for you with the reason you selected
| (and the email was pre written).
|
| Don't mistake an automated email for assuming your resume
| wasn't looked at.
| salomon812 wrote:
| God, I wish I could respond to denied applicants like a
| human, but the threat of legal action prevents me from
| giving good feedback. I know it sucks, but I'm not sure
| what to do about this, and I'm already so burnt out from
| the hiring process as it is, it's hard to work up the
| strength to do this fight as well.
|
| Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many
| and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...
| Aurornis wrote:
| I tried giving honest and actionable interview feedback
| at first.
|
| A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well
| and tried to use my feedback against me. I had people
| trying to argue that my feedback was wrong, someone
| stalking me across social media and trying to argue
| everything there, and eventually someone who threatened
| to use my feedback as the basis for a discrimination
| lawsuit.
|
| So now we're back to simple "we're proceeding with other
| candidates" feedback.
|
| If we're going to play the blame-game, then you have to
| see the full picture. Many candidates can be awful and
| even vengeful. Many people _do not_ handle rejection
| well.
| salomon812 wrote:
| > A scary number of candidates did not take rejection
| well and tried to use my feedback against me.
|
| This happened to one of my bosses. As a result, I've
| never attempted it.
|
| Except once, a candidate realized at the end of a
| technical screen they had done poorly and demanded
| feedback. I gave an initial bit (shouldn't have, my
| mistake) and instantly turned it around on me.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| At least _some_ kind of feedback is greatly appreciated.
| A simple, "No" would do so much more for me than being
| ghosted.
| lordnacho wrote:
| The line isn't between detailed feedback and brief,
| uninformative feedback.
|
| The line is between saying something brief and saying
| nothing.
|
| Somehow, it has become standard to say absolutely nothing
| instead of telling people a simple no.
|
| I've even had situations where people said they wanted to
| keep talking to me, and then went completely silent.
| gedy wrote:
| > So now we're back to simple "we're proceeding with
| other candidates" feedback.
|
| Hell if companies would even do that - I've spent a lot
| of time (7+ hours) interviewing with some known companies
| including meeting with the VP of engineering and then
| they just stop messaging and ghost you (looking at you
| Glassdoor..)
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I think people are just upset when they submit a resume,
| or even go on an interview, and get NO response at all ..
| I don't think most people care about feedback - they just
| want a response. A one-line auto response would be fine.
| atlintots wrote:
| Yep. As an undergrad, one of my first "proper" interviews
| was with Mozilla for an internship. I was obviously super
| excited since I actually cared about their products. I
| spent a lot of time carefully preparing for the two
| rounds of interviews, just to get ghosted! Sent a follow-
| up email a couple weeks later -- no response! I was
| crushed!
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 100%, this is a natural reaction to the situation
| companies have created
|
| Hiring manager here. I don't like the situation either, but
| to honest a lot of what you're seeing is a natural reaction
| to the shenanigans that applicants are doing.
|
| When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people
| who aren't even close to qualified and obviously didn't
| read the job description, you understand why we're not
| sending custom written rejection letters to every single
| application.
| icedrift wrote:
| I think their main complaint (or at least mine would be)
| is the laziness in many companies recruitment strategies.
| As an applicant in the software space I used to only
| apply to roles where I fit 70% or more of the
| qualifications but there is no difference in how often I
| get an interview compared to blindly applying to anything
| in the web space. I have 0 incentive to take the time to
| only apply to jobs I'm qualified for.
|
| This is one of the few aspects of hiring I feel
| government employers handle better than private. My state
| hold monthly events where you can just show up and talk
| to a representatives and if you pass the vibes check you
| are virtually guaranteed a proper interview.
| robocat wrote:
| The weird part is that your response to being ignored as a
| unique person is to treat companies as though they are all
| exactly the same. The relationship is not assymetrical. I
| also wonder whether the signals we interpret from the
| application process have much correlation with whether the
| job is actually worthwhile?
| plagiarist wrote:
| I also find it hard to sympathize. This is an industry that
| is notorious for emailing software developers with irrelevant
| job offers.
|
| We know from the irrelevant offers that many professionals
| have automated the processes for casting a net. How it is a
| problem if individuals do that in reverse?
| lolinder wrote:
| > it seems hiring companies brought this upon themselves
|
| You're missing the point. The primary people who suffer for
| this environment isn't hiring companies--they'll eventually
| work through all the resumes and find _someone_ who will be
| qualified to fill their open roles, it 's just much more
| expensive--the primary people who suffer for this is
| qualified employees who now have to work that much harder to
| stand out from a sea of garbage.
|
| Your odds and my odds of having our resumes thrown out
| summarily are 100x what they were a few years ago, because
| time-per-resume has dropped dramatically. _That 's_ the
| fallout from this trend to be concerned about, and _we 're_
| the real victims of it, not the hiring companies.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Alas, in this case it appears that unchecked competition
| and automation have led to a divergent outcome, creating
| worse outcomes for everyone.
|
| Who will champion the necessary regulations? In terms of
| financial incentives, employers can pay lower wages when
| candidates have a tougher time getting interviews, and
| individual candidates usually can't afford lobbyists.
| maccard wrote:
| I've been hiring for teams for a few years now, and I've
| heard people lament these things like you are. In practice
| I've not seen any of these "smart" scanning techniques used,
| it's a recruiter comparing resumes to a checklist I gave to
| them (5-ish years experience, maybe a degree role dependent,
| or something that you think is super relevant, one of
| c#/java/kotlin, hiring for a mid level role so we expect some
| amount of experience at being self sufficient) and they
| filter the hundreds down to 10-15 that they screen and pass
| 4-5 on to me.
|
| We did some spot checks on resumes that were passed on to
| make sure we were filtering ok and the quality was awful - a
| significant amount of people were applying for jobs asking
| for 5 years experience in a Java-like language with no
| experience, no degree and a half assed cover letter about
| being a good learner. A decent number were data scientists
| who had 2 years of python experience, and a surprising number
| were wildly over-qualified people who I realised after
| speaking to one or two they were actually trying to sell us
| their consulting services. That's before you even get to "are
| they lying?"
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sure - that's how things are meant to work, with recruiters
| providing a valuable filtering service, but it does seem
| that many companies are now using (poor quality) AI
| screening, as well as a slew of abusive application
| practices (the ghosting. etc), and it seems any mutual
| respect between hiring company and candidate is
| disappearing. I don't know what the solution is.
| maccard wrote:
| My point is that that had been my experience hiring in a
| 10 person company and a 30k person company, and that the
| "suggested" AI screening isn't happening - it's probably
| that your application is the same as the other 300
| applications that went in.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I haven't experienced it myself (haven't applied for a
| job in a long time), but there are lots of reports here
| on HN of people getting online applications rejected
| withing minutes, or late at night - definitely some
| companies are using software to filter resumes. This has
| been going on for a long time - it's not just a recent
| "AI" thing - resumes used to get rejected for not having
| the right keywords on them.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to
| land a single interview, then can you blame someone for
| automating it?
|
| Yes, a candidate is responsible for their own actions. This
| logic only sounds good until you're on the hiring side and
| you see the stark difference between the LLM abuser
| applications and the people who are genuinely applying.
|
| Those people who have to apply to 100s of jobs are probably
| in that situation because they're spraying low-effort LLM
| resumes around and most hiring managers can see right through
| this game by now.
|
| > I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate
| it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't
| already found a job!
|
| Doesn't work that way, in my experience. The people who game
| their way through the application process don't suddenly
| switch to honest and high performing employees after they
| start. They continue the process of trying to min-max their
| effort given to the company, riding the line of finding how
| little or how low quality work they can get away with.
|
| The mythical lazy applicant who suddenly becomes a brilliant
| and loyal employee isn't realistic.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| > Yes, a candidate is responsible for their own actions.
|
| Yes, but I think it is overly reductive. As a candidate,
| you've to now apply for a magnitude more of jobs. Tailoring
| resumes per job takes time, and given how many more I've to
| send, this doesn't scale.
|
| Additionally, whatever ATS system is being used might auto-
| reject it because the algorithm decided it's not a match.
| If tailored resumes increased hit rate, that would be a
| different story but that is not the case.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >This logic only sounds good until you're on the hiring
| side and you see the stark difference between the LLM
| abuser applications and the people who are genuinely
| applying.
|
| Thanks to the automated systems put in place on the hiring
| side, you often never see the applications of many of the
| people genuinely applying because your stupid automated
| filters determined they weren't qualified.
| trod1234 wrote:
| As a side note, for a person with a decade of experience in
| IT, its currently taking roughly 1500 applications per pre-
| screen interview to give you an idea where the market is at
| today (and over the past 2 years with the mass adoption of
| AI).
|
| Less than 1/100th of 1%.
|
| You should also see what I had to say about the history of
| slavery, and wage slaves, and what anyone can expect from
| them. The TL;DR is that what you are looking for no longer
| exists if it ever did, because you have adopted a scorched;
| salt the earth strategy for finding labor.
|
| What you call lazy, may actually be incredibly hard working
| (given the current environment) to even get to the point
| where you see them. Is it their fault you didn't recognize
| them for the value they could potentially provide? If you
| pay wages comparable to an office assistant for skilled
| labor, why do you expect to get anything more than what
| that first role provides? The economics of things are
| important.
|
| You need to re-calibrate unreasonable expectations
| (delusions) back to some more close to reality.
| tripper_27 wrote:
| > Those people who have to apply to 100s of jobs are
| probably in that situation because they're spraying low-
| effort LLM resumes around and most hiring managers can see
| right through this game by now.
|
| Just came off a brutal 7 month job search. And that's with
| a resume good enough, and care enough in jobs I applied to,
| that I got to the hiring manager with 1 of 10 applications
| (vs 1:100 or worse which is what I've heard is normal).
|
| I think I interviewed at 50+ companies, which makes 500 or
| more applications.
|
| Yes, this clearly says something about my interview skills,
| but there is a difference between interview skills and
| engineering/software skills-- I've done well in my career
| without having to heavily interview before (senior IC
| level) and I came by that strong resume honestly.
|
| So please be careful about generalizing. I'm an example of
| someone who had to apply to 5x as many jobs as you say
| would be needed, and it would have been 50x if I didn't
| have a strong background and work ethic.
| ponector wrote:
| That is true. Companies are using LLM in ATS to filter
| resume.
|
| If they can bullshit job description to reach more
| applications why candidates cannot do the same with CV?
|
| The result we are going to is almost every CV now will be a
| 99% matching to the job description thanks to LLM tools.
|
| And cover letter is even more useless now.
| Terr_ wrote:
| It's certainly a mutual escalation issue. Even a few bad-
| actors on either side can catalyze more bad-actors on the
| other, especially since most of the badness involves abuse of
| scale.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 'We can use automation tools to just throw away your resume,
| but heaven forbid the average person does' isn't a take average
| people care about.
|
| I look forward to the day the average person has the same level
| of access to agents to counter all this. Oh, Wall Street
| Journal you want to make it difficult to unsubscribe? You want
| me to call, waste time on the phone, etc. OK, I'll just have my
| AI agent call and take up your calling agents time, increasing
| your costs.
|
| ... my AI agent goes through phone tree... finally connected to
| agent... WSJ Support Person:'Hello, Wall Street Journal
| support' My AI Agent: 'please hold as I connect with my human'
| hold music plays... My AI Agent: 'sorry, we are taking longer
| to connect than normal, please hold while you are connected'
| hold music plays...
| sensanaty wrote:
| I've had situations where a reapplication to the same spot
| (with the same resume/details) I got auto-rejected from would
| yield an acceptance.
|
| I blame all the ASTs and companies that fail to give _any_
| feedback whatsoever other than a generic "We went another
| way". If you can't give people the 5 minutes of effort of
| looking over their resume, why do you expect them to respect
| your time instead?
| highcountess wrote:
| I am sure it's tough for you, but imagine being someone looking
| for work when you probably don't even realize the massive
| amounts of noise on the employee side. I get friends asking me
| for input on whether I think that a job listing may be a
| fraudulent or scammy listing, and that's from the top job board
| sites. People have zero trust in the system because the
| corporations have created this toxic hell of commoditized
| humans where you are now all the sudden competing with the
| whole rest of the world in this poss as t-American transitional
| hell we are currently in.
|
| There have been posts here on HN about people applying to 500
| jobs in 8 months and not even getting so much as a human reply,
| let alone a job. There are other posts proving that companies
| are posting false job openings to give the impression of growth
| to Wall Street or also just to argue that more immigration is
| needed.
|
| You may complain about it, but just be happy you haven't been
| replaced by AI application reviewers, because that is coming. I
| suggest you start thinking about pairing down expenses and
| increasing savings. No, seriously. Worst case, you have more
| savings.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Public job board listings have always been flooded with low-
| effort spam applicants, but AI tools have supercharged the
| problem.
|
| The saddest part to me is watching the AI and social media
| malaise infect young mentees. I've been doing volunteer
| mentoring for years. Recent cohorts have been infected with a
| sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they
| need to min-max. It's sad to see smart, motivated young people
| get their opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit
| and TikTok, which teach them that _trying_ is lame and the only
| way to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a
| job, lie your way through interviews, and "quiet quit" by
| testing the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok
| swoop in to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies
| and CEOs, not their own decisions.
|
| The recent tech recession was a huge wake up call for a lot of
| these people. The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug
| malaise to being very humbled when they got laid off due to
| their own low performance. It's depressing for me and other
| mentors who have been trying to warn that workplace behavior
| has consequences for years, but the weird tech market of 2021
| and 2022 led a lot of young people to think the worst thing
| that could happen to them was that they'd get fired and get a
| new job next week with a 20% raise.
|
| The new version of this malaise is believing that AI will take
| their jobs anyway so the game is to use LLMs to bluff your way
| through applications, through interviews, and then use LLMs to
| coast as long as possible at their jobs until the next one.
|
| The problem is so bad that one company withdrew from partnering
| in our internal job board, citing rampant LLM-generated
| applications and obvious LLM cheating in interviews. The other
| side of this is that anyone who makes any effort to be genuine
| and learn (rather than rely on LLMs for communication and
| coding) is automatically in the top 25% or so.
|
| I don't know how this ends. My sense is that the job market is
| continuing to bifurcate into jobs that people take seriously on
| one end and jobs where everyone just does performative LLM
| ping-pong as long as they can get away with it.
| linkjuice4all wrote:
| > Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job
| market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max
|
| Can you blame them? Other comments mention that automating
| applications is just the response to automating rejections,
| so why wouldn't an employee min-max their job when companies
| are min-maxing their employees?
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Yes we can. Resume spamming is not a new phenomenon. Ten
| years ago we were already struggling to sift through the
| nonsense at the big co i worked for, llms just expanded the
| "tam".
| icedrift wrote:
| I don't understand why more companies don't leverage in
| person events. It's something my state does for
| government jobs and as an applicant, it's so much easier
| to chat up an agency rep about what they're looking for
| and schedule a formal interview.
| trod1234 wrote:
| Public job board listings have been spammed by fake jobs
| called ghost jobs. Candidates must overcome that to find real
| jobs, and the boards in general do not remove said postings.
| Candidates are forced to identify characterize and remove
| listings on their side (extra work and cost), through strict
| OSINT background searches. Businesses have forced candidates
| to bear increasing arbitrary costs just to find a job and
| this is a longstanding trend (half a century). Comparisons
| could easily be made of a slave master in uncivilized times,
| where mental coercion and torture has replaced physical
| torture.
|
| What is happening is the same mechanism that RNA interference
| plays in cellular networks. Equilibrium means no one gets
| jobs, and its far more cost effective to ramp up the spam
| (and indirectly the lagging, but adaptive noise floor) than
| to correct the underlying issue. Nothing else works.
|
| Also, there is a big problem with wages when you can't
| support yourself a wife, and multiple children and because of
| cooperation among companies in various little things they
| have integrated, this has gotten worse (like a sieve) over
| decades.
|
| The recent tech recession is manufactured and AI driven. You
| have execs looking to use AI to replace wholesale any workers
| further driving wages down while vigorously replacing any
| workers that would dare to pace their wages independently of
| inflation (just keeping them static in terms of purchasing
| power, not even increasing).
|
| The malaise is because jobs aren't available, and people are
| working for slave wages, they are no better than wage slaves
| in many respects. Companies care far more for short term
| profits than they do for sustainability, despite there being
| clear documented evidence that slaves are the worst most
| costly type of labor because of that lack of agency (malaise
| as you call it).
|
| Slaves do subtle sabotage, and front-of-line block with
| minimal output, they also don't have children. If you read a
| bit of history this goes all the way back to where Spain
| during the inquisition had to outlaw slavery by decree in the
| Americas because threatened their colonies there (from the
| destruction of the natives, i.e. killing themselves in
| granary, or killing their children so they wouldn't have to
| suffer). How bad did it have to get for the government
| responsible for the inquisition to at the same time say, no
| we can't have this. (The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,
| Landis)
|
| Business chooses what they do, Candidates don't choose for
| them. When business has adopted bad assumptions and
| frameworks, you need to re-examine your premises.
|
| Qualified labor didn't just disappear, you filtered it out,
| and the fact that people don't see this shows just how blind
| people are today.
|
| Also, when you black tarp out a landscape for long periods of
| time, of course everything dies underneath it, and its barren
| even if you change and remove that requirement, for a good
| amount of time.
|
| Intelligent candidates have options in that they are flexible
| (and go to other sectors for business when no jobs are
| available). This is a sticky psychological decision, and they
| rarely as a general rule return to previous bad investments.
|
| When you and most other businesses scorch the earth in
| pursuit of profit, why is there any surprise that talent
| can't be found? You selected and filtered against talent in
| the first place by the actions taken.
|
| You can see this perfectly in the fact that for most
| companies, any gap in employment (not continuously employed,
| larger than 6mo), puts you at the bottom of a pile or
| straight to the waste-bin, regardless. False association says
| its because there is something wrong with the candidate, when
| in a downturn there may be nothing wrong. Its completely
| irrational when these people then say they can't find talent.
| The brain drain is real.
|
| Incidentally, experience at companies outside your given
| sector is also considered another redflag as well, with a
| discard or waste-bin non-response. Perfectly competent
| candidates which your HR department, or 3rd-party pre-
| screener (AI), ignored, and that isn't even touching on all
| the protected class violations silently occurring in
| unenforceable ways, thanks to AI's black box characteristics
| (where age, gender, and other things are being used to
| decide).
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| >It's sad to see smart, motivated young people get their
| opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit and
| TikTok, which teach them that trying is lame and the only way
| to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a job,
| lie your way through interviews, and "quiet quit" by testing
| the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok swoop in
| to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies and
| CEOs, not their own decisions.
|
| I was given Tech Lead duties after being hired as a Senior
| SWE, but when it came time for the promotion and pay bump at
| the end of this year, I kept my current title and only got a
| 3% pay increase. All of the feedback was good. If there was
| criticism or bad opinions, it was withheld. I have to wait
| until next year to see if I can get that now while still
| carrying those duties, which is ample time to look for new
| positions.
|
| I was also shown a chart where I was under the 50th
| percentile (roughly 33%) of pay of other Senior SWEs at the
| company. That was a nice disclosure, but they don't want to
| do anything about it. That is patently saying they believe I
| am below average even though I am doing regular senior SWE
| work plus tech lead duties without the title and pay. But
| they don't have any feedback for that. It's possible I just
| accepted a lower salary and they want to keep it as low as
| possible.
|
| There could be other reasons why I didn't get it, but I have
| to guess at those reasons. I'm not going to do more than the
| minimum if they don't give me actionable feedback and don't
| reward taking on additional duties. Their move is to not give
| rewards for working harder, my move is job hopping for that
| increase.
|
| You can't have many of these experiences before you become
| jaded. I am definitely not spending a minute outside of work
| when I take up additional duties on the job and still don't
| get rewarded for it.
|
| I'm going to act like a business of one and just take as much
| as I can for as little as possible throughout the career. If
| that means spamming LLM applications for the next position,
| then so be it I guess.
|
| Playing the blame game about whether workers or businesses
| caused this is pretty pointless, but the simple truth is that
| many people get far more money for far less effort than a
| Senior SWE (and certainly more than manual labor at all
| levels below where I'm at).
|
| All of these stories we hear paints a picture of how the
| world really works, so can you really blame people for
| getting ahead that way and not taking the path of hard work
| when it doesn't reward you? I don't want to be taken
| advantage of and be a sucker - do you?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want.
|
| Job seekers do not care and should not care what you want. They
| want the job, you are paid to find the best candidate. Just
| arriving at a situation where you get flooded with hundreds of
| resumes, means that you or your organisation has failed with
| what you were trying to do. You should have had hand picked
| candidates ready in the pipeline when it came time to hire. You
| are a hiring manager after all.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| >But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want.
|
| This is just a natural response to the automatic screening
| methods that have been used by the hiring side for years.
| Finally the sides have more equal power again in this arms race
| started by the hiring side.
|
| Of course the consequence is that everyone loses and is worse
| off than if this arms race never started, but you (not you
| personally, hiring managers in general) should have thought
| about that before screening automatically. This is on you.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Exactly. I've referred many ex-colleagues to a specific
| position, their CV was perfect but an automated system
| rejected them so that was that. I can't even as a human being
| go talk to the director because the applicant status was
| "rejected" so their hands were tied too.
|
| It's absurd, and only getting worse.
| anarticle wrote:
| Too bad, fix hiring. A five interview cycle that takes nearly
| two weeks which keeps me from applying to other companies who
| are shitting up job listings with fake or ghost listings is
| reducing the SNR of hiring dramatically.
|
| The solution is likely some kind of highly curated list you
| have to pay to be on, for both sides to increase signal and get
| rid of scammers. Many friends of mine have gone down the line
| of replying to recruiters only to be met with "contract to hire
| <20% of market rate and you must move to Nowhere, MN" when
| clearly your profile says what metro you are attached to.
|
| Things are gonna be worse longer I think. Leaning hard on my
| network.
| itronitron wrote:
| Most (not all) position descriptions for software engineers
| include requirements for experience with particular tools,
| applications, or 'frameworks'.
|
| Would you hire a statistician that didn't have 'n' years of MS
| Excel experience, or had never used Pandas?
|
| If I were a statistician with 20 years experience, would I even
| apply to positions listing those as requirements?
|
| It's an interesting problem, as giving information on the
| position requirements clues applicants into the game they need
| to play and also runs the risk of turning some otherwise
| qualified people away.
| la64710 wrote:
| What exactly you can do as a HM to make the life of a job
| seeker easy? I dare say nothing except to just make the quality
| of response better. Even after six rounds of interviews
| candidates who are not selected get not a single honest useful
| feedback and is treated like human scrap with a soulless
| rejection. Beleive me as a job applicant I have zero sympathy
| for the corporates that hire me and I will use every thing at
| my disposal including AI to be more efficient in any way I deem
| fit. The job is just a business transaction to me and I don't
| care about your high and mighty lecture as a HM. GTFO.
| hnthrow213 wrote:
| 2025 - ai agent mass spamming incoming
| PerilousD wrote:
| I'm so glad I retired and can afford to say "No" with an
| occasional "Yes" if it's interesting :-)
| thepuppet33r wrote:
| Congrats on your privileged position! I'm glad you are able to
| retire, but not sure this is the best time to crow about it.
|
| I'm trying to eke out enough money to put in my 401K and hope
| that when it's time for me to retire in a few decades, I'll
| have enough to scrape by on and the economy hasn't exploded by
| then and render my investments worthless.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| As someone who automates everything and normally loves this type
| of thing, my approach for job hunting has been way different.
| Instead of spray and pray, I spend a week or so deeply
| researching where I want to work and figure out how to get there
| role-wise. Everything 100% manual and focused, no more than 8
| total companies.
|
| Maybe spray and pray works if you're more junior, but later in
| your career you'll want to be very picky about where you spend
| your time interviewing because the roles are long term and have a
| huge impact on your life.
| tennisflyi wrote:
| That investment isn't worth it to just be ghosted
| Oras wrote:
| Agree. You need to see it from the other side. Most likely,
| they are receiving 100+ applications, so the chance that your
| application will be seen is too low.
| pknomad wrote:
| This.
|
| I also limit myself on how many applications I see in a day
| (no more than 20 on a busy day, 50 on a not so busy day) so
| that I give every resume a fair read. A team can only do so
| much in a day. It's disheartening when you see a blatant AI
| use (and it goes into the trash bin right away).
| drillsteps5 wrote:
| Basically my approach as well. The problem is that your well-
| thought-through application will get lost in a sea of
| applicants (many using tools similar to the one shown above).
| The tools used by the recruiters/HR also suck and can be easily
| gamed (ie strategically spreading keywords/phrases throughout
| the resume even if the candidate has no actual experience). The
| end result is hiring managers cannot find good candidates to
| interview, and good candidates cannot get interviews.
|
| The core problem is not that the systems suck but that so many
| people in IT lost their jobs in the last 2-3 years so that they
| don't have a choice other than to spray-and-pray (in the end of
| the day you need to put the food on the table).
|
| Things won't improve until hiring recovers (increase in labor
| demand), and some IT professionals probably will pivot to other
| industries (decrease in labor supply), as it happened in 2000
| and again in 2008.
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| This sounds like a good and noble pursuit, but I would be able
| to take exactly one ghosting or premature rejection before
| abandoning it completely. There are so many BS reasons
| applications are ignored, I can't see this approach working
| well. Maybe if you can network your way to a manager or
| something
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| There are no foolproof methods. Shotgunning makes it much
| harder to get past the recruiter screen. Yes the high touch
| method leads to larger feelings of rejection but its also
| more likely to actually work.
| bravura wrote:
| With that said, an LLM to a) generate a LONG-list and b) help
| you zero in on your short-list; is something I would pay for.
| sroussey wrote:
| I agree! Not that it's worked as of yet.
| ramoz wrote:
| Something has to give. As a hiring manager I can't filter through
| 100s of resumes or profiles.
|
| Using all the top sites as well that are supposed to make the
| hiring process easier.
| petesergeant wrote:
| That something is hiring a recruitment consultant.
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| Is there a solution that doesn't expose you to the entirety of
| the internet at one time? Proactive networking maybe? Asking
| existing employees if they have friends looking for jobs?
| Oras wrote:
| I'm curious which companies still use emails to receive resumes
| and job applications! This sounds like hell to manage.
| teeray wrote:
| It's astounding that we, as an industry, are so averse to
| licensing developers. It solves the resume spam problem and the
| repetitive LeetCode round(s) that every company now wants. We
| also don't have to settle for the licensing process other
| industries have--ours can be more inclusive of alternative
| development backgrounds, while still providing a meaningful
| quality filter.
| vunderba wrote:
| Yep, I've talked about this at length _for years_. We need to
| bring back the PE Exam to help guarantee some minimal level of
| competency in prospective applicants.
|
| https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin...
|
| But this is one of the most entitled industries in the
| universe. Even the mere notion of suggesting academic degrees,
| PE Exams and other forms of "gatekeeping" is tantamount to
| shouting Voldemort's name through a megaphone.
| robocat wrote:
| Because MCSE was such a success?
|
| This article unintentionally perfectly rebuts the idea of
| licensing: https://mcpmag.com/articles/2005/05/11/the-death-of-
| paper-mc...
|
| Our industry is one where actual skills should and do matter,
| and much gatekeeping has been reduced.
|
| Professional rote learning is great for mandarin jobs where you
| are working within a static prescribed framework (legal,
| accounting, building codes). It is terrible for jobs that
| require professional taste.
|
| Tell me how you would create a license for a graphic designer
| or UX specialist.
|
| I actually fail to understand idealists that believe that
| licensing might even work. Who are y'all?
| abc-1 wrote:
| > Our industry is one where actual skills should and do
| matter [...] Professional rote learning is great for mandarin
| jobs where you are working within a static prescribed
| framework (legal, accounting, building codes).
|
| Saying things like this reflects poorly on our community and
| demonstrates a poor understanding on how much creativity and
| thought goes into legal and accounting. There's a reason
| there is a large pay band for lawyers and accountants.
| lysium wrote:
| What do you mean with licensing? What's the difference to a
| university degree?
| localghost3000 wrote:
| In my nearly 20 year career, I have never gotten a job by
| applying directly. The few times I've tried it was shockingly
| bad. I feel for anyone where that's the only option they have.
|
| My advice is to invest heavily in your professional network and
| when you have one, treat it like the special garden that it is.
| This takes years to cultivate. I also see people try to come at
| it from a very transactional unauthentic angle which will always
| fail. The right way to approach it is honestly quite simple: make
| friends. Be nice. Help people. Mentor. Etc. Don't expect anything
| from it. People remember that stuff. Opportunities find you.
| drillsteps5 wrote:
| In the middle of fruitless multi-month job search, I manually
| view LinkedIn/indeed job sites daily and look for new positions,
| going through requirements, making sure I have the skills and
| experience (also helps with understanding if I need to upskill in
| certain areas), then look up the company, the industry it's in,
| etc. By the time I'm ready to apply to the position I know I'm
| interested in and a good fit for, there's a few hundred
| applications already (LinkedIn shows the count to the
| applicants). I'm like, how is this possible, it's only been 3
| days?..
|
| Well, that's how.
| DavidDodda wrote:
| well, manual application is also a thing, there are people who
| literally make it their job to apply to job listings. you can
| find people offering their services on r/slavelabour. some
| times they take a flat rate/job application, sometimes they do
| percentage of your first paycheck on new job.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/slavelabour/search/?q=job+applicati...
| sroussey wrote:
| Often it's 100 applicants in the first hour.
|
| My advice for both sides: don't use job boards. Use your own
| website.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Just for your consideration, in my experience Linkedin is
| pretty much the worst place to look for a job right now if
| you're a real human that actually knows how to do their work.
| Everyone just clicks apply to everything just to see what
| sticks and the signal to noise ratio is absolute garbage. If a
| company has a jobs section on their homepage, that should
| always be preferred.
| 65 wrote:
| The biggest issue for me was filtering through software engineer
| job listings, since I wouldn't be interested or qualified for
| listings using various tech stacks.
|
| I made a Chrome extension for LinkedIn that would filter out
| listings to exclude certain keywords, e.g. "Rust" or "Java" and
| find only listings that applied to me. From there I could
| manually apply and track my job application status. This saved
| much more time. I had a few macros to paste information which
| sped up the process.
| toasteros wrote:
| Scrolling down to the bottom of this post brought up the "please
| subscribe!" nag screen _and also_ immediately sent me back to the
| top of the page. The modal has poor contrast on the close button,
| so it was just confusing.
|
| If you must nag for subscriptions, you might want to try and find
| a way that does it without interfering with page interactivity.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Every job I've applied to has involved me researching the
| company, deciding whether I understood it, was right for the
| role, and wanted to work for them, and then tailoring my resume
| and cover letter to what that role needed. In my life, I've maybe
| sent 25 applications, gotten 6-7 interviews, and been hired 4
| times. Pretty good batting average, and I'm not by any means
| especially qualified or accomplished. For me, automated spam has
| not been the answer, laser targeting has been.
| Uvix wrote:
| How long ago did this last succeed?
| jdbdnej wrote:
| The only applicants I hire are like that. If you cannot show
| you chose this company why would I assume you would like to
| work here?
|
| Of cause this assumes you are a good fit in the first place
| regarding your skills. But the latter is usually much easier
| to filter out
| vacuity wrote:
| I too would like to know more about @karaterobot's specific
| circumstances here, because while I understand your
| sentiment, it's a numbers game for SWE applicants like me.
| Of course there are some companies I would prefer to work
| at, but I don't think @karaterobot's experience is
| realistic right now.
| tripper_27 wrote:
| Seconding Uvix's question.
|
| I was looking for work in 2021-2022, and an approach like yours
| got me a job after interviewing with circa 10 companies.
| Unfortunately ended up on the wrong side of office politics and
| had to leave in early 2024.
|
| At the start of my 2024 job search I again tried targeted
| search, targeting was good enough that I had a circa 1:10
| application to interview ratio. It took over 50 companies
| before I found my current role. The market is _much_ tougher
| now than it was a few years ago.
|
| I hear there was a time when companies were eager/desperate to
| hire. Those were good years for job seekers.
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| It's my understanding that most hiring managers have a similar
| AI-assisted filtering tools. So there are humans in either side,
| it's just a bunch of garbage in between
| kqr wrote:
| > Format the response as a JSON object with these keys:{
| "status": "success" or "error", ...
|
| Would it not be better to ask the LLM to generate the status key
| last, since it cannot know ahead of generation whether the
| generation will actually be successful?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Yes, you are right. Not to be too snide about it but this is
| not optimal.
|
| You get provably better performance if you let the thing
| analyze the situation / think through the problem / whatever
| before letting it commit to choosing a status like that.
| DavidDodda wrote:
| thanks for the feedback!, that's something I haven't though of!
| divbzero wrote:
| This is pretty cool, though it seems more beneficial as a neat
| demo project than for its actual functionality. First, automated
| job application submission probably doesn't endear you to hiring
| managers. And, moreover, you probably don't want to optimize your
| life for job hunting in the same way that you probably don't want
| to optimize your life for being very good at first dates. Life is
| more fulfilling if you can find what you want and keep it for the
| long run.
| pknomad wrote:
| Agree.
|
| It also feels like it's optimizing for the wrong thing (getting
| past the screening for as many job as possible, regardless of
| fit). I personally felt like the most successful experience I
| had with job search (and retention) is if I knew someone at the
| company and just bypassed the initial resume screening
| altogether and hand-crafted a nuanced resume and cover letter
| with a strong backing from people that knew me.
|
| I realize not everyone has that luxury but I made diligent
| effort to network in and out of work and it has mostly helped
| me filter out bad jobs/fit and save time for both parties.
| quicksilver03 wrote:
| I'd prefer an application to automatically fill in my data in
| those junk ATS systems, such as WorkDay, that pretend to parse my
| LinkedIn profile or a PDF resume and inevitably makes me do all
| the copy-paste twice.
|
| A couple of years ago it was so bad that I stopped applying as
| soon as I saw that WorkDay crap pop up, regardless of the
| company.
| ugurs wrote:
| Workday is a hostile environment for applicants. Perhaps that
| is intended.
| salomon812 wrote:
| I'm a software manager that has been doing some form of
| interviewing/hiring for 13 years.
|
| I did two rounds of hiring software engineers last year, one in
| spring that seemed normal, and one in the fall that was was
| brutal. The fall hiring had a flood of applicants, and in
| retrospect, most seemed like AI was used in some way.
|
| For the fall round, I suddenly had a higher percentage of
| applicants that qualified after resume screening and initial
| phone screen, but they all collapsed when I did a technical
| round. And failure rate on the technical was much much worse than
| usual.
|
| We have a full-time recruiter working with us, and I'm not 100%
| sure what tools he used, but I switched to manually reviewing
| each resume, and given that it was 100s, it took a long time, but
| I still had my problem of great initial screen, terrible
| technical interview.
|
| Then, I decided to throw out anyone who heavily mentioned AI,
| LLM, or data science. After all, with almost a thousand
| applicants, I needed to sort some how. (To be fair, our use case
| is more esoteric, we're not writing Javascript or parsers, so
| it's not as much of a time-saver.) Large chunks of applicants
| dropped and the process felt more normal.
|
| I also switched to only on-site interviews. My initial technical
| screenings are still done remotely. Before COVID we were 100% on-
| site interviews, but did hybrid after COVID. Now, I'm back to
| enforcing on-site for my group.
| pknomad wrote:
| I am a Platform Engineer and it feels like your experience
| mirrors mine. Like you, our challenge is filtering out large
| volume but also filtering out LLM abusers. We're not opposed to
| people using LLMs, when appropriate. I find that candidates
| inappropriately use it to circumvent the process and that is a
| big deal for me (and our team). We try to do the right
| thing(TM) by the candidates by creating minimal interview
| workloads, asking highly relevant questions that aren't
| "gotchas", and updating their candidacy as soon as possible. It
| doesn't feel like many candidates are interested in returning
| the same courtesy. This kind of behavior means we have to lean
| harder into tapping our existing networks for sourcing "trust-
| worthy" candidates. That puts us at risk for creating
| additional blinders and also unfairly filters out "un-
| networked" candidates. For whatever it's worth, we are remote-
| first org so all of our interviews are done remotely.
|
| One of the things I'm thinking about doing in the future is
| sharing the screen with diagrams and adding irrelevant
| annotations to it (while clearly indicating to the candidates
| that those are irrelevant) as a primitive adversarial AI
| technique. Perhaps on-site interviews is part of the solution.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| Fellow Platform Engineer here, and I can relate 100% with
| your comment. We decided to stop announcing our engineering
| jobs and go back to mouth to mouth for sourcing candidates
| for now. It's a move I didn't want to make as, like you said,
| it means a lot of less networked engineers will not know
| about it and all. but for now this was the only way we got
| rid of the constant stream of letters from AI.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| >mouth to mouth for sourcing candidates for now
|
| Well, I certainly hope your revival rate is better than
| your hiring success rate.
| stackskipton wrote:
| In our remote interviews, I've started pasting the question
| into meeting chat that I've already fed into ChatGPT. Mainly
| because some candidates do actually do better with reading
| and thinking but it's also just pure bait to paste into their
| open ChatGPT window. Since I've already got input on my side,
| if they start reading off ChatGPT output, they get a strike,
| two strikes and interview is ended.
|
| However, I do believe onsite interviews is best solution but
| finance obviously screams about cost.
| bdangubic wrote:
| it is surprising there isn't some SaaS bullshit company
| that solves this problem. we have shit like Pearsons and
| whatnots when taking exams, I took few certification exams
| and it was like
|
| - install this thing that takes over my machine
|
| - 360 camera around to show my surroundings
|
| - no phone/watch/...
|
| One would think by now there'd be two Stanford grads with a
| SaaS shit taking care of this for $899/hr
|
| Last interview I did it was obvious candidate was cheating.
| Gave him my cell and told him to call me, no speakerphone
| or bluetooth and hung up Teams meeting - never got a call
| :)
| Terr_ wrote:
| Even as we speak, scams are going on where pretend-
| employers are backdooring the computers of applicants
| that way.
|
| I fear the only applicants who would agree are also the
| ones who can't be trusted with any employee access to
| your corporate resources.
| bdangubic wrote:
| a company would run this... Not your company taking over
| candidate's computer, an intermediary that candidate and
| potential employer are using.
|
| candidates are already using Slack/Teams/Zoom/... now
| they get to use Pouixy or whatever BS name someone in SF
| comes up with. guarantee you this will be a thing in
| 2025, some stanfords are on the case
| gray_-_wolf wrote:
| If you (the company) send me a company laptop to use for
| that shit, sure, we can interview that way. It is the
| same deal with Teams and Zoom. None of that shit is
| touching my personal devices, it is strictly limited to
| the work machine.
| bdangubic wrote:
| have you ever taken a certification exam remotely from
| your own computer?
| gray_-_wolf wrote:
| No.
| bdangubic wrote:
| you might be slightly more receptive to this idea if you
| have, the company administering the exam needs to ensure
| no cheating is happening so app starts, all your other
| apps are shutdown, you get a call through the app to show
| your surroundings with the camera on your laptop etc
| before exam begins. at no point in time did I find any of
| it intrusive or strange, I wanted to get the exam done
| remotely, they need to ensure that I wasn't cheating
| gray_-_wolf wrote:
| > so app starts
|
| I assume this "app" is not open source, correct? Is is
| compatible with Linux systems? Can it run on non-FHS
| distribution?
|
| > all your other apps are shutdown
|
| I admit I am curious about this bit. Does it just start
| killing all other processes belonging to the same user
| ID? Or of all users (since you could get "assist" from
| process owned by an another user)? At least PID 1 needs
| to survive the slaughter, but it _can_ be used to run
| arbitrary code to assist with the cheating. So how does
| it tell what is "an app" it needs to stop?
| bdangubic wrote:
| there is a video on this page showing overall experience
| - https://www.pearsonvue.com/us/en/test-takers/onvue-
| online-pr...
| Gigachad wrote:
| There's a much simpler solution. You do the interview in
| your office and watch them answer without typing the
| question in to chatgpt.
| elashri wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the temperature of even GPT4o-mini is not 0
| so how would you know it is the something like you have. It
| would be hard to be reading an answer, it would feel
| awkward and probably obvious it itself. But I'm just saying
| that some people would have memorized answers to some
| standard questions (they apply to many places as you might
| know).
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| Alternatively they might also use a different model that
| has different response traits.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Yea, the newer models wouldn't catch this but there is
| enough candidates going to chatgpt.com and just pasting
| in the question.
|
| As always, it's arms race and one I wish I'd didn't have
| to participate in.
| mlloyd wrote:
| When folks are engaging in mass circumventing of pervasive
| processes, it's because the process has broken 'typical'
| attempts to interact with it.
|
| You're being penalized for doing right by candidates but it's
| likely that a lot of those candidates were penalized
| previously when they tried to interact the 'right' way with
| other folks hiring and adapted workarounds as a result.
|
| It's a quintessential arms race. For what it's worth, I
| appreciate that you're trying hard to keep your hiring
| process broad and to mitigate your potential blind spots.
| That's refreshing to hear from a hiring manager.
| photonthug wrote:
| Yep. Hiring managers are flooded with thousands of bullshit
| applications because job seekers are flooded with thousands
| of bullshit jobs, and/or unfairly filtered out of the
| funnel for real jobs. So now it's a matter of sheer
| application volume for candidate employees more than ever,
| who after all are in a rather more desperate position than
| potential employers will ever be.
|
| Besides the arms race with AI on both sides to
| filter/escape being filtered, the other problem is that
| it's completely normal these days to use so called "hiring"
| more as cheap version of advertisement or a growth signal
| to investors rather than to indicate you are actually
| hiring.
|
| I would hazard a guess that the average job-seeking
| application count for individuals has gone up not 2x, not
| 10x, but like 100x in many fields the last few years, and
| similarly for the time involved. And this happens without
| the economy as a whole even being in serious troubles. The
| only people that win here are the staffing platforms like
| indeed and linked-in, and the options in that space and in
| recruitment/staffing generally are decreasing as the
| industry consolidates with M&A. Brutal
| jcutrell wrote:
| Remember - the vast majority of candidates who take the time
| to do right by your process get zero reward for their effort.
| You get a reward in the end, so it feels imbalanced. This is
| true for VERY good candidates, as well.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Over Christmas I met up with a friend who teaches part-time at
| a local college. He said he's failed more people this year than
| the cumulative total of his entire past teaching career due to
| LLM abuse.
|
| He doesn't use LLM detection tools, but he says it's easy to
| identify papers with warning signs of LLM use. For some reason,
| using ChatGPT for his specific niche topic overuses a few
| obscure, rarely-used words that most people wouldn't even
| recognize. The ChatGPT abusers some times have these words
| appearing multiple times through their essays.
|
| He's also caught people who cited a lot of different works and
| books in their reports that were outside of the assigned
| reading, or in some cases books that don't exist at all.
| Catching them is as simple as asking them about their sources
| or where they acquired a copy of the text.
|
| I see a lot of parallels in hiring and talking to junior
| software engineers right now. We had a take-home problem that
| was well liked that we used for many years, but now it's
| obvious that a majority of young applicants are just using LLMs
| to get an answer. When we want to talk about their solution in
| the interview, they "can't remember" how it works or why they
| picked their method.
|
| It's really sad to me as a long time remote worker because I
| see far more blatant abuse from remote candidates. Like you,
| bringing people on site for interviews seems to instantly scare
| away the LLM cheaters, but it's expensive and time consuming
| for everyone involved.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >It's really sad to me as a long time remote worker because I
| see far more blatant abuse from remote candidates. Like you,
| bringing people on site for interviews seems to instantly
| scare away the LLM cheaters, but it's expensive and time
| consuming for everyone involved.
|
| Technology enables scale and reach, which solves some
| problems but also creates its own set of issues. I think
| you're right on with the solution: do things that are anti-
| scale. If you make things a bit more inconvenient, a bit more
| costly, and a bit more local, you create an environment where
| there's space for trust and humanity---values that don't
| scale.
| salomon812 wrote:
| I know the on-site is time-consuming and expensive, but so is
| firing people (at least in United States it is.) I've had a
| few on-site interviews where having them on-site made us
| realize we could never work with them. Given how much time
| they will spend with you, it's totally worth it to spend your
| resources on hiring.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Firing people isn't as expensive as people make it out to
| be. People vastly overestimate the chance of a lawsuit. And
| they overestimate the chance of a lawsuit that makes it far
| enough that it costs significant money even more.
|
| Hiring fast and firing fast (for lying or
| misrepresentation) is almost always a better business
| decision than being ultra defensive in the hiring process.
| salomon812 wrote:
| It's not the lawsuit, it's about the time wasted as a
| manager and salary to the person as you work out if it's
| actually time to fire. Performance Improvement Plans, a
| bunch of back-and-forths. I'm not going to be the kind of
| person that fires quickly, so there's a bunch of sunk
| cost we have to take. Plus, fast firing creates a cooling
| effect among everyone there.
|
| And for what? To save money on hiring? Not worth it.
| floating-io wrote:
| The counter argument is that firing too slowly can be a
| serious drag on morale. Leaving your team to carry dead
| weight can really suck for the team.
|
| Ask me how I know... :)
| salomon812 wrote:
| Okay, so the original argument is about whether or not
| it's worth it to fly people out for an on-site. Hotel and
| airfare: $2000 absolute max. Salary at $100/hr for one
| month for me to figure out it's not going to work out,
| then pull the trigger to fire: $24,000.
|
| I mean, being a manager is hard, but putting in the time
| and money to hire and then putting in the time to make
| sure your team doesn't have a morale drag, it's worth it.
| floating-io wrote:
| The catch is that even in-person interviews are no
| panacea. I agree that it's worth the time to filter -- I
| wasn't really responding to that bit -- but from what
| I've seen, you have to be a _very_ good interviewer not
| to get a bad hire every so often.
|
| I often wonder how many hiring managers are actually good
| interviewers, in-person or not, but I digress...
|
| Seeing the truly bad hires dragged along to the detriment
| of the rest of the team is a sore spot for me, though. It
| happens way too often in my experience.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| $17k/month, not $24k?
|
| If you're paying people $290k a year, no kidding you
| should bring them in for an on-site interview?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The fastest that I can possibly fire somebody is still
| _months_ from the date I choose to hire them.
|
| I decide they are the best candidate. A recruiter talks
| with them to negotiate compensation and they accept the
| offer. This takes a week at best, but can take weeks if
| they are choosing between multiple offers. Then they
| choose a start date. They've got a couple weeks at the
| old job, plus probably some time in between roles before
| they start. So 2-6 weeks waiting here. Then they join and
| go through the company-wide onboarding and training
| processes and set up their equipment. Another week.
|
| The first time I actually get to have them do any work is
| 4-10 weeks from the date I chose to offer them a job. It
| now takes me some time to realize they are hopeless and
| misrepresented themself on their resume. Three weeks
| would be an extraordinary outcome here, but it more
| likely that this takes 8+ weeks. Even if the actual
| process of firing them is instant once I've decided that
| it was a bad hire, I'm still out 3-5 months from the date
| I chose to hire them. Any other strong candidates I had
| in the pipeline now have other jobs and I am starting
| from scratch.
|
| That is incredibly expensive.
| salomon812 wrote:
| This. 100% this.
|
| I can't believe any company would look at this story
| (which I've heard variations on from multiple peers) and
| go: "we should save money by not flying candidates out
| for an on-site and use terrible AI tools to sort our
| candidates."
| jjav wrote:
| > so is firing people (at least in United States it is.)
|
| There's _probably_ some country somewhere where it is
| easier to fire people than the US, but not sure where would
| that be.
|
| There are zero requirements to fire people in the US. No
| reason needed, no notice, no compensation, nothing.
|
| Most (if not all) other countries have varying levels of
| requirements, notice and compensation required to fire
| someone. In the US, nothing.
| salomon812 wrote:
| There's a difference between layoffs and firing. To fire
| an individual, the company must have documentation to
| ensure it's not a wrongful termination. Ironically, it's
| easier to lay-off 100 people because all you need to do
| is demonstrate their division's project is cancelled.
|
| And that documentation takes time as a manager, which
| costs money.
|
| But I admit not knowing completely because I haven't had
| to fire anyone yet. I have talked to legal about the
| process regarding someone not on my team.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >the company must have documentation to ensure it's not a
| wrongful termination.
|
| Companies develop documentation processes as they get
| bigger for myriad reasons, but there is very little to
| worry about in the US in the way of terminating someone.
|
| The only adverse effect most times is increase in
| unemployment insurance premiums, if you do not have
| enough documentation to show you terminated for cause.
|
| Otherwise, 99.9% of the time, the terminated person can
| claim whatever kind of wrongful termination they want,
| they probably won't get anywhere via the courts.
| ghusbands wrote:
| What jjav is referring to is "at will" employment - in
| almost all US states, employees can be fired for almost
| any reason, with no recourse. So the fact you're saying
| that firing people is expensive and time-consuming in the
| US flies in the face of the actual legal environment
| there compared with most other relevant countries.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| I'm assuming you're talking about "at-will" states,
| coming from Canada I've heard there are also sane states.
| And even some at-will states have powerful unions no
| doubt.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >We have a full-time recruiter working with us, and I'm not
| 100% sure what tools he used, but I switched to manually
| reviewing each resume, and given that it was 100s, it took a
| long time, but I still had my problem of great initial screen,
| terrible technical interview.
|
| I think it's very scary when even manual review is still
| yielding you results with horrible technical screenings. I
| wonder at that point if your technical review is very hard or
| specific (specific makes sense, yo did you you are looking for
| esoteric), or if it's just truly that polarized a market. Many
| are laid off and I imagine those qualified with such
| specialized knowledge and anchoring themselves instead of
| searching.
|
| >I also switched to only on-site interviews
|
| Kind of crazy. Not that I mind on-sites, but I haven't even
| heard a mention of on-site in the interview process since
| COVID. And I'm basically applying to any relevant position,
| locally or remotely. Just another curiosity.
| salomon812 wrote:
| > I think it's very scary when even manual review is still
| yielding you results with horrible technical screenings.
|
| It was bad. It was starting to affect my life outside of
| work.
|
| > I wonder at that point if your technical review is very
| hard
|
| My technical review is very hard, but it is directly
| applicable to the work I'm doing. And I've seen some
| candidates just do outstanding based entirely on their
| natural curiosity to look a bit deeper. I've been using a
| form of it for five years, so it's well reviewed.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| Speaking as a contractor since 2017, I have given up using
| recruitment agencies in the UK to find work.
|
| I am likely the number one expert, in my field, globally. I
| apply for roles which specifically ask for an SME in my field.
| There is no question here of skills, and it is as certain as it
| can be without actually knowing that I am a light year ahead of
| all other applicants (because there is practically no one else
| actually qualified in my field). I'm not flapping my ego, this
| is how things look to actually be.
|
| I find now I never get even contacted by agencies.
|
| I _think_ they are not reading my CV /application, and I think
| this is happening because they are flooded - hundreds of
| applications in the first hour. They take the first person who
| looks good enough (and they're not good - there are practically
| no people in this field who actually have skills and
| experience, as opposed to just "I've worked with") and run with
| that, and then turn to filling the next contract.
|
| The upshot of this is that it doesn't matter how good you are,
| because your CV isn't going to be seen, not unless you apply in
| the first ten minutes or so.
|
| You have to play that game, and automate your applications, to
| be seen.
|
| So the question is, if you don't want to play that game, how
| now do you find companies who need skills?
| hbbvgn wrote:
| Obviously your field is in no demand at all. Otherwise, why
| would you be searching for employment if you are #1 in it?
| jorts wrote:
| They're a contractor.
| ben_w wrote:
| They gave a plausible reason why.
|
| Marketing is a skill all in itself.
|
| I know this because it is one which I lack, which in turn
| is one of two reasons I didn't go down the contracting
| path.
|
| AI is better at selling itself than at doing the thing.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| It's a type of work where companies normally want permanent
| employees.
|
| Also, it tends to be concentrated in the USA.
|
| However, I see one absolutely perfect contract about every
| month or two.
| lordnacho wrote:
| For something super niche, wouldn't you already know all the
| likely interested people? Why not just write to them
| directly?
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I had a recruiter basically hold onto me after I passed more
| than one technical screen, even though I clearly did get all
| the way through the hiring process at either role. They were
| maintaining a pool of competent people.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Did not get?
| riwsky wrote:
| [delayed]
| umvi wrote:
| Same experience, we are getting absolutely flooded with
| hundreds, sometimes thousands of applicants who are presumably
| using some sort of automation/AI to adapt their resumes to the
| position yet they are very weak when it comes time for a job
| challenge or tech screening
| cj wrote:
| > I also switched to only on-site interviews. My initial
| technical screenings are still done remotely.
|
| Pro tip for anyone hiring engineers for remote positions:
|
| Tell the applicant that there "might be" an in person technical
| assessment, even if you know the process will be 100% remote.
|
| The amount of fake candidates at the moment is insane. The only
| thing that makes fake candidates self-select out is knowing
| there's the possibility that they will be required to be
| somewhere in person.
|
| Another trick I've used is saying "Oh, you live in Flint
| Michigan?? We happen to have an employee 20 minutes away, would
| you be open to meeting them?" And then suddenly they drop out
| of the interview process.
|
| There are a lot of foreign scammers exploiting the WFH trend in
| the US to the point where it drowns out real candidates. It's
| really bad.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I agree with this approach.
|
| In this field, unless you're hiring a junior engineer, you
| can have a reasonable expectation that a potential candidate
| will fly out for an interview even if it's a 100% remote job.
|
| If they refuse, well, there's a chance it's just because they
| can't afford to. The chance is far greater, though, that you
| dodged a bullet.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| To be clear, you expect candidates to fly out on their own
| dime just for the interview?
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| It's more about the reaction by obvious scammers.
| Teever wrote:
| You're talking about the entity trying to make people
| spend a nontrivial sum of money, time, and effort to get
| a job, right?
| dallasg3 wrote:
| What's the scam? Get a job they can't do...continue to
| get paid?
| roland35 wrote:
| I think the expectation is that any travel is paid for by
| the company. I've even had a per diem given to me to pay
| for meals as well.
| kortilla wrote:
| I can't imagine you actually work in the US in software and
| expect candidates to pay to fly out for an interview.
|
| I would withdraw from the process immediately if I
| encountered a company so cheap
| paradox460 wrote:
| Not only withdraw, but post publicly about said company.
| That's so beyond the pale it's gotta be a joke
| gbear605 wrote:
| I agree, though you should pay. The scammers aren't going
| to take you up, because they know that the in person will
| catch them out.
|
| Obviously that's a financial burden to the company, but
| minimal compared to the long term costs to the company of
| an employee.
| biztos wrote:
| What do you mean by "can't afford to?"
|
| Because you can't possibly mean you think candidates are
| going to fly out for an interview at their own expense.
|
| Traditionally (i.e. pre-Covid) flying out a senior
| candidate was the standard signal that both sides were
| taking the process seriously. And for competitive hires,
| the quality of the hotel and the restaurants they were
| taken to and the seniority of the people who joined for
| dinner were all very important indicators.
|
| I've been working remote since 2009 but I kinda miss the
| old ways.
| neilv wrote:
| > _the quality of the hotel and the restaurants they were
| taken to and the seniority of the people who joined for
| dinner were all very important indicators._
|
| I maybe once misinterpreted this. I was flattered to be
| having dinner with the well-regarded co-founder, and two
| other highly-ranked people, but I thought the nice hotel
| and the fancy restaurant was just their everyday
| extravagant lifestyle.
|
| Despite being obviously unfamiliar and uncomfortable with
| the affluent lifestyle conventions, I did get the offer.
| Had I known there might be other signaling going on, such
| as the nice restaurant and VIPs being specifically to say
| that they valued me, I would've been more likely to
| accept it.
| jland10 wrote:
| I have 15 YOE and I am a very qualified senior candidate,
| at least IMO.
|
| There is no world where I would take an interview that I
| had to fly out and stay at a hotel on my own dime. That
| would 100% sound like some sort of scam job to me.
| swang wrote:
| i saw a tiktok where the guy had his phone propped up but not
| in view of his webcam, and basically the interviewer's mic
| was going through his phone on some llm and the llm was
| spitting out responses for him to reply to the soft questions
| his interviewer was asking. the interviewer also made him
| "quickly" turn on his screen sharing so he could see that his
| computer didn't have anything assisting him.
|
| i haven't done an interview in a while, it's kinda crazy all
| the things people are pulling now for interviews on both
| sides. the process feels really broken.
| jakewins wrote:
| But like.. what happens after this supposed trick? I don't
| understand how they wouldn't just be fired after the first
| week if they can't actually do the job?
|
| Is it that they are applying to places where you don't pair
| program?
| neilv wrote:
| The reality is that most developers are bad at their
| jobs.
|
| Also, there's the "fake it till you make it" thinking.
| la64710 wrote:
| What exactly you can do as a HM to make the life of a job
| seeker easy? I dare say nothing except to just make the quality
| of response better. Even after six rounds of interviews
| candidates who are not selected get not a single positive
| feedback and is treated like scrap with a soulless rejection.
| Beleive me as a job applicant I have zero sympathy for the
| corporates that hire me and I will use every thing at my
| disposal including AI to be more efficient in any way I deem
| fit. The job is just a business transaction to me and I don't
| care about your high and mighty lecture as a HM. GTFO.
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| I worked on a side project that generated the AI resume and cover
| letter. I did a controlled experiment applying for jobs with the
| generic vs AI customized resume. The AI customized resume out
| performed the generic resume by 4x.
| https://customizedresumes.com/custom-vs-generic-resumes
| jdbdnej wrote:
| That's like comparing your "AI customized resume" to shitting
| on the hiring manager's desk
|
| You'll be shocked to find out which performed better!
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| What's so bad about a "generic" resume? I assume this means
| one that just honestly describes your experience rather than
| tailoring it to the job applied for to make it seem you're a
| better fit than you really are. It's up to the person
| (hopefully) reading your resume to decide whether you're
| enough of a potential fit to take to the next step (technical
| screening call?).
| trod1234 wrote:
| I have a very nuanced view on this.
|
| While I'm partially glad someone put this together and did this,
| having seen firsthand what an utter shit show that job hunting
| has been for the past two years with no offers, dismal conversion
| ratios (x100 -> x10000), and this with a decade of directly
| applied professional experience in highly regulated sectors, as
| well as having all my colleagues amazed at the competency of the
| work and solutions I put out (which has just been going to waste
| these past two years).
|
| I'm still only partial on this; however, because I don't think
| this does anything but make the problem anything but much worse
| in the long run for everyone.
|
| Individuals using this are simply just treading water with
| assistance while drowning others like them (without), and
| businesses will adapt to the flood of applications (by not even
| manually reviewing them) and bad actors will simply increase the
| noise.
|
| The people left out (those not using AI), will not find any work.
| No work, no prospects, despite education, investment, and direct
| experience; this is unacceptable and leads to unrest, and
| eventually something akin to 1776. Similar jobless conditions
| were present leading up through the 1760s prior to the American
| Revolution.
|
| I think it should come as no surprise that this is a hellscape
| when you depend on work to get food and other life necessities,
| and businesses that adapt sign themselves up for deflationary
| spirals of doom (not being able to find qualified applicants).
| People won't put up with it. You see people turning to crime in
| California over retail thefts, and then laws being passed making
| it more draconian, then violence becomes commonplace. Its a
| vicious cycle and its preventable if one is rational enough to
| see it.
|
| The process people have been using is not good at qualifying
| people, and really most of what people are looking in specific
| jobs is magical thinking that doesn't correspond to their actual
| requirements. Time is limited; on both sides.
|
| Now what is the underlying problem? It is that the same mechanism
| used by RNA interference in a cellular network, is being created
| by AI in a communications network from both sides of the
| participants creating interference so labor relations is
| sabotaged and fails from interference. I would not be surprised
| if many of those ghost jobs out there are actually digitally
| fabricated by China. They have the most to benefit from
| destroying the underpinnings of western society and driving
| people crazy in a pre-war footing setting.
|
| If people are unable to regulate themselves, and this first goes
| to the producers in an economy, then laws need to be made so that
| those unintelligent people don't destroy society for everyone
| else.
| a3w wrote:
| "part 1", I hope he will do a "part 20" or ex post look at ideas
| like - start at 500.000 USD/year salary - go down until you get
| positive responses
|
| and runs this script for ten years, even while employed.
| submeta wrote:
| I did this as well and landed a job in 3 months. The most tedious
| part before I automated the process was copying and pasting
| relevant infos into my cover letter, updating stuff, creating the
| word document for the cover letter and a copy of my resume in a
| folder for that company/offer. Also, I auto added job details to
| a Notion table (a Kanban board) where I tracked open
| applications.
|
| The whole process took me previously half an hour to 45 minutes.
| Afterwards it took me less then 2 minutes. I didn't apply for
| more, but could write an application in a fraction of time. And
| then focus on researching the company and the job.
|
| Chatgpt made the whole process super smooth. We live in wonderful
| times.
| raminf wrote:
| I remember talking to techie friends about this a couple years
| ago. With the advent of AI screeners, it would only be a matter
| of time before candidates figured out how to craft and rewrite
| not just their cover letter, but their whole resume to
| semantically best-fit a job listing. It could even A/B test for
| the best response.
|
| Everyone laughed and said it was too much work. I predicted it
| would be a YC company before long.
|
| Only a matter of time before AIs will be talking to AIs to have a
| technical interview and negotiate salary.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| For hiring managers, if you getting a flood of resumes here is a
| possible solution for a filter: unpopular things and manual
| instructions.
|
| 1. Manual instructions. On the application submission page
| mention something like: _All resumes or cover letters must copy
| and apply the following statement or will be dropped from
| consideration._ This tests that candidates actually read and
| follow the instructions and rejections can be automated with a
| simple string search.
|
| 2. For that 1% of candidates that do follow instructions that
| during the technical filter phase of interviewing they will be
| required to do something unpopular as a demonstration of prior
| coding experience. In my case as a JavaScript developer it was
| walking the DOM from one node location to another. I was able to
| filter 22 candidates down to two and that doesn't include the
| larger number that dropped out.
| darkwater wrote:
| The first one would be solved just as easily by an LLM though.
| internetter wrote:
| > they will be required to do something unpopular as a
| demonstration of prior coding experience. In my case as a
| JavaScript developer it was walking the DOM from one node
| location to another.
|
| Is this open book? I can walk a DOM in many ways. With my eyes
| closed, I could hack something using `childNodes` and
| `nextSibling`, but the best way would be the the TreeWalker
| class, which I have previously used, though I couldn't write a
| working implementation on a whiteboard without briefly
| consulting MDN for a refresher. If you're just filtering
| candidates based on if they've memorized the ever-growing web
| standard, you're going to lose a lot of good candidates.
| binary132 wrote:
| Congratulations, you are part of the problem.
| neilv wrote:
| It's lucky for some people that I'm not hiring right now, because
| I'd probably perma-denylist anyone I caught sending me LLM-
| generated text, especially for something that's supposed to be
| one-to-one, like a cover letter/email.
|
| That is such a obvious imminent plague upon society, in so many
| ways, and the only thing I can do is nip the few buds that are
| within my reach.
| hbbvgn wrote:
| If you automate your application process, you risk getting a job
| you do not want O_o
|
| Talking to a company is mainly to determine if you want to work
| there so I really don't get why you would want to automate it
| ramon156 wrote:
| Hate how this has become the job market. I finished my degree in
| July but was only able to find a job in November. Might not sound
| like a lot but it took almost 50 manual job applications, all
| with varying experiences.
|
| I couldn't imagine being a manager having to sift through so much
| garbage just to find a candidate that's worth their salt.
| TSUTiger wrote:
| Roughly 15 years ago when I entered the job market, I spammed
| my resume to 36 roles within a single company so 50 doesn't
| sound too bad.
|
| It was a Fortune 10 company so plenty of roles and I eventually
| got in.
| some_random wrote:
| This is one of the big reasons why it's so hard to get an
| interview these days, it's pretty lame.
| VagabundoP wrote:
| This is basically the email spam problem all over again.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| This is blogspam - the author opened the blog barely a few days
| ago and filled it with content that at the very least is AI
| "assisted" content.
| jpcom wrote:
| >Automated job application process
|
| And, just to confirm, you got a job?
| clippy99 wrote:
| I love the system he built, but the kicker would be to enable
| auto-filling and submitting on the various career portals. I
| question the efficacy of submitting job applications via email in
| 2024 (but perhaps I'm in the wrong industry.)
| MrMember wrote:
| I'm seeing a lot of back in forth in the comments between hiring
| managers and employees discussing who is more responsible for the
| current situation, but from the perspective of someone looking
| for a job what _should_ I be doing?
|
| I've been pretty aggressively looking for a job for the past six
| months or so. I have 10+ years of professional software dev
| experience so I've mostly been looking at senior dev positions. I
| haven't used LLMs at all in my resume, cover letters, etc. I only
| apply to jobs that I believe I meet the requirements for and that
| I would likely accept if given an offer. How do I signal that 1)
| I am a real person 2) I really do have the job experience and
| skills listed on my resume, and 3) I really am interested in the
| specific job I'm applying for. Because doing this my hit rate has
| been abysmal. I've had maybe 10-12 initial phone screens (never
| an issue, I easily make it past these). Past that I've had maybe
| 3-4 interviews that get into the later rounds. From that I've had
| zero offers.
|
| So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting me
| nowhere? Why shouldn't I switch to an automated "shotgun"
| approach that applies me to as many jobs as possible to which I
| vaguely fit the requirements? The only other way I've seen
| suggested to signal that I'm a real person with real experience
| is to know someone in the company who can vouch for me (which I
| almost never do).
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Did you get (or asked for) feedback from the interviews you
| failed? Hiring managers / recruiters are sometimes quite
| transparent on this front.
|
| Ask them if it is possible to re-apply in a few months.
|
| Show your resume to friends and colleagues you trust and ask
| for honest feedback.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| If you can't stand out from an LLM then why can't it do your
| job?
|
| Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev
| that is not open to this technology...
| MrMember wrote:
| >If you can't stand out from an LLM then why can't it do your
| job?
|
| My job isn't writing resumes and cover letters.
|
| > Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a
| dev that is not open to this technology...
|
| lmao this is exactly the issue. There are hiring managers in
| here saying they're trying to filter out people using LLMs in
| applications and you're telling me to use LLMs.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a
| dev that is not open to this technology...
|
| The person you're replying to is a senior, not junior
| candidate.
|
| For junior devs who are still learning, LLMs are a great
| force multiplier that help them understand code faster and
| integrate new things.
|
| For senior devs, LLMs are a maybe-optional tool that might
| save a couple hours per week, on a good week. I would
| consider extremely heavy LLM use a much larger red flag for a
| senior level position, than not using them at all.
| zero-sharp wrote:
| >If you can't stand out from an LLM then why can't it do your
| job?
|
| I downvoted your post because this is a complete nonsequitur.
| RobRivera wrote:
| What company have you hired developers for?
| ericjmorey wrote:
| Doesn't seem like your resume or approach in applying to open
| positions is your problem. It seems like you're not connecting
| well with the interviewers in some way.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| As a candidate, I strongly believe in not applying, in letting
| the company find you. Applying is a waste of time.
|
| Also, one can get falsely accused of using ChatGPT in online
| interviews, so just don't start if the role doesn't have at least
| one on-site round. If you get ghosted or falsely accused anyway,
| report it on Glassdoor at once. Always also report the questions
| you were asked.
| internetter wrote:
| > As a candidate, I strongly believe in not applying, in
| letting the company find you. Applying is a waste of time.
|
| Easier said than done, innit? I'm privileged enough to have a
| relatively highly trafficked blog, as well as some social media
| following, so this could possibly for me, but plenty of
| candidates who are arguably more qualified than me don't have
| either.
| bckr wrote:
| If any students or aspiring career-switchers are paying
| attention, now is a great time to start 10Xing your networking
| game. Stand out by being known.
| aantix wrote:
| The current hiring situation is so broken. Because of AI and
| automation.
|
| One developer job on LinkedIn - 1100 applicants, 1000+ don't even
| live in the right region, so clearly it's automated and they're
| not reading even basic requirements.
|
| Next time - video interviews all the way through. Any hint of AI
| in the interview process, they're done. If a different person
| shows up for the first day of the job, they're done.
|
| Go away with this slop.
| frizlab wrote:
| Why do people ask "please" to an LLM is beyond me. It's a
| machine, it does not care about politeness! Treat it as a machine
| ffs.
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