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Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

At Google machine learning was was always used for vetting the 100k+ applications per year that the HR team just doesn't have time to go through.

The main goal was to filter people who have the biggest chance to go through the human interviews later in the process.

The only reason why it's called ,,AI'' now is because it's trendy. It can be just a simple linear model that takes education (University) and GPA score into account.

The simplest way to skip these filters is to get a reference from a person who already works at the company.

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I wonder why ultra-elite companies like Google don't swap to a model where they reach out to people they want to hire, rather than accepting random applications?

> I wonder why ultra-elite companies like Google don't swap to a model where they reach out to people they want to hire, rather than accepting random applications?

This is exactly what happens. Most experienced engineers I know with a good resume get emails almost weekly from Google and Amazon in particular.

They do reach out to people they want to urge to apply; the set of people they "want to hire" is pretty small.

They reach out to people, but those people end up in the same bucket as everyone else.

There was a specific class action law suit about it actually: a no poach agreement between top big tech companies, to keep salaries lower.

After the law suit my salary was increased 10% at Google, although I didn’t even work in US :)

I think no-poach applied the same weather you applied or they reached out to you, so it’s not that.

Google employees a team of recruiters to do exactly this.

I know - I meant why do they also have an open mailbox for millions of people not remotely qualified (I presume) to spam into, creating this problem for themselves.

If you’re at the level of working for Google you’re presumably already at the absolute top of your field internationally and will know people at Google you can reach out to personally.

Google hires tons of people fresh out of university, they're not going to be "at the absolute top of their field" or well-connected. (they do seem to hire previous interns a lot, but that moves the filter having to handle the flood to people applying for internships instead)

They do. Google's been asking me to interview with them multiple times a year for almost a decade.

People who reach out to them are probably cheaper than people that Google has to reach out to.

They reach out to people regularly based on their GitHub profile for example.

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