Ask HN: Does YC use AI to screen applications? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does YC use AI to screen applications?

9 pointsdayve10 comments

There are thousands of YC applications to read & review each YC batch. I’m curious to know if YC uses AI/ML to shortlist applications that might be relevant or not

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On a side note I applied to many positions at YC companies through YC's job portal. Wrote cover letters, reached out to people on linkedIn, did my research through Angel to show my genuine interest..did not get a single response. And I have a decent resume in terms of experience. I got better feedback from almost any other place besides YC's portal. Not good

Most of the jobs are fake, swathes of potential new hires is a positive signal to investors as the ship is going down.

Would be interesting to hear more about this. You mention fake jobs. Do you mean companies advertise vacancies but have no intention of hiring, or do they actually hire but only have useless work for the new employees?

I know this way of job posts from my former company. They had a lot of applications out there, but had a STOP to get new employees. This lasts more than 6 months. I asked the HR-manager about it, and he told me that all the offers are out there to not show the internal problem. This was more than 10 years ago in Germany. Seems nothing changed, even not in other countries.

If you talk about YC work at a startup, I can tell you that when hiring from that site that 99% of applicants didn't read our job description and missed to realise that they are not qualified. This leads to candidates not getting a response.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing. I hope I was not doing that but it is always possible.

At least for software engineering, your job ads aren't very specific. E.g. this one:

https://angel.co/company/shipamax/jobs/2198087-backend-devel...

There are a lot of compsci grads who have three years of experience as software engineers and some experience with Javascript or Typescript. If you're looking to get fewer unsuitable applications, I'd recommend fleshing the JD out a bit. As it stands probably the majority of software engineers in London are 'qualified' according to the criteria in the ad.

I don't know, but it would seem foolish to rely on AI to screen applications. AI isn't... there.

If anything, I'd see them using what is effectively a series of if/then statements or Bayesian[0] or SIEVE filters[1].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language...

sam altman once said in an interview that YC has an AI tool that reads applications and produces a score, and that score matches pretty well with their human evaluations. I don't know if they only rely on that score though.

this is the dude who is CEO of OpenAI, so he might be a little biased

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