Comment by stuckinhell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stuckinhell | Hacker News Reader

Part of my job responsibilities is hiring, retention, and unfortunately layoffs.

Hiring is only going to get worse in technology related fields.

The competition has increased 10x in the last couple months compared to the last year for a single jr - mid developer position at my company. That's going from 1000 applications to 10,000 applications.

I even created a jupyterhub notebook to do some analysis on the unfiltered resumes over the weekend. I can easily see over half are liberals arts majors who switched careers in the last 5 years via bootcamps or masters programs. The next 25% are are mostly people who were laid off. The final 25% are new graduates with either no experience or an internships.

A lot more jr developers basically, I imagine the senior devs are being kept happy, or weren't laid off. Yet those are the only people a bunch of our tech teams want to hire . . . .

Also yes we filter out a lot of resumes using keywords, but the latest batches of interviews didn't go well. So I've been re-evaluating our processes.

Just require applications to be sent by mail. Explain why you're doing it up-front. The tiny hassle and tens-of-cents cost should cut volume down tremendously.

[EDIT] Incidentally, in the age of ChatGPT, I suspect I'm going to be recommending this more and more often for a lot more use-cases....

It's an interesting idea, especially if you largely automate the analog->digital ingress process.

Unfortunately, you probably would have an adverse selection process. Anyone who can (or thinks they can) easily land a job will be F this crap. And the truly desperate will jump through the hoops.

> Unfortunately, you probably would have an adverse selection process. Anyone who can (or thinks they can) easily land a job will be F this crap. And the truly desperate will jump through the hoops.

I usually think that's the case when adding barriers, but I think it's also the case that the best devs aren't usually shotgunning résumés anyway, so if they really want to apply, it's not that big a deal.

Personally, I'd find "mail your résumé, with [name of role] on the envelope" less onerous than filling out the same fucking work-history shit that's already on my résumé on yet another form... for the dozenth time in a day. Hell, I bet I can have Kinkos or something do it for me for a couple bucks—print this PDF, mail it—if I don't want to do it myself.

It'd be less off-putting than "do this automatically-graded l33tcode exercise before we even look at your application", certainly. I'd actually find it encouraging that a human's likely to be the first one to see the document, without any gate-keeping in front of that, and knowing that the volume's likely to be much lower than all-online processes, so I'm less likely to just get lost in the pile.

Meanwhile, I think the desperate might skip it in the name of pursuing volume. Differs too much from normal procedures.

But, I might be wrong.

Possibly. I mean, you'd have people here who would be "The 20th century wants its job application processes back." On the other hand, I also see people pop up here saying they've applied to 500 jobs online which seems like an almost unfathomable level of shotgunning applications.

It's a nice idea, but no way it'll pass HR. Every process is now digital and audited.

It sounds like you're saying you want to hire people who weren't laid off? If so, what's the reasoning behind this?

Many of the people laid off in the last couple months are generally considered to be dead weight by executives and various tech teams.

(I do not believe this, but many do)

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