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Comment by ajb | Hacker News Reader

This just devalues cover letters. As a hiring manager I am strongly motivated to avoid channels which would cause me to wade through a bunch of fake crap. If there turns out to be no way to filter out AI generated text, we will end up that you have to attend an in person interview at some intermediary whose job is just to verify that you are a human being and you have some idea what the job ad said.

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If the main reason you’re making me write a cover letter is to verify that I am human and know what the job description said, you don’t deserve anything better than LLM generated.

We don't make people write them presently, but the occasional one can be good way to clarify why a person fits the role especially if their CV isn't quite an obvious match. If they will be generated by AI then I won't have time to go through them.

My bigger worry is that we will start getting AI generated CVs. If we have to ignore CVs then there will be no alternative to paying middlemen.

> This just devalues cover letters.

They already are very low signal.

> we will end up that you have to attend an in person interview at some intermediary

So like a recruiting agency that does pre-screening? That is a thing already.

> They already are very low signal.

by no means - when i was doing hiring (not now) cover letter was almost always the most important thing. the cv says what you have done, the cover says what you want to do.

> So like a recruiting agency that does pre-screening? That is a thing already.

and a very bad thing - i do not want possible good candidates screened out by some chinless-wonder in an agency.

I would not be inclined to use AI for this sort of thing, but it's a two-way street. but I can think of many hours spent writing carefully crafted introductory letters only to receive a form letter or nothing at all in return.

In the context of job applications, think how many recruitment ads are just a collection of buzzwords and happy talk, while omitting crucial information like pay etc. HR departments are notorious for their low quality of communication.

> I can think of many hours spent writing carefully crafted introductory letters only to receive a form letter or nothing at all in return.

yes, well, stuff happens. still, i don't think you can beat a good covering letter.

> In the context of job applications, think how many recruitment ads are just a collection of buzzwords and happy talk

which is why i hated using agencies.

my favorite interview memory was (for a c++ role) with a guy who had a degree in ancient greek (anyone fluent in ancient languages seems brilliant to me, as i only have a bit of schoolboy french). anyway, this was for a big 6 accountancy firm, and us programmers had to pass the same IQ tests that the accountants did, adminstered by HR. i amazed them by 100% on the visual/spaciel test - HR girl: "golly, no one has done that before!" though what accountants were to be expected to do with this skill i have no idea.

anyway, the guy we were interviewing was given the test papers and a pencil by the HR girl and left him to do it. 5 minutes later he came out of the interview room (i'll call him A):

HR: sorry is there a problem?

A: i've lost my pencil

note this was a very small room.

but once provided with another pencil, he did a pretty good job.

then he got the techie interview stuff with me (project manager/architect) and J (tech lead). this went well - he obviously knew his stuff. but then he offered to show some of his code for his current project:

me/J: cool

A: [searches through briefcase] oh, oh god, where is it???

me/J: collapse laughing

and we hired him. and he was great.

sorry this went on a bit, i had forgot and just rembered. this was about 30 years ago

>They already are very low signal.

This must vary a lot on context. For the hiring I've done, they're usually a 'low signal' only because they are so uniformly poor. I do read them, and a cogent, original letter immediately stands out.

Yeah, but recruiting agencies suck. Anything that causes more reliance on recruiters is bad for both employers and applicants.

I think ChatGPT is going to remove the value from a lot of roles and tasks.

If it can be done by ChatGPT .. there's no point in the ritual; we'll most likely end up scrapping it.

No cover letters. No marketing fluff. No library photography. Less hiring. Less jobs.

It will be interesting to see how ChatGPT interacts with BS jobs. Could go a lot of ways. One interesting scenario is if humans to finally accept that if you have a big population in a technologically advanced society, the demand for human labor is going to drop, while the supply increases. The only real jobs are those that require rare talent, on a power law dist. The best they can do is no negative contribution. NPCs just live, reproduce, and then see if their kids can do better. In general, this process will continue until ALL humans have BS jobs, or no jobs. So it's good to deal with it now.

Personally, I like the UBI idea.

So many jobs just exist to make money.

I'm praying that humans have the ability to think more about meaningful purpose.

Seems to me that plumbing would be one job that will very difficult to automate. Might be possible some day but it's going to be very tough to do. So if you want a job that probably won't be automated in your lifetime that would be one to consider.

Cutting hair .. I think this is probably the one.

As a person who has put a lot of heart and creativity into cover letters for select companies I was very interested in and received form letters declining my candidacy -- I think the process devalues cover letters more than any tool like this (or even the templates that have existed prior).

> This just devalues cover letters.

Low-effort cover letters have been around forever.

As far as I'm seeing, this is just another tool to provide boilerplate cover letters where people lack communication ability to write their own.

As a hiring manager, the majority of cover letters I already receive are basically worthless. You can tell when someone is writing a cover letter because they think they have to, or when someone is writing a cover letter because they've actually thought about how to communicate something to the hiring manager.

Most of the boilerplate cover letters communicate basically nothing useful, and I end up ignoring them after the first read through.

When people make an effort, though, I make sure to carry the cover letter through the interview process so we can all collect the additional context as we interview the candidate.

People who will cheat the written portion of the hiring process already do so without automation, by plagiarizing others resume and cover letters or by farming out the work to someone else.

That sounds like an improvement

Realise that this means more recruiters and it being a hugely valuable service all of a sudden, whereas today it is maybe neutral on the average (helpful for some, annoying for most). Since random strangers on the internet couldn't be trusted in this possible scenario, recruiting firms could be the ones to build up reputations of having suitable/legitimate candidates. You might not realistically be able to get around them.

More middle (wo)men does not sound like an improvement. But to be fair, I don't really know what the deal is with cover letters. When applying to a job, I always write some text in the email that explains why I can do that job and why I'm interested at all, it's not like I just drop my CV on an email address and trust the recipient to take it from there. The application process may be different in NL/DE versus whereever OP lives, or for my line of work compared to theirs.

> This just devalues cover letters cover letters are already dead a waste of time

For technical hires I'd be looking at their interests i.e. github likes on followed projects, created works, etc.

This makes for good conversation in interviews are gets to the point of seeing if their a good fit.

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