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Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

After 15+ years on the industry and being on all sides of the table (hiring, firing, being hired, being fired, interviewing, prospecting candidates, etc...) I haven't found a situation where HR makes things better. What's the point of HR? Can't we do without them? Really.

Edit: This tweet[0] which is pretty much a rant in disguise has a point. What if AI has a much better success rate on this? Recruiters are clueless wrt. to tech anyway.

0: https://twitter.com/adcock_brett/status/1645450069326598145

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Oh God, please no. Not enough getting tons of recruiter spam, now I'd also get robots pestering me about considering an exciting opportunity in a new exciting startup about which they'd surely be glad to tell me if only I respond to their spam. And this would happen anytime I'd write something online that is tangentially related to some keyword they gave to the robot. Because if I asked a question about some Scala library, and your company uses Scala too, this means I'm a perfect match for you and surely would want to drop everything and come to work for you. Or at least it doesn't cost anything for a robot to try?

And the worst of all, if anything goes wrong - "sorry, our AI hiring system had a bug, we deployed an update. We apologize for the inconvenience".

You basically laid out what an HR-minded person would do with an AI (I want a faster horse), and yes it sucks.

Try to think of how the hiring could be improved in such way that HR becomes unnecessary. "One-click-apply" to any job you want, AI vets you in seconds and tells you yes/no/feedback. Many other good possibilities.

>"sorry, our AI hiring system had a bug, we deployed an update. We apologize for the inconvenience

LOL, are you trying to make a point for humans here? Ghosting candidates is the standard nowadays. In the example you make the candidate gets a response, at least.

I've had two companies where HR made things better, but much of that was because I became personal friends with at least one person in HR.

A lot of HR professionals genuinely want the employees to be happy and healthy and all that. A lot of HR professionals are stymied in their efforts by other executives that either prioritize money or came up in hardship and think everybody should experience the same hardship.

To be clear both of the companies in question were small US Federal government contractors. Since pay is pretty standard across the sector, the way many choose to distinguish themselves is though benefits, culture, and things like that.

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