I applied to McDonald's and other fast food jobs but chatbots made it impossible | Hacker News Reader

I applied to McDonald's and other fast food jobs but chatbots made it impossible

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65 pointsnradov42 comments

I have a teenager trying to get a job and is running into this.

The local grocery store used to have a certain time each week to show up and interview. Now they have a web site. My kid filled out the web site multiple times and they’ve never called or emailed to follow up. Kid followed up in person and they just pointed to the web site.

It’s frustrating because the stores are understaffed and always ask for applicants during checkout.

Same for local fast food places.

Their hiring process is so stupid.

I lived through some really tight job markets as a youth, and it was the most aggressive of my classmates who got the jobs. I would advise printing out a short resume that could be scanned quickly, then handing it directly to the assistant manager with an explanation of the web-site problem and declaration of readiness to get right to work. If they don't hire you right off, I expect some will at least tell you how to get to the front of the line.

No manager in the history of managers will currently take a paper copy of your resume, period. That's not even considering giving you a job, they just will not take a resume. It's more hassle for them to enter it into hiring software, if it's a big corp they have to justify why the applicant is not in the hiring software in the first place, and they most likely can't do anything about choosing you inside the software, for fear of racism/sexism by the corp.

100% of all managers will always tell you to apply on the website, no matter how broken it is.

We seem to live in different worlds. Every hiring I've ever seen has been on the basis of personal contact and paper resumes. In OPs case particularly, we are talking about local businesses, not big corps.

> In OPs case particularly, we are talking about local businesses, not big corps.

The local grocery store and fast food places are very likely to be big corps.

> We seem to live in different worlds.

Different eras maybe?

Or maybe different times? I’m guessing you aren’t in the states?

> It’s frustrating because the stores are understaffed and always ask for applicants during checkout.

If they wanted to hire more, they would. Understaffing is intentional.

Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

Or in this case, incompetence.

GP said the person jumped through the hoops to submit the resume online. They have the candidate's information; they're actively choosing not to hire.

The most likely explanation is that understaffing hasn't reduced revenue more than the additional staff would cost. That's not what I would call "incompetence".

Do they have any friends? Referrals almost always get you hired immediately in retail.

> The second application asked me to create a general profile and fill out other fields, including a video cover letter for the recruiting platform.

This is tangential to the AI issue, but wow - absolutely horrible. How disillusioned are the execs who come up with these ideas? Do they really believe anyone _wants_ to work for them? I really feel for people who have no option other than to go through this garbage just to land a minimum wage job.

Videos, including asymmetrical video interviews where the candidate has to record themselves answering questions, are becoming more common for professional jobs as well. It's probably a great screening tool for identifying candidates with no self respect and no other options that can be treated badly throughout employment. If not illegal, this practice should at least be made socially unacceptable. I'm a capitalist, but this kind of thing is definitely an argument against unrestricted capitalism.

It's going to be an HR and lawsuit issue in the future. There is a reason in the USA we don't have head shots on our resume.

Ah I wouldn't worry about it. The courts don't accept statistical evidence of discrimination, the rejected applicant would actually need to prove discrimination on an individual basis. Source - https://www.culawreview.org/journal/what-constitutes-discrim...

> including asymmetrical video interviews where the candidate has to record themselves answering questions

As technology facilitates pushing this practice further up in the hiring pipeline, even to the point of initial contact, this presents a grim prospect for anyone who is already facing career headwinds due to ageism, let alone any of the other -isms. Ageism is a threat to to everyone regardless of gender, race, national origin etc. The makeup industry is going to be thrilled.

I've always been confused about how ageism, racism, sexism etc. are even compatible with capitalism.

If there's a vast under-employed pool of people of the "wrong" age, race, sex, etc. because "bad" companies refuse to employ them, why don't their "good" competitors seize the opportunity and hire all that untapped talent being left on the table?

you could also ask why were pro sports all white for decades before they began to look for talent outside that pool? didn't team owners (and local fans) want to win games above all else? eventually, yes, winning is what ultimately mattered most - but it took half a century for that priority to be fully recognized as the one that outranked all the others, including racial bias.

I think there are a few factors why both under-employed groups exist and we don't see the invisible hand creating upstarts consisting of old black women dominating their industry.

Many people, even those making hiring decisions, aren't in the entreprenuerial min/max hustle culture. Those employers will consider factors other than skills and the lowest agreeable wage. People tend to like other people similar to themselves so that leaves various undesirables unemployed longer.

The set of potential employers is sometimes limited, especially in the before times when people would only look for work for up to about an hour commute from where they live. Also filter employers down to an industry/skillset. Then filter by employers with openings that coincide when an applicant is looking for a job. Consider two dental technicians in a rural area that start looking for a job on the same day. If one of the three dentists in the region has a preference for some protected class, then the "wrong" applicant may be job hunting for a while longer.

There are also some jobs with tangible incentives for discrimination. Any role that benefits from sex appeal can favor young, attractive females. Jobs that are physically demanding can favor young and fit men.

To some degree it’s the fact that markets aren’t perfectly efficient and companies aren’t perfectly rational. Another component is that biases and stereotypes are often somewhat accurate, more so than random luck.

Capitalism doesn't run on rationality.

Companies don't want to employ people, they want to make money. Read about the antebellum american south and you will find answers to the questions you have posed. Race was invented for the purpose of companies obtaining free labor, and is a true capitalist "innovation". Modern naratives about for profit organizations are far too charitable. If companies were human they would all be psychopaths.

Because the efficient market hypothesis really only makes sense under a bunch of other assumptions; rational actors, perfect information, and parity between buyers and sellers.

Most markets that are important to you do not adhere to these constraints.

I've seen the "answer these questions in a video response" for several professional positions. I just opted out of applying there and was happier for it.

Yeah, that sort of thing is a really solid indicator that you probably don't want to work for the company. But will you have a choice?

McDonalds starts at $15 an hour, it's no longer minimum wage.

$15 is under minimum wage in many parts of the US

Is McDonalds paying the minimum wage anywhere in the US?

Maybe in a very rural area, but I'd be surprised to see a McD there to begin with. Do you have a source? I'm genuinely interested in looking at this more for unrelated reasons.

The federal minimum wage hasn't budged in 14 years. It's closer to the United Nations definitions of poverty than it is to resembling a wage.

> How disillusioned are the execs who come up with these ideas?

They love hearing themselves talk, they probably assume that everyone thinks the same way.

Requiring a video cover letter probably isn't even legal. It certainly opens you way up to allegations of discrimination and is therefore unwise.

I would assume that the employee acquisition middleware provider added "video cover letter" as a feature to distinguish their software suite, the procurement guy fell for it, and the hiring director said "hey, we paid for this feature, we should probably use it."

Asked about legality, the middleware provider would claim that "you see people in an interview, many jobs are remote now and a video cover letter is an extension of that."

That's not true, of course. Having images of the candidates ahead of interviewing allows you to discriminate without the candidate noticing your reaction to their appearance.

Law suits incoming.

Many high ranking fast food executives actively hate, detest, and despise their frontline employees, as in, consider them to be inferior human-like beings whose only duty in life is to cause trouble and give them grief and to cost them their bonuses in the process.

Frontline fast food employees are disobedient money making robots to them.

If the Stanford Prison Experiment could be reproduced ethically, I think using fast food executives as the guards and frontline as the prisoners, it would be very enlightening.

All the "ai fairness" bullshit it pretty rich when you consider how it's main use case is to abuse people who are desperate enough to put up with these automated interactions. All the talk about responsible AI and whatnot and how it affects various favored demographics is just a smoke screen for how it's really being used to treat people like crap.

I think a big part of it is execs at these companies jumping on the AI hype train looking to cut costs and stay up with the latest trends. They don’t realize and likely don’t care if the end user experience is awful as long as they can claim to be “using AI” in some way. Reminds me of the early days of outsourcing where there was a mad rush to outsource as much as possible to avoid being left out.

Yes, just like Yudkowsky and Altman are focusing on bullshit conceptual, theoretical and absurd risks as a smoke screen to what real risks and real harms will and are occurring right now, for regulatory capture and more funding for their bullshit non profit research orgs, so too do most AI ethics researchers.

I'd say they're not even hiding how useless they are. Hell, one of the main criticisms of internal PaLM was that it was not progressive enough and didn't toe the Silicon Valley Democrat party line and thus was racist.

AI washing is the new hotness in class warfare

Sometimes I ask myself when the first major companies won’t need any employees anymore. Basically, run by an AI that reports to investors and tries to buy robots on the markets to fulfill its goals.

Seems like we’re not there yet at all.

I had a quick play around with the Mcdonald's chatbot, in the hope that they might have hooked it up to GPT and it could be tricked into saying something funny.

No dice, the thing is as dumb as a Beavis and Butthead Christmas special, and incredibly poorly built.

I was being progressed to next questions after giving nonsense responses, there were also typos and zero context.

I know giving it an LLM would have been a very bad idea, but it was striking a) how my expectations of a chat bot have shifted, b) how bad an interface chat is, and c) how a company that big could roll out such a transparently bad system for such an important function.

"We are hiring*".

* - no we aren't.

Maybe when AI is added in, it will get really interesting. Imaging an AI hiring system, no human being involved.

Then all you'll have to do is post a likely resume to the website, and use a chatbot to answer their AI interview. No human will ever have even set eyes on you before you walk in the door your first day!

Rats. I have just given some HNer an idea for a startup.

> Imaging an AI hiring system, no human being involved.

I have imagined it. This is one of my nightmare scenarios.

McDonald's 2043: "We still employ humans! Yes, we do. Apply here." A small asterisk at the bottom adds in a microscopic font: "Applicants must bring a recent copy of the baseline test with a score of at least 740."

Surprisingly this is hardly new. The french national rail company has had a chatbot to handle customer complains for almost 5 years.

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