Unemployed Man Uses AI to Apply for 5k Jobs, Gets 20 Interviews
futurism.com
futurism.com
The actual hire will be someone the hiring manager knows from college.
"The tortoise lies there, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over, but it cannot do so without your help. You are not helping. Why?"
Thanks I hate it.
And history has clearly proved that's just not the case.
Most resumes follow a template and are scanned for keywords and action-phrases. ATS software isn't smarter than that, outside of maybe making some guesses about you based on time worked at each job or if you're lacking attention to detail by not ending each bulletpoint with a period.
The time before that, I think I applied to three places and got two offers.
So the "normal" approach has been quite good for me for the last seven years. My success rate is orders of magnitude larger than 20/5000.
remote is here to stay, and AI will be eating a lot of jobs.
call my bluff: throw out 3 resumes this week and see what sticks. How many come with the same level of salary -- it's dropping, aggressively, across the market -- or more?
I'm well aware, but the article we're responding to is an anecdote as well.
> remote is here to stay
thankfully, it's been great for me
> call my bluff: throw out 3 resumes this week and see what sticks. How many come with the same level of salary -- it's dropping, aggressively, across the market -- or more?
I don't see the need to do this, I'm happy at my job and don't even know who you are. You're probably right, why would I waste my time?
"Hey, do you want to apply to the position? Tell me how many Vitae (tm) tokens you want to pay for it."
It doesn't need to be worth a lot, it just needs to be something.
> It doesn't need to be worth a lot, it just needs to be something.
Market pricing, though. I can see the rate for being considered for lucrative tech jobs climbing into tens of thousands of dollars (or one or two paycheques).
The micropayment problem is not new, and there's no indication that the Ethereum-based tokens have solved them, especially not with transaction fees that high. If you're talking about a non-decentralized solution, then as the sibling comment argued it boils down to an entry in a database and that's trivial anyway.
Use a testnet.
We are talking about an application with literal zero monetary value. No one will attack a test net to be able to mint themselves a token meant to be used solely for priority-rating in a process queue.
> $0.001 USD
We can't have it both ways: either paying a token is a disincentive to spam job postings, which means the token actually has monetary value that's higher than zero; or it's not, then it's useless.
> (either) the token actually has monetary value that's higher than zero; or it's not, then it's useless.
Are you familiar with Germany's Pfand system?
You go to a beer garden, get your pint which costs (say) 5€. The bartender asks you for 7€, meaning a 2€ "pfand". You get your beer and a physical, plastic token.
When you are done with your beer, you go back to the bar and if you return your glass with the token, you get your 2€ back. The key thing is that you need to bring both. Lost the token? No cash back for you, might as well take the glass home. Lost/broke the glass? The token is worthless.
The point here is that the token, by itself, has no value. It's sole purpose is to be a unit of accounting.
Similarly, having job tokens independent of any kind of deposit or incentive will not prevent anyone from spamming applications.
People will still have to find a way to get the tokens. They are not going to be creating them out of thin air.
The token itself has no monetary value. I'm literally meaning it as a way to be an utility token, which is just another way to say "funny money".
The idea is just to have a way to avoid spam applicants. There will be no point in hoarding it, unless you are just trying to stop everyone else from ever submitting job applications.
Sure. Less of them means more success for me. Or for my people, i.e. we here at Stanford hoard it in order to ensure the success of Stanford grads.
In principle I'm alright with the idea -- force people to limit themselves to 25 applications, stuff you really want, keep down the noise -- but what happens if people don't get a bite at 25? what are you forcing the hiring orgs to do?
No, less of them means that recruiters will not receive any applications in that channel. If recruiters stop caring about that channel, there is nothing stopping them from using or even creating a different one.
I found a local contracting opportunity that sounded really interesting and something I could probably be a good fit for. It was a small company, 4 people, so I actually emailed the president directly with a well thought out introduction and explaining why I thought I would be a good fit for the position. Radio silence…
So, even the old adage of ‘hit the bricks and knock on doors’ has gone the way of the dodo.
I was legitimately considering going to their office but it being a small company, in the medical field, and uncertainties about how individuals might react with COVID still present…I opted for a personal email to the owner of the company. Maybe I should have opted for the ‘cold call’ approach and just went to their office but I erred on the side of caution/ decorum.
This is seems to be a good example of AI enriching/assisting with other processes.
It seems to me like a good example of AI making something worse for everyone involved.
and I don't care if large corps with automated ATS systems are mildly inconvenienced.
Statistically, most people weren't getting hired anyway with standard, non-AI ATS systems + the Mk1 Human Eyeball.
And of the hires, if you define successful hire as 2+ years in the role, most new hires fail at a rate between 50-80%[1]. Clearly not having AI is a failure. It might create tons of spam, but there is already a ton of spam, and it's miserable for everyone.
[1] https://itworkforce.intersog.com/blog/why-do-50-percent-of-a...
Neither do I. However, this use of AI harms more than just them -- it harms all other job-seekers as well. It looks to me like doing this just accelerates the race to the bottom for all.
A legit use of the power of AI might be to scan 5000 listings and present you with the 20 best fits.
It wasn't even about AI at all except as example or set dressing. You can substitute "computer" or "automation" for "AI" in my comment.
The point was about "value" that is actually just external cost imposed on others.
Technology makes it easier to be more anonymous, superficial, and lazy on both sides of the equation. Each side will gain a small temporary advantage with every advance in AI and the end result will be that EVERYONE will be worse off than before.
That's because the job application process will be worse, people will feel more isolated, and you'll still need to spend just as much time as before if not more learning all these arcane tools.
Technology is truly becoming a disease. We've taken something good and used too much of it like sugar. Everything has a happy medium, and technology used with moderation could have been something good, but its use is being pushed to its logical conclusion through these prisoner's dilemma-type situations and is resulting in a degradation of society.
The people that make AI make me sick.
Without AI, such a process favors potential employees that are good at writing likely word sequences themselves, and not those that are good at actually dpoing the job.
That's how most companies do it, even today. There is a special subset of companies that overautomate the hiring process, but it's not most of them (outside of SV-style companies, anyway).
It’s as if suddenly a significant number of ai people are hell bent on spam, ip theft, putting people out of jobs, spreading fear, manipulating and gaslighting folks, and so on. Almost as if after decades of irrelevance and frustration at memes about if then else “ai” attempts they seek revenge.
The tone was set by their thought leaders, in particular sam altman and the openai clique.
Taking a tech that was supposed to be a force for good and turning it into a toxic charade is quite the achievement. But gradually people are starting to push back.
People like Sam Altman just go after short-term profit because they can. They are psychopathic.
Mind you, I've never applied for a job myself, it's all gone through recruiters. This shows that that's going to continue, it's real people knowing real people, networks etc.
For those pigeons where there are no holes, it instead seems impossible.
I even applied to a place I worked a ~5 years ago, which I got via cold application. Apparently I’m not good enough anymore because I couldn’t get past the filters.
I finally found a job through a referral. Oddly, it was working with tech I have basically no experience in and probably had the most awkward interview out of all the ones I ended up doing.
I guess it’s time to bring me to the farm
(my main empathy will go at the recruiters, having to filter out massive amounts of auto-generated applicant files!)
because it's an arms race, recruiters are also using AI to filter people, just look at the chat GPT hack for resumes
Doesn't even have to be anything big, just that there aren't enough keywords, or that there were gaps between employment that were too large, etc.
The ATS would then rank the applications and score them, and HR just looks at the top 15 or something and picks the top 5, whittles them down to 2-3.
They're not spending 8 hours a day reading resumes.
Instead of focusing on quantity - number of applications - I decided to focus on quality - better resumes that emphasise the candidates skills that align with the job ad.
And instead of applying to all job ads, my service analyses a candidates resume and finds positions that closely match the candidate experience.
I think I had a similar response rate when looking for work few months ago. I applied to ~40 jobs and I got 3 interviews.