An AI bot-war destroyed the online job market | Hacker News Reader

An AI bot-war destroyed the online job market

salon.com

73 pointsheisenbit66 comments

I think the two most significant trends described by this article are "ghost jobs" - job listing that companies leave up even though they don't actually have a role to fill - and aggregators and scrapers which gather copies of job listings from elsewhere in order to populate a job board with a bunch of duplicate, potentially stale or filled positions.

Combined, these help explain why people complain of applying for 60 jobs and only hearing back from two of them - most of the listings aren't actually valid leads.

From the article:

> Half the managers in question said that one emphatically ambiguous reason they would keep such job listings open indefinitely was because “The company was always open to new people.” That was actually one of the better answers on a list of very bad ones. A tie, at 43%, went to the next most-common responses, “To give the impression that the company is growing” and “To keep current employees motivated.” Perhaps the most infuriating replies came in at 39% and 33%, respectively: “The job was filled” (but the post was left online anyway to keep gathering résumés), and “No reason in particular.”

> That’s right, all you go-getters out there: When you scream your 87th cover letter into the ghost-job void, there’s a one in three chance that your time was wasted for “no reason in particular.”

But I don’t think this is something groundbreaking isn’t it? Similar to dating apps, when the pool is enormous It’s very cheap to keep the options open. With the automation and growing value of the personal data, everyone should keep that in mind when applying for a job. Also, I suspect there is a reason but the responders are too lazy or are too ashamed to provide it. My wild guess would be, as cited as before: this position has been allocated but it almost cost nothing to keep it open to farm data and to keep perception that the business is growing.

It is generally be considered a foux pas to maintain a dating profile after committing to a romantic partner.

Employers are polyamorous.

And most people are not. Which makes jobs dissimilar to relationships.

I think you mean faux pas

> But I don’t think this is something groundbreaking isn’t it?

The vast majority of employment-related issues do not occur to elites and policymakers. These issues are completely invisible to them. Articles like this make real issues legible to the important people who are in a position to do something about it.

Can't job listing sites just make the cost of each active listing a lot more expensive. If you want to list a job per month it's $10 bucks, but the next one is like $100, then $200, etc. Eventually holding open random speculative listings becomes expensive. If companies prove they hired people, then they're allowed to have more openings at the lower rate. Basically make a track record for hiring open up more cheap listings.

There’s no incentive for the job boards to do that. Perhaps a model where candidates paid for access to the job board might fare better, as they need to prove their quality to candidates.

Wouldn't the inventive be that jobs listed there are real and people pay attention to them?

Hiring at Meta is like this. You pass the onsite interview before you even get to “team matching” which means they don’t even know they need you yet when you’ve passed the interviews.

> applying to 60 jobs and only hearing back from two

Really makes you wonder what “service” these job platforms are providing if a significant amount of their jobs are fake.

Yeah so job boards are as fake and gamed as the rest of the popular internet. Big surprise.

I wonder what the other side looks like. Do people using Indeed and other services to find employees get real applicants? Or is it mostly auto-generated garbage?

I'm imagining a world where nobody human actually uses these sites, it's all bots applying to scraped and auto-posted jobs.

Sometimes you see people with the complaints from the other side here.

It looks like recruiters filter the mass of fake applications, and only send real people to the companies. From those real people almost everybody is comically unprepared, and most attempts at filling a job fail.

Of the thousands or so resumes I've received on Indeed, I have advanced maybe a dozen into an initial screening stage. The vast majority was basically spam - applicants with backgrounds that didn't match the job at all or new grad applicants for a posting that clearly stated we were looking for experienced candidates. Then there was the terrible auto-formatting that Indeed would apply to candidates' resumes, sometimes being so jumbled as to be illegible. It made it seem as if there was no one behind the submission checking to make sure their information was being sent correctly.

I realize this isn't exactly an earth shattering, but for the new grad applicants I think that's an understandable reaction to the way that job postings are written. Even when every listing isn't asking for the moon for an entry level positions, most job postings list so many desired skills that no one could actually be qualified.

> they need you yet when you’ve passed the interviews

But they are usually open to hiring you. That's not a ghost job.

(Or better, it only becomes a ghost job from a handful of weeks prior to a couple of weeks after a layoff.)

This is worse than a ghost job. HR running the hiring process when no team has a position. Even worse for the person applying as they are wasting more time than just sending their resume and cover letter to /dev/null @ corp.

And in places like academia there are rules where you have to post a job opening even if the job already has a candidate picked (say a lab manager for an incoming scientist who wants to hire their spouse for the job). People who don't know the situation apply and are interviewed even though there is no real possibility that they will get the job.

As an employer, it makes complete sense to keep some kind of employee funnel active. This is achieved by having a listing active for months at a time. It is by far one of the most effective ways to recruit. You build and maintain funnels for client sales. Why would that not be done for the most business-critical aspect of an enterprise, human capital ?

This will not work for all jobs. And its effectiveness will vary by industry. For example: I wouldn't be able to run this technique successfully to hire a nurse for school. But if I was hiring nurses for a hospitwl, you can bet I'd have a permanent listing up. Something to think about the next time you are applying for a SWE at Amazon.

Why do employers do it? Because the vast majority of applicants dont read job descriptions at all. If you take 200 resumes and only 10 are qualified, its more likely you'll keep the position open, perhaps permanently, until you find a decent candidate. Or run a few trials with existing candidates while you wait for more applicants

I don't think I've personally ever been as disillusioned with technology more than with the recent rapid adoption of AI.

I think AI is massively negative on the environment via increased energy consumption to train large LLMs, on creative endeavors via the auto-generated art, etc. on labor via automation of jobs through AI agents, or the degradation of the job market, on public communication via the proliferation of fake videos/news, on personal relationships via AI significant others, on child development through easier cheating, etc, etc.

I get that there's a certain inevitability about technology. I also feel - and this could be a terrible analogy - that might have been what it was like to develop nuclear weapons. Better to develop and harness the technology for yourself if your competition is doing so too. That's the world and the market that we've constructed and it's rational to take advantage where you can.

I certainly don't pretend to stand on any moral high ground about what I would do if given the opportunity to cash out from AI skills if I had them.

But it all makes me very sad. I think I'll go read a book.

I really don’t like unemployment as a metric. If the US economy was a product and I was the product owner for it, it would be the last indicator to check. Underemployment is a much bigger issue since a barista with a PhD counts as employment, but from the user perspective (people living in the economy) there’s not much difference between full time minimum wage work in a HCOL area and not working.

Full time minimum wage work is probably netting you close to 40k in high cost of living areas these days. It’s not nothing.

When “low-income” starts at 100k, though, 40k might feel very close to nothing.

40k affords your $1600/mo rent at least. Having housing covered is not nothing.

Rent in HCOL areas is more than 1600 a month. I live in a college town, hardly HCOL, and 1600 a month will get you a small apartment here.

Looking online, median rent in the US for all housing types is over 2k.

Well chances are people making 40k aren't renting a unit that leaves them with only a thousand a month leftover. They are probably living in that small apartment or with roomates or a significant other, the latter case halves the rent wherever you live for a 1br for example.

Yes but you also have taxes, car payments, gas, and food. It also wouldn't be uncommon for rent to be more that $1600 a month.

Edit: To give an idea. According to Google, in New York at $40k a year you will pay $12,000 in taxes. So after taxes and $1600 a month in rent you would only have about $733 a month for transportation, food, entertainment, clothes, savings, etc.

Chances are if that is your spread you have roommates. No one on 40k is renting that 5k manhattan apartment. They are probably out in queens or somesuch. Craigslist says average rent for a 1br in queens is around $2k a month. So if these earners have a roommate or a significant other, they are paying like $1k a month on rent even with the base rent higher than $1600/mo.

Can't you hide your income if you are getting paid hourly at a minimum wage shop? It would be better to receive cash only, under these circumstances.

It’s probably not a great sign if the path to financial stability involves illegal activity.

In large cities like NYC, landlords require an annual salary of 40 times the monthly rent.

That means your $1600/mo rent landlord will not accept applicants making under $64k.

Which is better - working 40 hrs a week and barely existing, or not working 40 hrs a week and barely existing?

Back in January I wrote a blogpost about this exact issue and people treated it as ramblings. I discussed it with over 30 people in the meantime each saying theres no way ghost jobs are a thing, theres no way it’s that bad, or that they have a job so surely this is exaggerated.

It’s not, it really is that bad, and more than a dozen of them since lost their job and messaged me saying that the blogpost is much more real than they could’ve ever imagined.

https://blog.tymscar.com/posts/jobhunting/

The US right now is caught between two entirely delusional mental models, with massive amounts of manipulation being used by both.

The everything is terrible and we’re being attacked/losing model, and the everything is great and we’re winning model.

The incumbent group benefits from the ‘everything is great’ model because incumbents generally always lose when the economy is in the crapper.

And because this has turned into an existential fight between these two delusional world views, anyone trying to notice the actual reality gets attacked/gaslit/etc.

Notably, also the opposite world view - if allowed to win - will definitely eat everything it touches and destroy damn near everything.

It’s imperative we get our heads out of our asses and actually deal with the real world here before we get drug off the cliff.

Might have to get drug off the cliff to get anything fixed.

Something will happen, for sure. But history shows it’s rarely things getting fixed cleanly.

> But here’s the thing: While those criticisms may well be accurate for a certain number of anecdotal examples, anybody who searches for more such examples will never, ever run out. They can’t all have jumbled résumés. They can’t all need interview coaching.

Yes they can! It's stunning to see this level of media illiteracy from a reporter. In a country of 300 million people, there's all kinds of misleading or outright fictitious trends that you'll never run out of examples for. And then the article goes on to cite a "time-to-hire" statistic from a private report written by some guy and his self-named consulting company.

I'm a lot less confident this trend is even real than I was when I started reading.

So if the job marketplaces are flooded, where does one find a job anymore?

It seems like one should spend maybe 20% of their work time just maintaining professional connections to make sure they can find a job when they inevitably need one.

Yes, networks can be important. Since the one I got after an on-campus interview in grad school, every job I've had has been directly through people I knew.

I don't know how to quantify the time spent. It was mostly organic through people I had worked with in some capacity.

Make RTO very important for employees, right? I never tonight about it before that way.

There are also events, meetups, etc. But I think it's a legitimate point that fewer and shallower connections tend to be made virtually.

  s/An AI bot-war/Greed, selfishness, and laziness/g

Automated job posting is apparently an “AI bot war” who’d have thought! sure it’s annoying but so is click bait.

Unfortunately, most of the stuff from this publication[1] is just clickbait and culture war stuff; I wonder why the domain is even allowed here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=salon.com

I mean, presumably it's a "bot war" because there are multiple competing parties, all using automation:

* Direct recruiters using automated tools to post job ads, filter resumes and respond to applicants.

* Third-party recruiters using automated tools to scrape job boards for openings and create duplicates

* New entrant job boards scraping popular job boards, to create simulated activity.

* Identity thieves, automatically duplicating legitimate ads to gather PII

* Applicants using LLMs to fill out application forms and write cover letters.

That is fair I didn’t really consider that view point.

To be fair, we could definitely rule out unqualified people using AI, but currently these tools are driven by pure greed

Sure, we can attribute all unfortunate outcomes to Aristotilian vices, but as engineers we have learned that these traits are constant, and may be ameliorated through systems, processes, and policies.

Attributing misfortune to vice is nihilism.

The article seems to have one of the most stupidest takes of all.

> In other words, were they using early forms of what could now be considered management AI to automatically re-submit ghost listings

Surely you don't need an AI to automate a job resubmission, but somehow the author needed to grab attention by mentioning AI. No one asked the hiring managers if they were doing this. Workable is mentioned, but then this gem arises:

> what’s called “job post scraping,”

Yeah, AI writing job postings allright.

We finally get to the AI part:

> Armed with AI-driven interactive voice emulators, domain name spoofing, Python-powered web crawlers, the ability to post a fake job while posing as a real company, and some basic 3rd-grade distraction skills, scammers are winning in ways that would’ve seemed like science fiction just a few years ago.

Ok fine, but automated voice chatbots are not seamless yet.

The article is connecting random things and claiming it's AI

fwiw here in europe I don't think you - or anyone - is going to find a job online any more, and even through networking it's very unlikely to find a job, since there are virtually no (real) openings any more. Basically nobody is hiring, and those who are, aren't paying anything worthwhile.

> and those who are, aren't paying anything worthwhile.

That is the entire goal of interest rate tightening. To impoverish the masses until much lower wages are finally considered "worthwhile."

Look at the incredibly strong and quick knee-jerk reaction in 2021 to enhanced unemployment schemes as soon as the vaccines went out. Employers wanted to hire at the same low rates of pay, but couldn't find enough workers of sufficient quality, so all levels of government treated this as a policy emergency: they cut unemployment, they cut food stamps and many social programs, they lowered the legal age at which you can work at all, work dangerous jobs, and work overnights, and the Federal Reserve illegally defied its mandate to maintain full-employment first, and then a *3%* inflation target when it jacked rates up very quickly.

It’s largely to slow lending and credit creation. They’ve got a difficult balancing act to perform, especially since cheap money is a lot more politically popular than the alternative, partly because many people focus on the part where the higher rates makes their debt more expensive, or that it causes lowered employment, like you seem to be. And maintaining low rates also does things like raise asset prices, as people borrow more to pump up their leverage and returns, people spend more, companies make more, and they hire more, people make more, etc, and people generally feel a lot better about that than austerity/saving/laying low. Unfortunately, it also leads to a lot of malinvestment, where people work on a lot of ultimately useless stuff, and that tends to make countries long-term poorer than being more prudent.

> Basically nobody is hiring, and those who are, aren't paying anything worthwhile.

Your mistake is that you expect the job to pay for housing, and that the housing is available in the surroundings of the job. There needs to be some brutal EU-wide legislation preventing hoarding of real state and making it a miserable investment.

Overall I agree, nobody is hiring right now.

> hoarding of real state and making it a miserable investment.

Homeowners are a powerful voting bloc and do not want this. Many EU states also have excessive rent control, which creates another powerful voting bloc who also is opposed to any change in the housing market.

There is only ever one problem that makes housing too expensive: zoning restrictions that make it illegal to build huge volumes of cheap housing. There's a huge amount of evidence to support this, and very little evidence to support any other theory. Even in towns with a lot of tourism and AirBnBs, the problem is a lack of hotels (which are almost always superior to paying a cleaning fee and then having to clean your room yourself).

I went into the job market a few months ago. Applied to 15 companies (all online, all offering salary within my highish expectations), went into the interviewing process for 7, finished 5 and got 4 offers (although a couple were for a lower role than I applied to). A number of friends have also recently found a job online.

It’s very anecdotal of course, but it’s just not true that nobody finds jobs online anymore.

Data points for the interested reader: fullstack web engineer, L5-L6 level, UK.

The only thing I've found evidence to work to get actual responses is LazyApply.

As always, journalists blaming tech for everything bad, this time unemployment.

Higher interest rates makes money more scarse, section 174 makes hiring programmers too expensive, high inflation makes everyone poorer… but sure, it must be the evil AI!

There's 1 paragraph talking about unemployment rates... In a 2 to 3 pages long article.

It doesn't blame unemployment into AI at all.

The whole article premise is "Job hunting is difficult because of AI". The title itself is "An AI bot-war destroyed the online job market".

¨Difficult job hunting" means "unable to find work" means "unemployment"

Okay…and nothing worse than techies thinking they necessarily have requisite knowledge outside of tech.

I will simply solve economics in a weekend with my startup: GOSPLAN.ai

I know I can't. But I also doesn't think AI is the single cause of job-hunting being difficult right now

Ghost jobs, at least in Europe, are a way for recruiters to get your data and send you real jobs, normally much less glamorous. Ghost apartments to let* too, for scummy estate agents instead of recruiters.

*Which are real places that have been already let months ago but whose status was never updated to keep them in search results.

having been through this stuff recently, i find that "speculative application" is a wasted opportunity for all this "AI" bs.

if both sides are going to blindly spam with llm, why not only send one application and let the likes of workday match the profile with internal personnel requirements?

being without a job during my search and getting little to no replies to hundreds of applications, often tens in the same company, drained the life out of me and i wish this to nobody.

it seems like this will have a similar fate as filing for taxes in the states. the job platforms benefit from the on-paper engagement this situation produces.

Job market isnt that rosy as government stats show. Just go to any foodbanks and see for yourself the queue. Remember no one audit government numbers. All the numbers are essentially "trust me bros".

My partner has been volunteering at a food pantry here in the US northeast since mid-2020. The numbers have remained fairly constant, aside from regular seasonality.

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