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Comment by MantisShrimp90 | Hacker News Reader

As somebody who just did job interviews, tech like this is why the job market has somehow become even worse in the LLM age.

You want to know why people are using AI to read your resume? Because tools like this are clogging job inboxes with hundreds of submissions per day.

Also, don't think this makes you special, we can tell when something is written by AI. Not only do you not look smart, you look like the 100s of the people who thought they could get one over but instead your resumes all read the same and say a whole lot of nothing.

This isn't a criticism of the tool or the people using it. More a rumination on how an already horrible process has someone become so bad that tools like this feel like a good idea to people.

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> You want to know why people are using AI to read your resume? Because tools like this are clogging job inboxes with hundreds of submissions per day.

While I sympathize with the sentiment, it's important to note that companies were using algorithms to screen resumes long before LLMs became an option for generating job applications. Job applicants have long been accustomed to trying to guess which keywords to use to make it through HR filters and then submitting the application with only the faintest hope that it will ever be seen by an actual human.

LLM tech allows applicants to play the same game and in the process makes the problem even worse—driving more companies to use algorithmic screening even more aggressively—but applicants did not fire the first shots, they merely responded in kind.

> You want to know why people are using AI to read your resume? Because (of) tools like this

Do 8 in 10 recruiters [1] also post ghost jobs - making job seekers lose their time - also because of tools like this?

Only recruiters had the leverage of AI. Now the other party has the same leverage.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/looking-struggle-headhunters-...

People were most certainly simultaneously using the much dumber predecessors to AI to read gobs of resumes whilst forcing candidates to spend 15 minutes transcribing their resumes into whatever slow web forms years prior not to mention longer yet on automated tests, writing about ourselves, or in one case writing a short story! Turn about is fair play.

Back to old school networking?

connecting with actual people at events/hackathons/mailing lists.

Got to brush up on those soft skills ;)

> You want to know why people are using AI to read your resume? Because tools like this are clogging job inboxes with hundreds of submissions per day.

You want to know why people are using AI to write and send resumes?

I do. Please share.

From the hiring side: I would like good candidates to use tooling to apply to jobs. Then I’m more likely to get an application from you. But the applicant better apply some quality control to their tooling. It’s a turn-off to get a LinkedIn “I’m excited about your job opening” message where the content isn’t correctly substituted.

However, I think that what is actually happening is that tooling is more often used by more desperate candidates.

When you write tooling, do you mean "please use our HR platform to enter your resume", and then one has to enter for the 123rd time his whole career with every single date ?

If it's that, that's not tooling, that's "if he/she really wants the job, then he'll do it anyway". No thx.

I don't think that candidates should have to do a lot of pointless data-entry to apply. If the candidate has tooling to increase their reach, for a given level of time invested, all the better. I'd rather that they have a minimum of personal investment to get into the top of the hiring funnel. If we start an interview process, then that will require increasing time and energy investment from both sides as it gets closer to hiring (and continuing to ramp up, to a point, post hiring).

The problem is that it is massively skewed in favor of the company hiring.

First of all you need to fight through the annoying drop downs of Workday (which have 0 accessibility).

Then you need to write a cover letter, because for some reason that's mandatory a lot of times.

Then you get an email with a CodeSignals / LeetCode pre-interview.

So all in all I'm in it for about 1 hour already before I am even considered as part of the pile.

So.....that's a "yes" then.

it takes me literally half an hour to thoughtfully find and apply to a single job, which has less than a 1% chance of me getting a job. In reality the percentage is probably closer to 0.2%. I'm a software developer with a decade of experience. It's a really shitty job market out there and I don't blame the automation of a task that seems hopeless anyway.

Ah yes, the "but he started it!" defense for bad behavior. If only there were parents and teachers we could call in to defuse the situation.

Yeah what a world that would be

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