I automated my job application process | Hacker News Reader

I automated my job application process

blog.daviddodda.com

655 pointspaul-tharun857 comments

I'm seeing a lot of back in forth in the comments between hiring managers and employees discussing who is more responsible for the current situation, but from the perspective of someone looking for a job what should I be doing?

I've been pretty aggressively looking for a job for the past six months or so. I have 10+ years of professional software dev experience so I've mostly been looking at senior dev positions. I haven't used LLMs at all in my resume, cover letters, etc. I only apply to jobs that I believe I meet the requirements for and that I would likely accept if given an offer. How do I signal that 1) I am a real person 2) I really do have the job experience and skills listed on my resume, and 3) I really am interested in the specific job I'm applying for. Because doing this my hit rate has been abysmal. I've had maybe 10-12 initial phone screens (never an issue, I easily make it past these). Past that I've had maybe 3-4 interviews that get into the later rounds. From that I've had zero offers.

So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting me nowhere? Why shouldn't I switch to an automated "shotgun" approach that applies me to as many jobs as possible to which I vaguely fit the requirements? The only other way I've seen suggested to signal that I'm a real person with real experience is to know someone in the company who can vouch for me (which I almost never do).

Did you get (or asked for) feedback from the interviews you failed? Hiring managers / recruiters are sometimes quite transparent on this front.

Ask them if it is possible to re-apply in a few months.

Show your resume to friends and colleagues you trust and ask for honest feedback.

Personally, I've just been getting generic rejection responses from no-reply email addresses. There's no way to get feedback. My guess is that they're just sending out mass rejections for anyone except a few candidates they've selected to interview, and the other 1000 applications just get automatically tossed.

I was just hiring for an associate role recently and we got more than 800 applicants within a day, and our recruiter had a short list within a few days. If we gave everyone individualized feedback we wouldn’t do anything else for months. You might need to pay someone to look at the roles you’re applying for and the resumes you’re sending in for the kind of feedback you’re expecting.

Did more than a few ask for feedback?

I'm not the OP, but I've paid many people for feedback, and I actually have a very strong resume when a human being looks at it. I suspect that I'm being filtered out automatically because I don't meet the parameters of some automated system, probably on some relatively arbitrary metric set by the recruiter or hiring manager to filter the thousands of applications they receive.

If you required applicants to pay a sufficiently high cost to apply you wouldn't get 800 applicants within a day.

I want to see a site or ATS that makes it non-free to send an application and non-free to ghost an applicant.

If you can't stand out from an LLM then why can't it do your job?

Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev that is not open to this technology...

>If you can't stand out from an LLM then why can't it do your job?

My job isn't writing resumes and cover letters.

> Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev that is not open to this technology...

lmao this is exactly the issue. There are hiring managers in here saying they're trying to filter out people using LLMs in applications and you're telling me to use LLMs.

> Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev that is not open to this technology...

The person you're replying to is a senior, not junior candidate.

For junior devs who are still learning, LLMs are a great force multiplier that help them understand code faster and integrate new things.

For senior devs, LLMs are a maybe-optional tool that might save a couple hours per week, on a good week. I would consider extremely heavy LLM use a much larger red flag for a senior level position, than not using them at all.

Github copilot still sucks for writing complex code (algorithms or database queries, e.g.). Or trying to do unpopular things (like custom electronics using particular micros and driver chips).

For unit tests, it's a godsend. Particularly if you write one unit test, and then it can write another in the style you wrote.

LLMs can’t write unit tests. They can’t even tell what you intend. If your code is already correct, you don’t need the unit test, if it’s not, the LLM can’t write the unit test. If you thing an LLM can write tests for you, you can be replaced by an LLM.

I don't think the concept here is blindly taking the output of the LLM and calling it a day. One can test, the test.

I've had about 33% luck with unit tests coming out perfect. Usually the issues are small problems that are easily fixed though.

> If your code is already correct, you don’t need the unit test.

I don't know where you work where code is written once and is never changed again, but enjoy it while it lasts...

Worse is when a protocol or shared state condition is modified.

E.g. suddenly some fresh out of college know-it-all sent crap into your function that you weren't expecting. Then he went to management to blame you for writing such shitty code.

Thing is you wrote unit tests around that code and the shitty know-it-all deleted them rather than changing them when he modified the code

This is why management needs to understand code.

What? Is that a real example? Are you seriously working with people who delete your tests, misuse your code then complain about you to management?

Is your workplace filled with high school students? I’ve never seen anything so petty and immature in my professional career. I hope management told them to grow up.

> Is your workplace filled with high school students? I’ve never seen anything so petty and immature in my professional career.

I think the description I remember on glass door was that it was "high school all over again".

Recently on HN there was a thread debating the utility of having required code reviews for PRs.

I'm firmly on team "require a coworker to say okay before merging", and this is exactly why.

> if your code is already correct, you don’t need the unit test

This is a hot take. I'm 100% not onboard with.

Correct. Unit tests are not only for the current version of the code, but also to prevent regressions in future versions of the same code.

IMO, the main use case for LLMs in unit tests is through a code completion model like Copilot where you use it to save on some typing.

Of course, there are overzealous managers and their brown-nosing underlings who will say that the LLM can do everything from writing the code itself and the unit tests, end-to-end, but that is usually because they see more value in toeing the line and follow the narratives being pushed from the C-level.

I've been in the industry for something like 15 years. I've been using LLMs to help me create the stuff I always wanted but never had time to make myself. This is how LLMs can be used by seniors to great effect - not just to cut time off tasks.

Same here (not in the industry though). I recently got a personal project done with the help of LLM's that I otherwise wouldnt have had the time or energy to research properly if it wasnt for the time savings.

I’ve done so many tiny hobby projects lately that scratch 10+ year itches, where I’ve said so many times “I wish there was an application for this, but I’m too lazy to sit down and learn some Python library and actually do it.” Little utilities that might have taken me a day to bring up a bunch of boilerplate, study a few docs, write the code switching back and forth from the docs, and then debugging. Today that utility takes me 30 minutes tops to write just using Copilot and it’s done.

I kind of feel like it is the inverse in many ways.

As an experienced engineer, I know how to describe what I want which is 90% of getting the right implementation.

Secondly, because I know what I want and how it should work, I tend to know it when I see it. Often it only takes a nudge to get to a solution similar to what I already would have done. Usually it is just a quick comment like: "Do it in a functional style." or "This needs to have double check locking around {something}."

When I am working in the edge of my knowledge I can also lean on the model, but I know when I need to validate approaches that I am not sure satisfy my constraints.

A junior engineer doesn't know what they need most of the time and they usually don't understand which are the important constraints to communicate to the model.

I use an LLM to generate probably 50-60% of my code? Certainly it isn't ALWAYS strictly faster, but sometimes it is way way faster. On of the other things that is an advantage is it requires less detailed thinking at the inception phase which allows my do fire off something to build a class, make a change when I am in a context where I can't devote 100% of my attention to it and then review all the code later, still saving a bunch of time.

I'm not making numbers up here; the controlled studies that have been done agree with me.

See here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566

Worse/less experienced developers see a much greater increase in output, and better and more experienced developers see much less improvement. AI are great at generating junior level work en masse, but their output generally is not up to quality and functionality standards at a more senior level. This is both what I've personally observed and what my peers have said as well.

Out of curiosity, which LLM code tool do you use?

interesting paper and lots of really well done bits. As a senior dev that uses LLM extensively: This paper was using copilot in 2023 mostly. I used it and chatgpt in that timeframe, and took chatgpts output 90% of the time; copilot was rarely good beyond very basic boilerplate for me, in that time period. Which might explain why it helped jr devs so much in the study.

Somewhat related, i have a good idea what i can and cannot ask chatgpt for, ie when it will and wont help. That is partially usage related and partially dev experience related. I usually ask it to not generate full examples, only minimal snippets which helps quite a bit.

Another factor not brought into consideration here may be that there are two uses of "senior dev" in this conversation so far; one of them refers to a person who has been asked to work on something they're very familiar with (the same tech stack, a similar problem they've encountered etc.) whereas the other one has been asked to work on something unfamiliar.

For the second use case, I can easily see how effectively prompting a model can boost productivity. A few months ago, I had to work on implementing a Docker registry client and I had no idea where to begin, but prompting a model and then reviewing its code, and asking for corrections (such as missing pagination or parameters) allowed me to get said task done in an hour.

Yes, when you have the general principles of programming, but not experience with a particular technology, ChatGPT is a force multiplier.

So I often use Github Copilot at work usually with o1-preview as the LLM. This often isn't "autocomplete" which generally uses a lower end model, I almost exclusively use the inline chat. That being said.. I do also use the auto-complete a lot when editing. I might create a comment on what I want to do and have it auto-complete, that is usually pretty accurate, and also works well with me since I liked Code Complete comment then implement method.

For example I needed to create a starting point for 4 langchain tools that would use different prompts. They are initially similar but, I'll be deverging them. I would do something like copy the file of one. select all then use the inline chat to ask o1 to rename the file, rip out some stuff and make sure the naming was internally consistent. Then I might attach additional output schema file and the maybe something else I want it to integrate with and tell it to go to town. About 90% of the work is done right.. then I just have to touch up. (This specific use case is not typical, but it is an example where it saved me time, I have them scafolded out and functional while listening to a keynote and in-between meetings.. then in the laster day I validated it. There were a handful of misses that I needed to clean up.)

As someone learning programming with an llm, its 50-50 as to whether it saves or costs me extra time.

This is mostly because if i don't know that i'm asking for the wrong thing, the llm won't correct me and provide code that answers the wrong question and make things up to do that if needed.

Sure i learn by debugging the llm's nonsensical code too, and it solves my "don't want to watch a 2h tutorial because if i just watch the 10minutes that explain what i want to learn, i don't understand any of the context". But it's not much faster with the llm since I need to google things anyway to check if it is gaslighting me.

It does help understanding errors i'm unfamiliar with and the most value i found is pasting in my own code and asking it to explain what the code should do, so i find errors in my logic when it compiles but doesn't have the desired effect. And it will mention concepts i'm lacking to look them up (it won't explain em clearly but at least it's flagging them to me) in a way youtubers earely do.

Still haven't made up my mind if it is a net positive as it often ends up getting on my nerves to wait 10min for a fluff intro before it gets to the answer. Better than a 20min fluff video intro on youtube maybe?

> For senior devs, LLMs are a maybe-optional tool that might save a couple hours per week, on a good week.

I'm an industrial engineer who writes software and admittedly not a "senior dev", I guess, but LLMs help me save much more than just a few hours of week when crapping out a bunch of Qt/Python code that would cause my eyes to glaze over if I had to plod through it.

The flag you want to see from a senior is reasoned examples of how they use it effectively. Ask for stories about successes and failures. By now, everyone has some.

You've got this completely backwards. A Jr with an LLM is a recipe for disaster. They don't know the tech, and have no clue what the LLM is spitting back. They copy code into the abyss.

Meanwhile, a sr with an LLM is a straight up superpower!

Here's a recent study showing junior devs seeing far higher gains from LLMs than seniors: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566

It is the opposite. Juniors can only solve toy tasks with chatgpt.

Someone with experience can first think through the problem. Maybe use chatgpt for some resarch and fresh up your memory first.

Then you can break up the problem and let chatgpt implement the stuff instead typing everything. Since you are smart and experience you know what chunks of code it can write (basically nothing new. only stuff you could copy pasta before if you had somehow access to all code in the internet yourself).

TLDR: It is way faster to use it. Especially for experienced programmers. Everything else is just ignorant.

What is consensus at the end, I have heard people say that is good for seniors but for juniors is detrimental.

>If you can't stand out from an LLM then why can't it do your job?

I downvoted your post because this is a complete nonsequitur.

If you reply to a comment I believe it cancels your downvote.

For the ranking order. The post itself will still get greyed out, or flagged after enough downvotes.

That is so mean. I actually cried for 5 minutes.

What company have you hired developers for?

LLMs just lie way too much.

Like completely fabricate what they need for a plausible answer from thin air.

As of now they do more harm than good.

Like completely fabricate what they need for a plausible answer from thin air.

Reminds me of a guy I used to work with. He just made stuff up all the time. Turns out, the answers never actually mattered, people were just bored at their desk and wanted to give the appearance of doing work. I think he's in management at Apple now.

> I think he's in management at Apple now.

Clearly management material.

We all know that.

Doesn't seem like your resume or approach in applying to open positions is your problem. It seems like you're not connecting well with the interviewers in some way.

And how does one know how to connect with interviewers when every individual is different, and when there is no feedback from the interviewer’s side?

Some people are able to do that subconsciously. If your not one of them you should probably learn some basics in how to read body language.

Then you should also apply some mirroring. I wouldnt overdo it with body language, but mirroring with spoken language can be quite powerful (and is more stealthy). Normally there are many different ways in our language to express an idea. Try to do it in a way that is natural to your counterpart.

Look at what you can infer from the appearance of the interviewer. Maybe you can also find out more about him before the interview. What generation does he belong to? Is he conservative/progressive/whatever? What programming languages is he familiar with? ...

Does he look rather old and conservative? - Maybe dont talk about your love for the newest tech hype. Put an emphasis on your good cs fundamentals.

Is he a Java programmer? - use the word interface

Is he a Haskell programmer? - use the word typeclass

Is he a nice guy? - try to be nice

Is he not a nice guy? - dont be too nice

etc...

I was hiring manager for 3 positions about 4 months ago and the amount of fake applications out there was mind boggling to me. I would say 90% were either entirely fake or had the exact same generated ai text. It got so bad that we started only looking at resumes that had a working LinkedIn link.

Also after so many bad resumes I started being very forgiving for the ones that didn't fully match the job requirements if they had something in them that made it seem like a real person, e.g. a personal hobby section. I think a lot of people discourage writing that but I argue it makes you stand out in an ocean of fake and copy pasted junk.

And that's not even enough: A few weeks ago I had to interview someone who had what appeared to be a realistic profile. Everything that came out of their mouth was from chatGPT It was suspicious, but the ruse became clear when they shared the wrong screen, so we could see his prompt, and how everything we said was being read in.

At this point every remote internet checklist has to include checks for humanity, because the percentage of straight out fakes is too high. Even the questions to ask me at the end were GPT provided.

Start every interview asking the candidate how many rs are in strawberry.

Apparently outdated, ChatGPT 3.5 answers correctly here.

Try raspberry? Both fail for me, but I'm not a paid user.

I don't pay either (anymore), but is correct as well. (Via chatgot android app)

From iOS app, paid 4o

> There are 4 Rs in “razzleberry.”

Follow up with, "Please check again"

You’re absolutely right to ask for a recheck! Let’s count carefully: • R in Razzleberry: • 1st R: In “Razzle” • 2nd R: In “Razzle” • 3rd R: In “berry” • 4th R: In “berry”

Total: 4 Rs in “razzleberry.”

No changes—still 4 Rs! Let me know if I can clarify further.

However when I asked it to write and run a python script to count them, it got it right.

ChatGPT-4 (free) on Android just told me:

> There are two "R"s in the word "cranberry."

Same for me.

Good example to illustrate how LLMs work, if it is not correct for cranberry, but correct for raspberry or strawberry.

you're not on 3.5 anymore

Well, I use the free version and just checked, but I cannot even see what model is used.

Either way, if my cheap standard unpaid ChatGPT version gives the correct result, I don't think it counts as a valid catch anymore.

Anyone affected by this and in the US might consider calling or writing to their congressman. The time to do that is now when the demand is high to bolster jobs but low for excessive laws. Nobody innocent is going to be wronged if this is made into a crime or otherwise regulated to put a stop to.

The fake job applicants are only siphoning resources from the economy at the high expense of all other parties involved. The ones who are getting screwed the most are the applicants, some of whom are concerned about making ends meet and getting auto-rejected constantly despite decades of experience. No one should stand for it.

If I didn't know better I'd think this was satire. As far as I can tell the advocacy is for either companies to be empowered to sue people who apply to work with them (seems like madness) or to set up a situation where the government enforcement arm pro-actively goes out and harasses unemployed job seekers. Either way that sounds like a recipe for disaster for unemployed persons.

AI has made hiring especially in technical industry an absolute shit show. I agree with parent comment that ideally government could do something about it but agree with you on how would you even do that. Maybe if they required all the job board companies like indeed and glassdoor and LinkedIn to properly vet candidates else those companies would be fined, but it's hard to imagine a solution that doesn't also hurt unemployed legit human beings

And then you run into problems on the corporate side: fake job listings to build up resume databases for comparison shopping of applicants. Regulations in this area should have to cut both ways.

This the end game that Silicon Valley created. An automation arms race between two competing groups that were initially trying to save a little time or cut down on staffing but escalated it to the point where the default approach would be considered unforgivably assholish 15 years ago, people that don’t buy into it at least somewhat are drowning in bullshit, and nobody’s happy— but on paper everybody’s got record productivity!

With LLMs, this same exact scenario is playing out in other realms. Look at writing and publishing. Sure you’re on top of the world before everyone else catches up, but when they do, there’s now just a boilerplate of exponentially expanding bullshit and counter-bullshit that everyone has to circumvent to do anything.

This has already happened long ago with Google search results. The first tier of results is won by reasonably well-funded entities that provide a legitimate service, and have the means to optimize the signals feeding the search rankings, putting them higher than the next tier.

The second tier of search results tends to be dominated by imitators that don't really add anything of value (SEO spam, blog posts that tell you how to write a for loop in Ruby despite knowing full well that the reader already had no problem finding that information, etc.)

Then finally at the bottom are the little guys who try their best, but haven't learned yet that it's a waste of time to try to self-publish any content because there's too much actual spam masquerading as content, and Google can't tell the difference.

The search results effectively became a list of content approved by a single publisher (even if automated) rather than a melting pot of freely-expressed ideas.

I sincerely hope that we can prevent the similar nullification of the software developer's career accomplishments as carrying any weight, but I am starting to have doubts. If it even goes as far as the erosion of incentives to accomplish things, then we may actually end up needing that AI to do the work for us, as there will be few people left who give a shit.

Yes, that’s a good example, and I share your concerns.

As an aside, I shudder thinking about what a heavily ‘SEO’d’ LLM experience would be like.

Somebody convince me LLMs are not net-negative productivity.

They seem much better at producing bullshit that’s difficult to filter through, than performing actually useful work.

I have found copilot autocomplete to be somewhat useful for small blocks of code.

Coca-Cola and Toys R Us have found them useful for making terrible commercials cheaper than making terrible commercials by hand and way cheaper than making good commercials that actually improve their brand image. Seems weird they’d do that for immensely expensive holiday television spots rather than throwaway 5 second YouTube spots or something but hey — I’m clearly not a corporate genius.

Yea, I couldn't tell if the original comment was satire but the number of phishing ads that existed in the past for bogus positions, to pool candidates for later hiring, to farm market rate data, and who knows what else… makes me have very little empathy for the employer side.

It’s been a mess for awhile due to economies of scale benefiting the hiring side to manipulate and abuse the market. The fact it’s become more affordable for job seekers to do a bit of the same is just ironic.

I would REALLY love if job postings had to go through a government clearing house. Only real jobs get posted. Only real applicants can apply.

Bonus: jobs would have to be classified according to a single government standard, so it should be possible to search for a good job match by at least limiting the field and (allowed) location(s).

making the jobs application (and hiring) market a single market will make it more efficient, and cut out a lot of middlemen inefficiencies. I like it.

You as a hiring company can pay to have a 2nd website, but posting it to the gov't portal is a requirement. The information, such as conditions, salary (range), experience, location etc, are all in standardized format. If you're found to be lying, it's a federal crime (because of fraud and interstate commerce for example).

Applicants also must have gov't issued ID (such as social security), so you cannot be fake.

If you look at some of the problems of USA Jobs, you may not actually want this.

Hiring in tech has been pretty awful even before AI.

> If I didn't know better I'd think this was satire.

It’s actually a constant them on HN to imagine that passing laws will magically make problems disappear. The realities of enforcing the law or even identifying perpetrators are imagined to be the easy part.

People seem to want to pass laws that treat the symptoms, not the cause.

“You keep getting the stomach bug. Here take this, it’ll calm your stomach. No no, you can keep eating that expired cheese, it’s all good”

> you can keep eating that expired cheese

Why are you anti French ?

My oldest kid hate experiencing vomit, she transferred that on to me as a “gross gross thing” and it was the first thing that came to mind.

I’m a huge fan of French onion soup.

Ah, the ol’ “manufacture an argument that wasn’t made, then shoot it down it in front of an audience” trick. I suppose I’ll be advocating for the outlawing of those kinds of comments, and anything else deemed as misinformation next.

A more realistic scenario would involve no enforcement by the government (except perhaps in extreme cases, like with the 'spam king' back in the day). ChatGPT's terms of service would already cover it under the "shall not be used for illegal activity" language, and it would be just enough of a deterrence to benefit a larger number of people without creating new problems. But I wasn't advocating for a specific solution, just a call to a congressman. Despite their faults and flaws, they're probably still going to do a better job than I am at making the call, or maybe it won't even be a priority for them and they'll do nothing.

I think the GP is suggesting that making, distributing, and profiting from such software should be made illegal. If an engineer can make this software, they are probably a good fit for many jobs in the market.

I'm suggesting that you should call your congressman and say that getting a job is a problem right now and automated applicants could be contributing to it (we don't know the full story, but making noise about it might at least inspire some investigation by those who have the ability to get the facts). I don't think it should be a crime to automate a job application, and I have no problem with it from an ethical point of view long as the application is made truthfully and in good faith by a reasonably qualified applicant and there is real intent to follow up on it.

But if that isn't the case, there's no reasonably good safety mechanism to mitigate the massive amount of harm that a determined bad faith actor could cause to the economy.

But making false claims about your work history (as could be the case with the one using ChatGPT to answer questions) is a problem, isn't it? And it's wonderful to see these rebuttals made against a hypothetical something that already happened. https://www.lawdepot.com/resources/business-articles/legal-c...

> situation where the government enforcement arm pro-actively goes out and harasses unemployed job seekers

Why wouldn't this be a desired outcome? Unemployment doesn't give a carte blanche to send spam.

> Nobody innocent is going to be wronged if this is made into a crime or otherwise regulated to put a stop to.

Good luck.

The applicants doing fake job applications do not care about your laws at all. Many might be in foreign countries. They might plan on applying with stolen identities.

Making a law isn’t going to change a thing. Even if you did, what company is going to spend resources tracking down the likely fake identity of someone applying for a job just to hand it to law enforcement for them to ignore in their backlog forever?

> Making a law isn’t going to change a thing. Even if you did, what company is going to spend resources tracking down the likely fake identity of someone applying for a job just to hand it to law enforcement for them to ignore in their backlog forever?

I missed the part where I included that or any strategy on how it would be used as a deterrent. Clearly that's not how it is done as you pointed out, but you make it seem as if laws have no value at all, which is a rather naive take. Fraud is already illegal FYI.

I don't have a solution, other than to make a call to the people who are elected to find those solutions, if they are able to. If they can't or won't, then it is a good thing that phone call was free anyway.

How exactly does someone who applies with a stolen identity get anything out of doing so?

Absolutely correct, just making laws themselves have little effect over anything. Enforcement is the key. For most laws that step is an afterthought. But there are creative ways to do it.

> applicants doing fake job applications … stolen identities

What I don’t get is what’s the economic incentive for this behaviour

- It can be a side effect to keep your unemployment insurance which is conditional upon proving you are sending applications at a given pace. I'd probably need to apply to random jobs if I qualified for it because there isn't a role opening in my niche weekly to fullfil the criteria here. I never had to because I was ineligible for other reasons every time I was unemployed and could have used support but that's a whole other can of worms)

- I heard its a thing to get n jobs you're not qualified for to get at least the first few month salary "for free" (as an individual or as a pawn from a larger organized fraud). Not sure how common or how much truth there is to it though.

But this chaos fits Big Tech's claim that there are not enough American workers, so they can then turn around and onshore H1Bs from the hiring manager's hometown back in the old country.

Hundreds of comments, and this is the first one that mentions perhaps the primary root cause of the situation.

Do you work in tech? Have you ever seen any pressure to create LLM-driven chaos with the goal of increasing support for encouraging immigration in future years?

It’s too elaborate of a Rube Goldberg strategy to take very seriously. Companies struggle to achieve simple, clear, short-term goals in tight-knit, well-aligned teams. Ain’t nobody got the skill to pull off that level of conspiracy.

There often isn't a nefarious scheme. Humans are better at spotting patterns than they are at mass coordination.

then move abroad and get your dream job there?

Huh? Is this a 'love it or leave it' comment? I genuinely don't understand what you're meaning to say here.

What I mean is unless your ideal is autarky or USSR under Joseph Stalin, it is hypocritical or ingenuous to expect having a market where you can sell goods and services worldwide but not allowing workers applying and getting jobs worldwide for same companies. That is called free market.

So if you happen to think you are missing jobs because they are given to people living in another country, you also have the choice to play by the same rules, relocate there and apply for the same job. Or ask for a lower salary where you already are to be competitive. This is fair competition.

ha lets see…

In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority.

if you think america is “free market” I have some Enron stock to sell to you :)

Lol wat. 'Free market' is a spherical cow in a vacuum. Its an abstraction that people like to make to reduce complex reality to something small and comfortable. In reality, the world is not driven only (or even mostly) by market forces. All players in modern economies are subsidized by and beholden to governance by nation states. That wildly warps what actually happens outside the textbook.

>Everything that came out of their mouth was from chatGPT It was suspicious, but the ruse became clear when they shared the wrong screen, so we could see his prompt, and how everything we said was being read in.

Wouldn't you notice a lag between your question and the candidate's answer if the candidate had to type your question into chatGPT?Or does the candidate use some software/tool with transmits your question to chatGPT directly?

there is no lag, voice to text to chatgpt then read the answer

Thank you. (Haven't been up to date with the hype.)

> At this point every remote internet checklist has to include checks for humanity,

I genuinely don't understand this requirement. Isn't an interview exactly that? It's a conversation pretending to be about a technical problem/question/challenge but in reality its purpose is to find out whether you click with the person and would want to work with them. If some ChatGPT text can trick you then your process is broken anyway and everybody joining your company can expect colleagues selected by this sub-par process.

> If some ChatGPT text can trick you then your process is broken anyway

This is pretty unfair and seems like victim-blaming when we have companies spending billions of dollars to create these programs with the specific intent of trying to pass the Turing test.

There’s a bit of an echo chamber on HN where people convince each other that all LLM-generated text is easy to identify, riddled with errors, and “obviously” inferior to all real-human writing. Because some LLM writing fits those criteria and is easily identified, these folks are convinced they can identify all LLM writing and anyone who can’t must be a dunce.

I didn't claim anything about identifying writing. That's a strawman. I'm talking about humans talking to each other. Even if it's in a zoom call. Any interview process that doesn't include that is broken, and that's my claim. Echo chamber or not.

Apologies for misunderstanding you, then. Agreed that human to human is critical, especially for identifying culture fit (not homogeneity of course, just interaction styles like openness, etc).

I do think people cheat video interviews with LLM help, but in-person should always be required anyway, even if it’s via proxy (“meet with a colleague from our Madrid office”).

How widespread is LLM cheating during video interviews these days? Honest question.. How do people even do it? Let an LLM app listen in and suggest avenues of discussion and lists a bunch of facts on the side to spice things up?

Even if that's the case, isn't it just a matter of conversing in a way that the LLM can't easily follow?

An interviewer is a "victim"? Maybe they should just, you know, speak to their interviewees. At least in 2024 that's hardly faked by an LLM. Therefore, if you are fooled, you cheaped out, and you are hardly a victim.

Someone being deceived is a victim, yes.

I left LinkedIn years ago, because everyone and their dog was copying my entire profile.

I was happy for that info to go to potential employers, but not to random company and its canine friend.

Then MS bought LI and I was so glad I'd left years ago already.

I've seen one of two places have mandatory URL fields for LinkedIn profiles.

One of the impressions I've been getting is that if you do not fit exactly into an recruitment agencies process, you're DoA, and I have begun to suspect the only work they do is look at LinkedIn.

Well LinkedIn does a lot of stuff around making sure the accounts are for real people. Kind of helps with many of the issues people are complaining about. I mean they can improve it, but they do some level of effort.

Who cares if someone is copying your profile?

Having an established LinkedIn profile with their simple identity verification tool is such a trivial amount of effort for de-risking your job search that it’s hard to justify boycotting LinkedIn at this point.

If an application looks suspicious for some reason, I’ll look for their LinkedIn profile as the second step. If I can’t find one or if the profile is also questionable, I move on. LinkedIn is far from perfect, but it’s at least some signal in a world where the noise level is rising fast.

LinkedIn locked my account for no reason awhile ago and apparently want me to send a photo of my ID to some sketchy “verification” third party. No thanks.

I’m glad it’s a trivial amount of effort for you, I guess.

> only looking at resumes that had a working LinkedIn link

wait shouldn't that already have been the case? lol

I haven’t been job hunting since around 2002, so I’m completely out of the loop. Why are people submitting fake resumes? Are they hoping to get hired despite having no skills beyond using ChatGPT? But, what happens after that? They don’t have the skills to do the job, so what was the point of getting hired?

I can only think of a multiple-salary for onboarding period scam, where they llm all their job and get fired everywhere after a month with a couple years worth of money. You can’t really fire a hired guy without paying them at least once in US, can you?

You (almost always) have to pay them for any work they actually did. If you catch a North Korean citizen day 1 of onboarding, you're obligated to kick them out immediately, and you might have to pay them for the few hours they were there. If you catch them before they start, you (usually) don't have to pay them.

A growing scam involves people applying to remote jobs under fake or stolen identities. The work is then done by someone else or an agency that assumes the identity and collects the pay. They know it won’t last long so they try to target companies that look like someone could become another generic name on a spreadsheet for a year or two.

There’s also a rise of “overemployed” people who farm out second and third jobs. Again, they don’t care about anything other than collecting paychecks for a while until they go through the long onboarding, ramp-up, and PIP process, by which time they may have collected $100K for doing barely any work. They use fake backgrounds and resumes as a way to avoid their primary employer getting notified and as a sort of filter for companies who aren’t looking closely at the details. If you can trick them with a fake application, you’ll probably be able to trick them in the interview and then trick them into paying you for a long time too.

It is mind-blowing that this happens but I suppose totally logical too. Scammers are out to extract money from people and companies by any method possible, so in the world of remote-only work, it's just another extraction angle for them I suppose.

Wild.

(Thanks for sharing this info btw.)

You can often work days to years before people catch on that you are (a) unqualified, (b) underqualified, (c) not legally allowed to work in a particular jursdiction, (d) overemployed, (e) leaking company secrets to ChatGPT, ....

On top of that, you have a number of people who are just trying to get hired and perhaps are skilled, but the market is so shitty (in part because of the AI resume slop) that they're resorting to various services to lessen the workload of shotgun resume posting. If you pay a person to send out resumes, you get email notifications that the resumes were submitted, and that person was just asking an LLM to spit out a resume, you'll be hard-pressed to figure out that the resumes are fake (and so on for a variety of other similar reasons, where spray-and-pray resumes are sent out in moderate good-faith but the resumes are BS).

What I find mind blowing is how unqualified people manage to land jobs while qualified people may not even land an interview. How does this even work?

What if we don’t like linked in? Is it effectively mandatory?

Well, that's some handy information. I had no idea any employer would care one whit about my LinkedIn, or that a personal hobby section was considered anything but totally superfluous and irrelevant.

I suppose I am supposed to actually fill out my LinkedIn too?

What did the working LinkedIn link help validate?

That you have a decent number of connections and some of them are mutuals so I know you're a respected part of the software community.

Just wanna say keep at it! You’re getting interviews and sometimes it just takes time for the stars to align into an offer.

Run LeetCode problems until you can crush the technicals

A lot of companies are reevaluating the technical interviews because they're too easy to cheat at now unless they're on site on your hardware (or on a physical whiteboard).

The idea that the problem is primarily (or even substantially) the fault of employees is laughable. HMs put up all the hoops, and keep immeasurably more power in the process from start to finish.

Because adding shit to the pool doesn’t help. The jobs aren’t there, and crapping in an empty pool doesn’t help any more than pissing in a full pool.

> So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting me nowhere?

I'd go the other way, towards more schlepping and less automation[0].

Are you reaching out to anyone in your network and asking if they know anyone who needs your skills?

Are you joining communities (online or offline) that match up to your skills and interests?

Doing either of these, so that you can be warm intro-ed to hiring managers by someone who knows you (or maybe knows someone who knows you) will typically get you to the front of the line.

That's the approach I would take if I were looking today. Too much noise otherwise.

0: Works for startups: https://paulgraham.com/ds.html

This is generally how I've gotten jobs. People who know people, or gladhanding at an event.

It seems like the best strategy is automation for both job-seekers and employers and upshot is awful for everyone. So, the sum individually optimum behaviors might not be optimal for a group. Well, back to the drawing board, humanity.

It highly depends on what kind of job you want. What kind of company do you want to work for?

It's absolute insanity. Something has to give, or we're about to see some big changes in how hiring is done.

I don't want to retype my recent experiences, but I have a thread from about 6 weeks ago that goes into my specific details here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42137229

I was in a good position so I could take my time, but I honestly don't know what I would have done if I had needed a position quickly.

All of you are being fed nonsense. During my 10 years of being a salaried employee I interviewed for only the first one.

All of the rest including Faang companies I went in without any interviews by knowing people and pulling strings. You shouldn't have to "apply" for anything.

what if you don't know people or have strings to pull?

You start looking at industries you are interested in, then look at companies which are on an upward trajectory in those industries, look at people who recently joined those companies, find their github / blogs / emails. Start talking to them about some common ground.

You can get away without applying, yes, if your network is strong enough to get referred wherever you want to work. FAANG and similar companies absolutely will not hire software engineers without interviewing them, since the cost of a bad hire is too high.

What I have seen on occasion, especially for more senior people, is a carefully constructed charade. We're not interviewing you, that would be so uncouth, we're just having a chat!

At a bigger company, they need to more or less go through the motions even if the top person has basically made a decision after a chat and they're writing a job description for you.

At a small company, a chat over lunch that you didn't even go into thinking of it as interview may be enough.

Ask me how I know in both cases :-)

Software should have some universal competency baseline, like a license. If AI resume spamming is that straw that breaks the camel’s back then so be it.

The best defense against AI would be a license number that identifies a person uniquely, provides their relevant job history from a database, proves some minimal common competency baseline, and confirms conformance to some ethical norm against known liabilities.

Every certification I have is numbered.

I've often thought that this would be an actually useful use of Blockchain tech.

In some industries, unions fill this nieche.

Come to think of it, this might be a good way for software unions to get a hold in the US. The Union will have a process to validate the competency if its members, and validate their careers, meanwhile hiring managers who are looking for guaranteed engineering quality will be able to find them, and unemployed engineers will be able to find work quickly, only bye the may benefit from the power of collective bargaining.

Kinda like a recruiting agency, but without for-profit motives and the shareholders will be the union members.

I don't see any downsides, except dkr the usual "corrupt men on top" problem which plagues any hunan organization, though mandating that leaders have extencive industry experience could slightly mitigate that.

It's called a PE in the US. But, for software, it was discontinued because it wasn't really used. And, indeed, it's pretty uncommon for most engineering disciplines except those interacting with regulators--civil engineers in particular.

But it comes with requirements like 4-year degrees, having worked under a PE, etc.

Was there anything distinctive about the position or the process for the one that you did land?

Yes! A few things stood out from my POV:

1) They didn't waste my or their time. Interviews rounds clearly progressed towards a hiring decision.

2) Their version of an AWS-style "loop" was a half day with people I'd be working with directly in various capacities. Questions were directly relevant to work culture and function.

3) After the first couple of rounds (recruiter screen, then first tier) all interviews were in person at their office. Interviews were conversational, open, and honest on both sides.

4) The final interview round with the hiring manager was structured as a round of questions to find possible match among the choices of equivalent openings I was likely qualified for.

5) At offer time, I told them what I'd work for and they told me what they couldn't exceed. We discussed total package and wiggle-room. The final offer they made had both no surprises and was also better than other incoming offers.

The position is not specifically rare in my industry, but I am specifically well qualified for it. None of us had worked together before, but we did have some shared clients so they were able to check my bona fides.

In comparison:

- AWS's process, while highly structured and tries for impartiality, is a massive time suck for all involved and as a result is kind of a mindless assembly line. However, it's kind of a good first interview among many companies since it preps you well for everybody else.

- There's more to this story, but briefly, I had two prior near interviews through a strong internal referral and another recruiter who put me into the wrong funnel then disappeared along with the position.

- There's also more here involving friends and former colleagues but to put it short, Google's process is stupid, disconnected, and broken while being far too self-congratulatory. It's a surprisingly good match for what they appear to be as a company externally, and from what I hear, how they are these days internally.

> So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting me nowhere? Why shouldn't I switch to an automated "shotgun" approach that applies me to as many jobs as possible to which I vaguely fit the requirements?

I’m in a big semi-private Slack where people have been discussing CS application strategies for a long time (since before ChatGPT).

The desperate people usually go through an arc where they try automated applications and embracing LLMs. Their response rate is dismal, but they make up for it with shotgun volume.

The catch is that when they finally get a job, it’s usually at a company that sucks. Some place with incompetent hiring managers who can’t tell the difference between LLM slop and a genuine application. Interview processes that leave so much room for LLM cheating that all of your coworkers are going to be LLM jockeys too.

So you can try it. You might get something out of it, which is better than nothing. However, if you’re expecting a good job at a good company then it’s not going to deliver what you expect.

This is just the first pass. There are second pass strategies that could improve and are even more insidious: - review your generated CV pre-submission, make changes, do this a lot. Eventually you'll have a training set to fine-tune the model - throw 100-200 CVs at a job and see what sticks. That's your training set for that job. Now you have tuned the hiring manager's preferences. Follow up with your actual CV. Side benefit is it will jam up other candidates.

An arms race is afoot

This is just fear mongering. If a job posting got spammed with 200 fake resumes from multiple fake applicants then the first thing we’re doing is cancelling our job postings with whatever service is so poor that it can’t reject basic spam attacks like this.

Honestly, I think people vastly overestimate how much hiring managers use AI for filtering. Blaming AI for rejections has become a common coping mechanism because it’s easier to think that a broken AI filter rejected you instead of the company making a valid decision to go with someone else.

> throw 100-200 CVs at a job and see what sticks

If your experience wasn’t good enough the first 10 times, doing another couple hundred rounds of LLM word manipulation isn’t going to make it better.

see comment below- " belinder 1 day ago | parent | prev | next [–]

is it "fear mongering" or is it reality?

You don’t need to blame “AI” (or LLMs specifically) for the rejection mess that, good old fashioned ATS (applicant tracking systems) already automated rejection either outright or due to selection priority, filtering for keywords or phrases, biasing towards certain more easily parseable document formats, and so on was already happening around 2018-2019, probably before.

And resume refinement representing and reformatting essentially the same information has always been a commonplace trick to improve your odds. My simple first pass resumes around that time must have never seen the light of human eyes because optimizing things around such systems, adjusting formatting, pushing docx versions, and so on increased my return response rate per submission for the exact same information. People just tend to forget they’ve gone through such processes or are moving positions through networking. The cold market has been abysmal for quite some time, even if you’re qualified.

Naysayers haven’t been submitting to cold options I suspect which is why the trend has always been denial. But with mass layoffs, people are having to resort to cold application processes and finally experiencing at scale how terrible the process has been.

> Naysayers haven’t been submitting to cold options I suspect which is why the trend has always been denial. But with mass layoffs, people are having to resort to cold application processes and finally experiencing at scale how terrible the process has been.

Aye, this. Got all of my jobs historically though word of mouth. Sat next to someone at a wedding reception, or talks at a Linux User Group, or colleagues from one job going to the next and pulling everyone with them, etc.

cold applying was brutal. worked out, eventually, but it feels/felt like such a waste of time.

Hiring managers don’t have infinite time and resources, they’ll just pursue other more fruitful avenues where a DoS attack isn’t possible.

This is a great way to entrench the recruiter middleman further though, because paying them a 20% cut to bypass the bullshit is already what they sell (and sometimes deliver).

Where are these places where the interview processes allow for LLM cheating? I'm desperate.

Unless the place has had 100% turnover in the last two years it sounds a bit dubious. Even some of the worst places to work that I know of haven’t churned through their entire development staff since ChatGPT first released.

> I have 10+ years of professional software dev experience so I've mostly been looking at senior dev positions.

Is the job market just as bad for juniors, people looking to enter the field right now?

Probably worse from what I understand. Seniors are more specialized but also (hopefully) have a network.

Most likely. I was seeing people with a few years experience willing to accept a fairly junior role. As a result we passed on some people that I would’ve hired and trained in years past.

I'm a junior; even getting internship in my city was impossible. And it's a requirement to graduate.

I had many of my peers pay people for signing off that they had an "internship" at some companies.

It’s always hard for juniors, but it’s always possible as well.

IMO job boards are almost entirely useless. Going to meetups and making friends in open source communities is the way to go.

I have found that this is the case for really good people, but if you dont have a degree and dont have much experience or expertise yet then this is a great way to totally destroy your confidence

It is way worse for juniors now. There was a time where merely reading CtCI printed your job offer at Google right out of school.

Makes me wonder if we should just mail in our applications by snail mail at this point.

I've wondered the same.

Or, better yet, literally knocking on doors.

I tried that too e.g. messaging talent recruiter managers on LinkedIn - never got a reply or “accepted” to start chatting

No no, literally literally knocking on doors. Go to a company's office and ask of they have a job.

It depends on the type of job. The receptionist at Google or IBM or wherever is going to give you a URL at best.

> I really am interested in the specific job I'm applying for.

Are you doing anything that shows and differentiates your interest isn’t the same as all the automated “interest”?

Ex: understand deeply some parts of the industry the company is in and how it can be improved w/tech? Or is it just “rust is cool”?

I've personally found that even when I do my best to exude interest in the industry/company through custom question responses or the cover letter that auto-rejection is still the most common end result.

I'm still amazed that the applicant tracking systems don't provide employers with stats like "time spent on application" or "time spent on website researching". At least this would be a signal towards higher interest.

Heck, I'd love a "fave 5" system for employers. Something to flag extreme interest in working for their company. Companies would probably love to have a list of high-intent people to recruit, regardless of their current employment status.

wouldn't poeple just flag everything as their fav 5 and put high numbers of hours not actually spent on the application? unless the system can track all a candidates applications, this seems moot, and if it did track all that yuk no thank you, i don't need more tracking in my life to solve a problem we created artificially. Plus it is probably easy to game for anyone with a minimum of programming skills...

The thought process was tracking all candidates (not having a user-submitted number). That tracking is already happening for most marketing analytics. I'm surprised I haven't seen it show up on the job application side.

As for the fave 5 idea - I don't see an easy way to game this if it's tied to a single user account. You would only be seen as prioritizing the company to the employer if you're actively prioritizing them. Most people are applying to way more than 5 companies simultaneously and don't know where their application stands for the company. It would be too risky to try and rotate it continuously.

>to signal that I'm a real person with real experience is to know someone in the company who can vouch for me (which I almost never do).

You ask your friends/past colleagues if the company they currently work for has any openings. If you've worked hard, solved problems and are good to work with, it's a good way to get further employment.

Today, the hardest part is to get to said first interview, because we are all flooded with fake resumes. Incomprensible amounts. So what you have to do is not send blind resumes, but get a warm intro from someone with a connection to the company that vouch that interviewing you will not be a total waste of time. Networks have never been more important.

Now, if on interview you pass rate is low, it's hard to say what you are doing wrong.

> Now, if on interview you pass rate is low, it's hard to say what you are doing wrong.

Yep. But this question has answers. You just don’t know what they are. Ask some friends to help you practice by getting them to give you mock- interviews and get feedback about what you need to do better. If you’re unemployed, you have time. Be resourceful and you should be able to figure out where the problems are.

(That said, solving your problems may be much harder - especially if you’re going for senior roles. I have met plenty of people who have 10 years experience who are nowhere near qualified to work as a senior engineer.)

What do you do if you don't have any way to get a warm intro? People still need to get a job even if they don't have connections.

I've been looking for a few months. I've got 20 years of professional dev experience, including in an eye-catching domain and haven't used LLMs in the process either.

Since university I have never not been offered the first job I've applied for. For 10 years now I could ring any of the firms working in the niche I've been in and more or less set my rate. I still could, but I'm trying to get out of that niche into the wider world. I've put hundreds of tailored applications in and basically had nothing (literally a few interviews with Canonical, which is a complete car crash of a process and an HR screening call for a role on half my previous income where she said they were struggling with the number of applications, that I didn't hear back from).

It's an absolute bloodbath out there. I regret I don't have any answers, but good luck with your search.

Similar story here. 20+ years experience in leading dev, pm, and UX teams. Launched multiple 0-1 market leading products, worked with dozens of Fortune 500s.

Applied to more than a hundred positions - one phone screen and one interview.

Then I just went to my large network and within a week I have multiple opportunities - companies creating positions so they can hire me.

Spoke to a number of colleagues in recruiting and who are hiring for their teams - the number of ghost jobs, and frozen but posted positions is staggering. Something is fundamentally broken in the hiring world today.

If this is a true story, then it means there’s no point in applying at all. You should just go full LinkedIn, and networking, preferably when you still have a job.

I’m not gonna do that so I’ll just keep my job until layoff, and then panic, automate my applications and belatedly start connecting.

I think that's more or less true. Outside of school (one of which was way back in spray and pray physical letter days), my few jobs have always been through personal connections. Any online applications pretty much resulted in nada.

This is the way. Submitting an application is useless. We've reverted back to networking for jobs. You have to connect with actual humans, as nobody is going to wade through 5k resumes and pick yours out no matter how good it is...

Is going to the company in person an option?

Networking to make contact that can help you get past the HR filter is the new skill set that is essential not job application automation.

Meet people and form connections.

agreed, last application i sent, i had an informational with the hiring manager. They told me to email them my resume in addition to the official submission process so they can tell HR to find and flag my application for interview.

I didn't get the job, or even an interview despite that and the hiring manager never bothered to tell me why. (one of their direct reports told me its because i was vastly overqualified)

I feel stuck in a limbo where my title doesn't reflect the seniority i operate at so i'm not getting interview for senior roles based on automated filters i guess, but jobs i do get interviews for, I was told no because because i was overqualified for the role more than once.

This includes being overqualified for the FTE equivalent of my current job as a contractor in the same company and org. But there's no roles opening at the seniority level they'd hire me at and I can't just rage quit on a 6 figure salary just because I should be making double even as a junior as an FTE by now. So they won't hire me for the work I already do but have no problem keeping me on for half the pay as a contractor. But at least I have a job?

> The only other way I've seen suggested to signal that I'm a real person with real experience is to know someone in the company who can vouch for me (which I almost never do).

The last company where I worked, employee referrals were the preferred mode of hiring. The referring employee would also benefit, on successful completion of the new hire’s first year.

You might want to revisit this aspect.

My advice is to contact recruitment agencies.

HN hates recruiters, especially the cold calling kind on LinkedIn, but it has worked great for me. Every other job of mine has been through a recruitment agency and they have been responsible for the highest pay increases and they have been better to talk to about available budget for the role than the employer

Recs on specific agencies?

Sorry about your search, and sorry to be another reply that you’ve already been inundated with, but in my experience job boards are nearly useless. Especially now that every job on LinkedIn has hundreds (or even thousands!!) of applicants. I’m sure indeed/zip recruiter/dice are all similarly flooded.

During my last job hunt I applied to nearly 300 jobs. Then I recruiter I met at a tiny JavaScript meetup messaged me about a position, and boom. New job.

It’s just one anecdote, but it changed my perspective, that’s for sure. When I’m getting serious about my next hunt I’m just gonna attend tons of meetups and get real active in open source

I think that’s the gold standard for finding engineering (software) and work. Get out into the world by attending meet-ups about technology and start contributing to real world open source projects or volunteer at the many projects looking for devs. It may not be a job overnight but it will keep you busy enough to not stagnate and you will also open yourself to bumping into someone who may be looking for someone at one of the meet ups.

Whether you consider this "networking" or not, the approach is to know relevant people in whatever way. Code, write, talk to people at events, etc. Ideally before you really need a job though because, as you suggest, it's not an overnight thing.

Both this and the OP you responded to are good advice if you aren’t in a situation where you needed a job yesterday.

What about situations where you were laid off and can’t really wait months to get a new one?

The advice is probably to promptly ping obvious connections (which is what I did when I was laid off and it worked out). Failing that, depending on financial situation, either do unpaid work or become a barista.

That’s grim, to say the least.

I also think it’s more proof that tech hiring is broken. When good candidates can’t reasonably get in front of hiring managers without an “in” that means they’re missing out on a lot of really good candidates.

Think that’s the part that bothers me about tech hiring right now. You can’t even really get away messaging a recruiter at the company to start a conversation, I’ve heard from friends that recruiters simply don’t respond in most cases and I’ve heard from a few recruiters I know that they won’t consider it anymore because it became swamped with spam

I'm not sure why you think this is something about tech specifically or even something recent. Most hiring has always been about knowing people and/or some other signal rather than walking off the street other than in a really would-be employee's hunting environment.

ADDED: To be fair, it's probably the fact that, in tech, junior people coming in without any real credentials or otherwise out of the blue at this point probably face a lot of headwinds--especially relative to the last decade or so.

I don’t know about that with other industries

I know a few mechanical engineers and they haven’t seemed to have the same hurdles. One works in the car industry, a few others in industrial areas, they all switch jobs by simply applying online to their desired companies.

I know some accountants and people who work in logistics who cleared lower bars to get interviews, though I suspect the accounting shortage had some to do with the former.

Finance is very networking heavy but clearing their interview process in some respects sounds easier than the leetcode engineering grind but that may not be representative of the situation as a whole.

Networking never hurts, no matter the industry but tech has a self inflicted wound around hiring practices few other industries seem to have

I guess the idea is to do this while you are employed so that you already have the connections when you need them. I can't think how anyone finds the energy to do this after a day at work though. You may also build this at work via former colleagues, but it depends a lot of the type of org and specific job.

I think that getting a good job nowadays requires having a strong referral.

The referral is not sufficient, but unless you have an MIT PhD in Machine Learning, or similarly rare and in-demand credential, it is necessary.

I am in the exact same situation

And I wish I had something encouraging to tell you, but I don’t. I’m extremely broke and getting ghosted on application after application, or turned down months later via robot email. Never any human contact any step of the process.

I’m looking at getting into another industry, tbf.

be creative in any kind of technical assessment

some people think SWE is about "logic". it is, in part, but the "engineering" in software is much more of an art than it is in other branches, like construction

the current sota AI is great at logic and terrible in creativity and actual engineering. if the technical assessment is not designed for you to show your creative engineering side, do it yourself, do more than you were asked, think about what would be relevant to that company in terms of engineering creativity and offer that

that's the best way I know of showing you're a real engineer, not an LLM operator, it's worked well for me in the job search process

good luck!

> what should I be doing?

The current hiring market mirrors online dating.

Swiping right as much as you can (as a man) will get you more matches for sure, but is unlikely to result in a long term relationship.

There isn't much you can do. It comes down to two things: luck and timing.

I do think there are actions you can take to improve your odds, but you gotta figure out what will work best for you. If those actions were somewhat obvious, I'd imagine thousands of others are doing the same thing.

> know someone in the company who can vouch for me

It didn't take long to establish myself as a relatively skilled engineer in a discord community specific to a mobile development framework. I was able to help many junior engineers solve issues. If I was looking for a job, that community may have provided me an opportunity to at least get my resume in front of a few hiring managers.

Me personally, with all these seemingly out of work programmers who are likely as skilled. or more, I'd look to network with a few of them and do something interesting. Start a programming community that lets engineers self organize and launch a projects. Keep the bar to join very selective much like those dating apps that target VIPs and elite people.

As someone who works on the other side of this... if you're getting through 10 phone screens and not getting an offer, something is wrong with the way you're interviewing.

You've gotten 10 phone screens, so you can probably double your activity and get to 20. If you're actually going for jobs you're qualified for, 20 screens should net you ~3 offers, if not more.

My suggestion: record yourself on your interviews and have friends review the recording and offer critique. You have blind spots you need to address to achieve the outcomes you want.

I'm a software manager that has been doing some form of interviewing/hiring for 13 years.

I did two rounds of hiring software engineers last year, one in spring that seemed normal, and one in the fall that was was brutal. The fall hiring had a flood of applicants, and in retrospect, most seemed like AI was used in some way.

For the fall round, I suddenly had a higher percentage of applicants that qualified after resume screening and initial phone screen, but they all collapsed when I did a technical round. And failure rate on the technical was much much worse than usual.

We have a full-time recruiter working with us, and I'm not 100% sure what tools he used, but I switched to manually reviewing each resume, and given that it was 100s, it took a long time, but I still had my problem of great initial screen, terrible technical interview.

Then, I decided to throw out anyone who heavily mentioned AI, LLM, or data science. After all, with almost a thousand applicants, I needed to sort some how. (To be fair, our use case is more esoteric, we're not writing Javascript or parsers, so it's not as much of a time-saver.) Large chunks of applicants dropped and the process felt more normal.

I also switched to only on-site interviews. My initial technical screenings are still done remotely. Before COVID we were 100% on-site interviews, but did hybrid after COVID. Now, I'm back to enforcing on-site for my group.

I am a Platform Engineer and it feels like your experience mirrors mine. Like you, our challenge is filtering out large volume but also filtering out LLM abusers. We're not opposed to people using LLMs, when appropriate. I find that candidates inappropriately use it to circumvent the process and that is a big deal for me (and our team). We try to do the right thing(TM) by the candidates by creating minimal interview workloads, asking highly relevant questions that aren't "gotchas", and updating their candidacy as soon as possible. It doesn't feel like many candidates are interested in returning the same courtesy. This kind of behavior means we have to lean harder into tapping our existing networks for sourcing "trust-worthy" candidates. That puts us at risk for creating additional blinders and also unfairly filters out "un-networked" candidates. For whatever it's worth, we are remote-first org so all of our interviews are done remotely.

One of the things I'm thinking about doing in the future is sharing the screen with diagrams and adding irrelevant annotations to it (while clearly indicating to the candidates that those are irrelevant) as a primitive adversarial AI technique. Perhaps on-site interviews is part of the solution.

Fellow Platform Engineer here, and I can relate 100% with your comment. We decided to stop announcing our engineering jobs and go back to mouth to mouth for sourcing candidates for now. It's a move I didn't want to make as, like you said, it means a lot of less networked engineers will not know about it and all. but for now this was the only way we got rid of the constant stream of letters from AI.

>mouth to mouth for sourcing candidates for now

Well, I certainly hope your revival rate is better than your hiring success rate.

hahaha, i was thinking the same when i read it, such an odd way to phrase it.

“Mouth to mouth” lol

The English phrase for this is 'word of mouth'

What is a "Platform Engineer"? I never heard that term before today.

Latest rebranding of “sysadmin”, which became “devops engineer” or SRE a decade ago. It’s the people who shove kubernetes, datadog, and CI/CD tools into every corner.

Platform Engineers are operationally focused software engineers who focus on enablement of other software engineering groups through building self-service tooling and create unified platform for app deployment.

The cultural focus is placed on enablement of teams through self service, whereas DevOps is more about reducing silos and SRE is more about doing infra through the software engineering lens with metrics (SLO/SLA/SLI).

TL;DR: Internal tool builder

Elitism is alive and well in this little nook. Equating platform engineering, SRE and sysadmin to the same thing.

Platforms are often large scale distributed systems, dealing with problems like ensuring 100000s of compute nodes are in a deployed and in consistent state. Millions of lines of code are written, peer reviewed and committed to solve this problem.

This mirrors an attitude I have frequently encountered from "traditional" or "mainstream" software engineers who devalue any work that isn't features, and don't want to have to work on problems like "make my feature appear on all deployments and work well" - it's just something sysadmins do amirite?

In our remote interviews, I've started pasting the question into meeting chat that I've already fed into ChatGPT. Mainly because some candidates do actually do better with reading and thinking but it's also just pure bait to paste into their open ChatGPT window. Since I've already got input on my side, if they start reading off ChatGPT output, they get a strike, two strikes and interview is ended.

However, I do believe onsite interviews is best solution but finance obviously screams about cost.

it is surprising there isn’t some SaaS bullshit company that solves this problem. we have shit like Pearsons and whatnots when taking exams, I took few certification exams and it was like

- install this thing that takes over my machine

- 360 camera around to show my surroundings

- no phone/watch/…

One would think by now there’d be two Stanford grads with a SaaS shit taking care of this for $899/hr

Last interview I did it was obvious candidate was cheating. Gave him my cell and told him to call me, no speakerphone or bluetooth and hung up Teams meeting - never got a call :)

Even as we speak, scams are going on where pretend-employers are backdooring the computers of applicants that way.

I fear the only applicants who would agree are also the ones who can't be trusted with any employee access to your corporate resources.

a company would run this… Not your company taking over candidate’s computer, an intermediary that candidate and potential employer are using.

candidates are already using Slack/Teams/Zoom/… now they get to use Pouixy or whatever BS name someone in SF comes up with. guarantee you this will be a thing in 2025, some stanfords are on the case

If you (the company) send me a company laptop to use for that shit, sure, we can interview that way. It is the same deal with Teams and Zoom. None of that shit is touching my personal devices, it is strictly limited to the work machine.

have you ever taken a certification exam remotely from your own computer?

No.

you might be slightly more receptive to this idea if you have, the company administering the exam needs to ensure no cheating is happening so app starts, all your other apps are shutdown, you get a call through the app to show your surroundings with the camera on your laptop etc before exam begins. at no point in time did I find any of it intrusive or strange, I wanted to get the exam done remotely, they need to ensure that I wasn’t cheating

> so app starts

I assume this "app" is not open source, correct? Is is compatible with Linux systems? Can it run on non-FHS distribution?

> all your other apps are shutdown

I admit I am curious about this bit. Does it just start killing all other processes belonging to the same user ID? Or of all users (since you could get "assist" from process owned by an another user)? At least PID 1 needs to survive the slaughter, but it can be used to run arbitrary code to assist with the cheating. So how does it tell what is "an app" it needs to stop?

there is a video on this page showing overall experience - https://www.pearsonvue.com/us/en/test-takers/onvue-online-pr...

There's a much simpler solution. You do the interview in your office and watch them answer without typing the question in to chatgpt.

too expensive - no one is doing that anymore

is it more expensive than what we're dealing with now? have we even tallied the human talent cost?

How is it too expensive? It takes the same amount of time for the interview, and you presumably have a room available in the office to book for the occasional interview.

And it instantly filters out all the spam applicants and chat GPT cheaters.

Startup idea to truly solve this would be large network of onsite test / interview centers.

I had to do all my certs onsite in test centers in early 2000's. For one I had to drive 2 hours to take the exam.

Seems like those test centers used to be in every mid size city in the country.

I don't believe one needs a startup to solve that problem - there are already a bazillion certification paths for a bazillion tech stacks. The(?) problem is one of trust from the hiring org that the certs mean anything, and that's where the whole discussion devolves into one of (gatekeeping|but muh leetcode|our business problem is special|$other)

I meant a startup that provides onsite screening / verification of candidates for companies. Only pre-verifed candidates can apply to company jobs. If the candidate is not local, the company can use the test center to do a remote screen in an environment where candidate cannot cheat. Etc.

I just brought up certs because back in the day you could not take those test online due to cheating.

Now in the age of AI you can't do any type of testing remote, imo.

I half-way suspected that's what you were going for (testing-as-a-service) but my point still stands: it is a web-of-trust bootstrapping problem. For example, Otherbranch[1] exists, is a startup, and is trying to handle pre-screening candidates, but they seem to have very few companies that are currently using them. One would assume if they were solving a real problem then companies would be beating down their door to get real, verified, actual people and yet.

1: see https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=otherbranch.com - the folks spun out of Triplebyte

this ain’t about pre-screening at all, it is about solving a different kind of problem. if you have experienced it already, you haven’t interviewed anyone recently.

You are correct, I'm over here stuck on the applicant side, feeling like both sides of this transaction are suffering from the same lack of trust

I therefore fail to see how introducing another party that the hiring managers have to cede their trust to solves our mutual lack of trust

If your company (since your reply implies that you are at least "hiring manager adjacent") merely needs that testing center to start hiring people, I'm totally open to going on Monday and starting a company to provide that service. I even already have a 4k security camera system I can wire up the room to provide DVR access to your interview candidate's session

But my strong suspicion is that such a video camera enabled room for a fee is not, in fact, the obstacle to getting people hired

11 out of last 12 candidates interviewed read their answers from chatgpt or the like. always same scenario, video call, interviewer never makes an eye contact and obviously is reading answers. last one I gave my cell and told him to call me, no speaker or bluetooth on the phone and hung up Teams meeting - mate never called back :)))

this is a pandemic already and tool is needed to establish that interviewer is not cheating. prior to today’s tools at interviewer’s disposal this was not really a thing - today it is a huge thing

too expensive mate… we live in year our Lord 2024 - no one is building 2000 buildings that will be vacant as everyone is working from home (or India…) :)

this requires a simple saas solution - someone’s working on this for sure already as it is already a big issue

I hear you, and yes old school solution sounds absurd, but I suspect interview cheating will be on par with game cheating. Even if you install kernel level cheat protection systems the game cheater's still find ways around them.

These guys already developed an invisible desktop app to help everyone cheat on remote interviews.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42348147

no question there will be cat&mouse here but even more incentive for some stanford grads to charge premium for “unbreakable quantum-proof interview experience” :)

I'm pretty sure the temperature of even GPT4o-mini is not 0 so how would you know it is the something like you have. It would be hard to be reading an answer, it would feel awkward and probably obvious it itself. But I'm just saying that some people would have memorized answers to some standard questions (they apply to many places as you might know).

Alternatively they might also use a different model that has different response traits.

Yea, the newer models wouldn't catch this but there is enough candidates going to chatgpt.com and just pasting in the question.

As always, it's arms race and one I wish I'd didn't have to participate in.

I discovered a new tactic where you ask a vaguely worded question on a niche subject, such that any seemingly off the cuff comprehensive answer must be ChatGPT. Asking something outside the candidate’s declared experience or following up on experience with tech they spoke well to will also reveal discrepancies.

When folks are engaging in mass circumventing of pervasive processes, it's because the process has broken 'typical' attempts to interact with it.

You're being penalized for doing right by candidates but it's likely that a lot of those candidates were penalized previously when they tried to interact the 'right' way with other folks hiring and adapted workarounds as a result.

It's a quintessential arms race. For what it's worth, I appreciate that you're trying hard to keep your hiring process broad and to mitigate your potential blind spots. That's refreshing to hear from a hiring manager.

Yep. Hiring managers are flooded with thousands of bullshit applications because job seekers are flooded with thousands of bullshit jobs, and/or unfairly filtered out of the funnel for real jobs. So now it’s a matter of sheer application volume for candidate employees more than ever, who after all are in a rather more desperate position than potential employers will ever be.

Besides the arms race with AI on both sides to filter/escape being filtered, the other problem is that it’s completely normal these days to use so called “hiring” more as cheap version of advertisement or a growth signal to investors rather than to indicate you are actually hiring.

I would hazard a guess that the average job-seeking application count for individuals has gone up not 2x, not 10x, but like 100x in many fields the last few years, and similarly for the time involved. And this happens without the economy as a whole even being in serious troubles. The only people that win here are the staffing platforms like indeed and linked-in, and the options in that space and in recruitment/staffing generally are decreasing as the industry consolidates with M&A. Brutal

I think there is a sort of just world fallacy employed here. It seems more like that there opportunists everywhere, and always have been. LLMs have amplified their destructive potential.

Remember - the vast majority of candidates who take the time to do right by your process get zero reward for their effort. You get a reward in the end, so it feels imbalanced. This is true for VERY good candidates, as well.

Precisely my problem. I only apply if I know I’m a good fit and have the required experience. I spent countless hours manually adjusting my resume and writing cover letter out of my heart. Just got the usual cold rejection from a no-reply address. I know do the same with ChatGPT. I also get rejections, but at least I waste little time and can therefore submit many more applications - so my odds are higher

Over Christmas I met up with a friend who teaches part-time at a local college. He said he’s failed more people this year than the cumulative total of his entire past teaching career due to LLM abuse.

He doesn’t use LLM detection tools, but he says it’s easy to identify papers with warning signs of LLM use. For some reason, using ChatGPT for his specific niche topic overuses a few obscure, rarely-used words that most people wouldn’t even recognize. The ChatGPT abusers some times have these words appearing multiple times through their essays.

He’s also caught people who cited a lot of different works and books in their reports that were outside of the assigned reading, or in some cases books that don’t exist at all. Catching them is as simple as asking them about their sources or where they acquired a copy of the text.

I see a lot of parallels in hiring and talking to junior software engineers right now. We had a take-home problem that was well liked that we used for many years, but now it’s obvious that a majority of young applicants are just using LLMs to get an answer. When we want to talk about their solution in the interview, they “can’t remember” how it works or why they picked their method.

It’s really sad to me as a long time remote worker because I see far more blatant abuse from remote candidates. Like you, bringing people on site for interviews seems to instantly scare away the LLM cheaters, but it’s expensive and time consuming for everyone involved.

>It’s really sad to me as a long time remote worker because I see far more blatant abuse from remote candidates. Like you, bringing people on site for interviews seems to instantly scare away the LLM cheaters, but it’s expensive and time consuming for everyone involved.

Technology enables scale and reach, which solves some problems but also creates its own set of issues. I think you're right on with the solution: do things that are anti-scale. If you make things a bit more inconvenient, a bit more costly, and a bit more local, you create an environment where there's space for trust and humanity---values that don't scale.

I know the on-site is time-consuming and expensive, but so is firing people (at least in United States it is.) I've had a few on-site interviews where having them on-site made us realize we could never work with them. Given how much time they will spend with you, it's totally worth it to spend your resources on hiring.

Firing people isn’t as expensive as people make it out to be. People vastly overestimate the chance of a lawsuit. And they overestimate the chance of a lawsuit that makes it far enough that it costs significant money even more.

Hiring fast and firing fast (for lying or misrepresentation) is almost always a better business decision than being ultra defensive in the hiring process.

It's not the lawsuit, it's about the time wasted as a manager and salary to the person as you work out if it's actually time to fire. Performance Improvement Plans, a bunch of back-and-forths. I'm not going to be the kind of person that fires quickly, so there's a bunch of sunk cost we have to take. Plus, fast firing creates a cooling effect among everyone there.

And for what? To save money on hiring? Not worth it.

The counter argument is that firing too slowly can be a serious drag on morale. Leaving your team to carry dead weight can really suck for the team.

Ask me how I know... :)

Okay, so the original argument is about whether or not it's worth it to fly people out for an on-site. Hotel and airfare: $2000 absolute max. Salary at $100/hr for one month for me to figure out it's not going to work out, then pull the trigger to fire: $24,000.

I mean, being a manager is hard, but putting in the time and money to hire and then putting in the time to make sure your team doesn't have a morale drag, it's worth it.

The catch is that even in-person interviews are no panacea. I agree that it's worth the time to filter -- I wasn't really responding to that bit -- but from what I've seen, you have to be a very good interviewer not to get a bad hire every so often.

I often wonder how many hiring managers are actually good interviewers, in-person or not, but I digress...

Seeing the truly bad hires dragged along to the detriment of the rest of the team is a sore spot for me, though. It happens way too often in my experience.

In person interview, or even coffee, filters out those who don’t actually exist and those who are reading answers from a screen (chatgpt/person)

Seems to be 90% of the problem reported on this post

$17k/month, not $24k?

If you're paying people $290k a year, no kidding you should bring them in for an on-site interview?

Oh geez, I see my math mistake. But even at $5k/mo, the point still stands.

The fastest that I can possibly fire somebody is still months from the date I choose to hire them.

I decide they are the best candidate. A recruiter talks with them to negotiate compensation and they accept the offer. This takes a week at best, but can take weeks if they are choosing between multiple offers. Then they choose a start date. They've got a couple weeks at the old job, plus probably some time in between roles before they start. So 2-6 weeks waiting here. Then they join and go through the company-wide onboarding and training processes and set up their equipment. Another week.

The first time I actually get to have them do any work is 4-10 weeks from the date I chose to offer them a job. It now takes me some time to realize they are hopeless and misrepresented themself on their resume. Three weeks would be an extraordinary outcome here, but it more likely that this takes 8+ weeks. Even if the actual process of firing them is instant once I've decided that it was a bad hire, I'm still out 3-5 months from the date I chose to hire them. Any other strong candidates I had in the pipeline now have other jobs and I am starting from scratch.

That is incredibly expensive.

This. 100% this.

I can't believe any company would look at this story (which I've heard variations on from multiple peers) and go: "we should save money by not flying candidates out for an on-site and use terrible AI tools to sort our candidates."

Just hire them as contractors first. Give them a 2-3 month contract, if it doesn't work out, you just don't renew the contract.

That only works for desperate people. Sr people or people with other options would not take that risk.

But we've just established in this thread that even senior people are having difficulty findings jobs. This has nothing to do with desperation. Temp contract works both ways, if an employee doesn't like the company or finds another job within the 2-3 months, they are free to leave. This is more than fair.

Relationships between an individual and a corporation are fundamentally asymmetrical. They can only be made equal by heavily favouring the single human side.

Ignoring that this seems like a bad way to start a hopefully long-term relationship, this would largely limit your pool to people who don’t already have a job. If a senior candidate already has a job, why would they give it up for a sketchy 2-3 month contract and the vague promise of full employment?

Also imagine you are a company with a reputation for hiring people - inducing them to leave their current job - and then often dismissing them quickly afterwards.

That would give many great prospective employees pause before applying to work there, because you are asking them to give up a good thing and take a chance on your company, without commitment.

Far better to screen early.

> so is firing people (at least in United States it is.)

There's probably some country somewhere where it is easier to fire people than the US, but not sure where would that be.

There are zero requirements to fire people in the US. No reason needed, no notice, no compensation, nothing.

Most (if not all) other countries have varying levels of requirements, notice and compensation required to fire someone. In the US, nothing.

There's a difference between layoffs and firing. To fire an individual, the company must have documentation to ensure it's not a wrongful termination. Ironically, it's easier to lay-off 100 people because all you need to do is demonstrate their division's project is cancelled.

And that documentation takes time as a manager, which costs money.

But I admit not knowing completely because I haven't had to fire anyone yet. I have talked to legal about the process regarding someone not on my team.

>the company must have documentation to ensure it's not a wrongful termination.

Companies develop documentation processes as they get bigger for myriad reasons, but there is very little to worry about in the US in the way of terminating someone.

The only adverse effect most times is increase in unemployment insurance premiums, if you do not have enough documentation to show you terminated for cause.

Otherwise, 99.9% of the time, the terminated person can claim whatever kind of wrongful termination they want, they probably won’t get anywhere via the courts.

What jjav is referring to is "at will" employment - in almost all US states, employees can be fired for almost any reason, with no recourse. So the fact you're saying that firing people is expensive and time-consuming in the US flies in the face of the actual legal environment there compared with most other relevant countries.

> To fire an individual, the company must have documentation to ensure it's not a wrongful termination.

Not in the US. All you must do is tell them they're gone, walk them out the door and that's that. You must pay them any worked days not yet paid but that's all.

Company HR departments sometimes establish more elaborate procedures for firing, but none of that is required by law, it's just internal company process.

I'm assuming you're talking about "at-will" states, coming from Canada I've heard there are also sane states. And even some at-will states have powerful unions no doubt.

In most places, even with strong labour laws, you can layoff people for any reason in the first 30/60/90 days. And, the US has extremely weak labour laws. Usually, a month of severance for each year of service is customary, but probably not strictly required.

    > When we want to talk about their solution in the interview, they “can’t remember” how it works or why they picked their method.

Sweet! That sounds like perfect signal for "used ChatGPT" to answer this question. So, you can send take home test, candidate sends reply (many from ChatGPT), then you do quick follow-up phone/video call to discuss the code. When you get the "signal" (should be quick!), then you immediately close the interview and move to the next candidate.

Overly expressive words like "robust" and words that would appear in the thesaurus for "extremely" seem like tell tale signs in my experience. I've noticed personally that sometimes I have to tell ChatGPT to "sound more human and concise." I'd love to hear if anyone else has had the same experience as me.

Regardless, if ChatGPT is tailored enough, or a custom model is created, I can't think of any way to detect if an LLM has authored something generic. The lazy college student will probably get caught, but the cunning one not so much.

>We have a full-time recruiter working with us, and I'm not 100% sure what tools he used, but I switched to manually reviewing each resume, and given that it was 100s, it took a long time, but I still had my problem of great initial screen, terrible technical interview.

I think it's very scary when even manual review is still yielding you results with horrible technical screenings. I wonder at that point if your technical review is very hard or specific (specific makes sense, yo did you you are looking for esoteric), or if it's just truly that polarized a market. Many are laid off and I imagine those qualified with such specialized knowledge and anchoring themselves instead of searching.

>I also switched to only on-site interviews

Kind of crazy. Not that I mind on-sites, but I haven't even heard a mention of on-site in the interview process since COVID. And I'm basically applying to any relevant position, locally or remotely. Just another curiosity.

> I think it's very scary when even manual review is still yielding you results with horrible technical screenings.

It was bad. It was starting to affect my life outside of work.

> I wonder at that point if your technical review is very hard

My technical review is very hard, but it is directly applicable to the work I'm doing. And I've seen some candidates just do outstanding based entirely on their natural curiosity to look a bit deeper. I've been using a form of it for five years, so it's well reviewed.

Speaking as a contractor since 2017, I have given up using recruitment agencies in the UK to find work.

I am likely the number one expert, in my field, globally. I apply for roles which specifically ask for an SME in my field. There is no question here of skills, and it is as certain as it can be without actually knowing that I am a light year ahead of all other applicants (because there is practically no one else actually qualified in my field). I'm not flapping my ego, this is how things look to actually be.

I find now I never get even contacted by agencies.

I think they are not reading my CV/application, and I think this is happening because they are flooded - hundreds of applications in the first hour. They take the first person who looks good enough (and they're not good - there are practically no people in this field who actually have skills and experience, as opposed to just "I've worked with") and run with that, and then turn to filling the next contract.

The upshot of this is that it doesn't matter how good you are, because your CV isn't going to be seen, not unless you apply in the first ten minutes or so.

You have to play that game, and automate your applications, to be seen.

So the question is, if you don't want to play that game, how now do you find companies who need skills?

Obviously your field is in no demand at all. Otherwise, why would you be searching for employment if you are #1 in it?

They’re a contractor.

They gave a plausible reason why.

Marketing is a skill all in itself.

I know this because it is one which I lack, which in turn is one of two reasons I didn't go down the contracting path.

AI is better at selling itself than at doing the thing.

It's a type of work where companies normally want permanent employees.

Also, it tends to be concentrated in the USA.

However, I see one absolutely perfect contract about every month or two.

For something super niche, wouldn't you already know all the likely interested people? Why not just write to them directly?

The UK job market is pretty screwy.

I got made redundant back in March, applied for a bunch of stuff I matched profile for and maybe got 5-6 interviews off the back of it.

The worst was the agency that lined me up for a contract role, got me to fill out all the paperwork only for the job to fall through because the client apparently never got budget signed off for the position.

> The worst was the agency that lined me up for a contract role, got me to fill out all the paperwork only for the job to fall through because the client apparently never got budget signed off for the position.

I could be wrong, but I think that might have been a lie.

I've heard it before, too, and I've come to doubt it; I think it too unlikely to be heard with such frequency as I do hear it.

I've also had on three occasions agents call up after a day or two and tell "something about the budget, so the rate is now less than expected".

In two cases I came to know the agency was simply lying, and was keeping the difference for itself, and I expect it to be true also in the third.

I saw this on contract jobs which require a US security clearance. Maybe its frequent with single-customer projects.

> I could be wrong, but I think that might have been a lie.

> I've heard it before, too, and I've come to doubt it; I think it too unlikely to be heard with such frequency as I do hear it.

Maybe but it sounded plausible, this would have been a 3 month contract with Moodys in Canary Wharf so not some rinkydink outfit. I could just be gullible but they gained nothing from stringing me along

I had a recruiter basically hold onto me after I passed more than one technical screen, even though I clearly did get all the way through the hiring process at either role. They were maintaining a pool of competent people.

Did not get?

If only they could crowd source/gpg web of trust such a designation.

We solved this for email by aggregating spam/not spam ratings from tons of recipients. It’d be great if we could do that here.

I’d be willing to sign someone’s (possibly incomplete) background check if I worked with them for six months.

That's why I don't answer LinkedIn recruiters anymore, unless they can show me a clear opportunity that matches my profile.

Every time I answered their bait and they "just wanted a quick phone call", it was clear that they only were interested in filling their database.

Then I get spammed by them with irrelevant automated offers forever, unless I block them completely.

Same experience, we are getting absolutely flooded with hundreds, sometimes thousands of applicants who are presumably using some sort of automation/AI to adapt their resumes to the position yet they are very weak when it comes time for a job challenge or tech screening

> I also switched to only on-site interviews. My initial technical screenings are still done remotely.

Pro tip for anyone hiring engineers for remote positions:

Tell the applicant that there “might be” an in person technical assessment, even if you know the process will be 100% remote.

The amount of fake candidates at the moment is insane. The only thing that makes fake candidates self-select out is knowing there’s the possibility that they will be required to be somewhere in person.

Another trick I’ve used is saying “Oh, you live in Flint Michigan?? We happen to have an employee 20 minutes away, would you be open to meeting them?” And then suddenly they drop out of the interview process.

There are a lot of foreign scammers exploiting the WFH trend in the US to the point where it drowns out real candidates. It’s really bad.

I agree with this approach.

In this field, unless you're hiring a junior engineer, you can have a reasonable expectation that a potential candidate will fly out for an interview even if it's a 100% remote job.

If they refuse, well, there's a chance it's just because they can't afford to. The chance is far greater, though, that you dodged a bullet.

To be clear, you expect candidates to fly out on their own dime just for the interview?

It's more about the reaction by obvious scammers.

You're talking about the entity trying to make people spend a nontrivial sum of money, time, and effort to get a job, right?

What’s the scam? Get a job they can’t do…continue to get paid?

1 paycheck of just a few thousand dollars USD is a lot of money in other countries.

The scam is hold on to the job for at least 1 paycheck. It’s a expensive for companies to (legally) fire people, so if you get hired you typically can get at least a few grand even if you do zero work.

> It’s a expensive for companies to (legally) fire people

Maybe in Europe, in the US it's an email.

Due to the wealth disparities involved, a month’s Silicon Valley money is a years income for a scammer in a poor country.

So just produce LLM-level code, make excuses, say you’re learning the code base, get lots of help from colleagues, turn in mediocre work, and if you can hang on for three months before they fire you - that’s decent money!

Hell, you might even get promoted to management!

> So just produce LLM-level code, make excuses, say you’re learning the code base, get lots of help from colleagues, turn in mediocre work

If they switched from doing all this to pressing people for estimates.

Yep, with very little upfront cost needed.

I think the expectation is that any travel is paid for by the company. I've even had a per diem given to me to pay for meals as well.

That was always the norm for me.

Not candidates for a position I'm hiring for, no.

But positions that I'm applying to? I'm senior enough now that if I can't negotiate a paid-travel interview, clearly I either don't care enough and should cross that opportunity off my list, or it's tempting enough that I don't care.

I can’t imagine you actually work in the US in software and expect candidates to pay to fly out for an interview.

I would withdraw from the process immediately if I encountered a company so cheap

Not only withdraw, but post publicly about said company. That's so beyond the pale it's gotta be a joke

I’ve flown myself out for interviews at companies that were dream jobs. Think: sports industries, not insurance companies. They tended to be small and didn’t have the resources to put together reservations (and would have taken months to figure out budgeting situations)

Yes, I wanted to work for them so badly it was well worth the risk. Sometimes you see opportunities and want to pay for them.

>They tended to be small and didn’t have the resources to put together reservations (and would have taken months to figure out budgeting situations)

This makes no sense. If they can't afford a one-off line item like travel arrangements, how can they possibly make payroll reliably? You're describing either a company with no financial buffer, or one that's asking prospective applicants to subsidize them.

To be honest the DC intern economy runs on rich parents willing to subsidize their kids rubbing shoulders with power.

This is a completely separate problem. Not as bad as in the U.K. but you still have the situation where wages low down in many industries are so poor you can’t afford to take the job unless your parents subsidise you (either they live close enough to give you free housing or they pay your rent for the first 5 years)

Once you “make it” then you have your six figure salary and are good to go.

This is by design to ensure the right people get the jobs.

I don’t have a generalized answer, but they have been making it, I guess is the answer? It’s been over 6 years since I interviewed, but talking with friends they haven’t missed a payroll. Sometimes smoke indicates a fire, sometimes it indicates bbq I guess.

I agree, though you should pay. The scammers aren’t going to take you up, because they know that the in person will catch them out.

Obviously that’s a financial burden to the company, but minimal compared to the long term costs to the company of an employee.

What do you mean by "can't afford to?"

Because you can't possibly mean you think candidates are going to fly out for an interview at their own expense.

Traditionally (i.e. pre-Covid) flying out a senior candidate was the standard signal that both sides were taking the process seriously. And for competitive hires, the quality of the hotel and the restaurants they were taken to and the seniority of the people who joined for dinner were all very important indicators.

I've been working remote since 2009 but I kinda miss the old ways.

> the quality of the hotel and the restaurants they were taken to and the seniority of the people who joined for dinner were all very important indicators.

I maybe once misinterpreted this. I was flattered to be having dinner with the well-regarded co-founder and two other highly-ranked people, but I thought the nice hotel and the fancy restaurant was just their everyday extravagant lifestyle.

Despite being obviously unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the affluent lifestyle conventions, I did get the offer. Had I known that the nice restaurant and VIPs might be specifically to say that they valued me, I would've been more likely to accept the offer.

Positive reading: cannot afford the time (off from their current employer, away from family, …)

Speaking from the point of view of an interviewee rather than an interviewer... I would pay for flying out to someplace for an in-person interview on my own dime, if I thought I would get a reasonable return on investment.

If the interviewer _expected_ that I would pay for a cross-country (or cross-border) flight myself, that would cast a shadow on the opportunity for me.

I live in Europe and work for a company based in the USA.

I probably wouldn’t have had this job if the job listing had said that in-person interviews might be required, because if I read that back then I probably would have thought:

1. Flying all the way to the USA is expensive.

2. It takes a lot of time.

3. I’ll be exhausted from the flight when I arrive.

4. There’s probably a bunch of other people applying for this job. What’s the point in flying all that way for a job I don’t even know if I’ll get hired for.

In reality of course, there are other people working for that same company that live in Europe, including people in managerial roles, so if they had been the type of company to ask for an in-person interview they probably would have asked that I meet in a neighboring country. Not that I fly all the way to the USA for an interview.

Luckily for me, the job listing never said anything about any in-person interviews so I never started thinking about what it would mean to maybe have to fly to the USA and therefore I happily proceeded to apply for the job and after a take-home assignment and a few remote interviews I got hired :)

And now in present day, if I were to apply to a job in the current market I would probably apply even if the company was far away and mentioned that in-person interviews might be required. After all, it might not necessarily mean that long of a flight even. They could also have people working in countries near to you. And if the in-person interview does turn out to be too far away well you can always say no at that point. And in order to not waste too much of your own time you can keep applying and interviewing for other jobs in the meantime also, all the way up to when you finally get hired and have a contract for work signed.

You're reasoning doesn't make sense.

You're saying that if an employer expected you to pay for the flight for an interview, that would be a red flag.

But then you say that as an interviewer, you would be willing to pay for the flight for an interview (if you thought it would be reasonable ROI).

The situation where you would be willing to pay for the flight implies that the employer would not pay for the flight (or else why would you pay for the flight?). So according to your own logic, that would raise a red flag (because the employer won't pay for the flight and expects you to). Then why would you be willing to pay for the flight to interview at an employer that is raising a red flag for you? Makes no sense at all.

I have no idea _why_ they wrote that up, but the points do separately make sense. They're willing to pay for a flight in the abstract, just not in the current timeline where employers know they're supposed to pay for it.

Yeah, flying someplace for interviews used to be pretty much the necessary stage for interviews after (maybe) a phone interview.

On the employer's dime though.

Correct.

> What do you mean by "can't afford to?"

Cat boarding is pricey. I couldn't afford it right now, even for a very short trip. I doubt any job would offer to pick up the tab.

I presume your cat is like all other cats and shits inside the house.

Get an automated food/water dispenser, save yourself some money.

For seniors maybe but for juniors it’s not rare to have to fly out in your own dime unfortunately.

For finding my first job I had to pay for a few trips myself (flights and hotel).

Just to counter your anecdote with another of equal value, the only time I’ve ever traveled for an interview was for my first software dev job when I had zero experience. Flight and hotel was paid for by the company. I’ve never heard of anyone other than an employer paying for interview travel expenses.

Same, I was always either able to interview fully remotely or had my trip and hotel paid for even for junior roles.

I have 15 YOE and I am a very qualified senior candidate, at least IMO.

There is no world where I would take an interview that I had to fly out and stay at a hotel on my own dime. That would 100% sound like some sort of scam job to me.

Seconded.

Fly out and hotel yes, on own dime, no.

I’ve seen the movie Dead Man. No way am I paying my own flight and lodging costs for a potential employer that has no accountability to me.

Can’t edit the comment anymore.

But it’s implied that the company would pay for all travel.

The “gotcha” is that the company would also see the departing airport, which exposes foreign candidates posing as US citizens.

> it's just because they can't afford to

Wait, is this another norm that corporate America broke in the last couple of decades? Do people now expect to pay to fly to interviews? When did this happen?

I have a better idea: pay to get through every step of the recruiting process, with steep increase for each stage. Who paid the most - get the job!

There's already industries that think you should pay them for the honor to work for them. (at least companies within said industries i worked for, in gaming, luxury, sports... it's not uncommon). I'm surprised they didn't charge for applications but they'll definitely pay lower wages because the rest is paid for by having their name on your resume.

i saw a tiktok where the guy had his phone propped up but not in view of his webcam, and basically the interviewer's mic was going through his phone on some llm and the llm was spitting out responses for him to reply to the soft questions his interviewer was asking. the interviewer also made him "quickly" turn on his screen sharing so he could see that his computer didn't have anything assisting him.

i haven't done an interview in a while, it's kinda crazy all the things people are pulling now for interviews on both sides. the process feels really broken.

But like.. what happens after this supposed trick? I don’t understand how they wouldn’t just be fired after the first week if they can’t actually do the job?

Is it that they are applying to places where you don’t pair program?

The reality is that most developers are bad at their jobs.

Also, there's the "fake it till you make it" thinking.

That's assuming the interview process tests for job performance with any sort of accuracy.

In my ten years I’ve never worked at a place where pairing was the norm. I would love to experience that kind of culture

Agreed, I've worked in a dozen firms now in many different teams and never seen anyone pairing.

If it’s remote, sometimes they’ll pay someone else to do the work and pocket the difference. And/or the job may just be a ruse to get credentials in the org because it’s an espionage target or to use as a launch point to go after an espionage target.

Most places have such chaotic onboarding that it would take a few months to truly get signal that the employee knew nothing.

Get hired. Go through onboarding. Collect your hiring bonus. Get a few weeks for your first project and fail at it. It gets written off as "they're just new here". Use some "unlimited" vacation time. Get more projects and keep failing at them. Get put on a new team because the eng director wants to give you another chance, and repeat the whole process. Eventually get put on a PIP. Show no improvement at the end of it. Accept a severance in exchange for "resigning" and signing an NDA/liability waiver.

At a large company it is possible for this entire process to draw out for 3-6 months, and you collecting >$100K in in that period.

Signing bonuses almost always have clawback provisions, and I've never heard of someone getting severance from being fired for cause (performance). The only way I can see your scenario playing out is if the employee has some kind of real leverage over the company (e.g., family connections, political backing, etc.).

> Signing bonuses almost always have clawback provisions

Written on a piece of paper, yes, but no company is actually going to sue you in court to recover it. It will cost them more than the value of the bonus to do so. And they know you have already spent the money.

> I've never heard of someone getting severance from being fired for cause (performance)

At large tech companies it is standard for people going through the PIP process to get the option of taking a severance and walking away (and waiving their right to sue the company) instead of waiting for their manager and HR to draw up the paperwork to fire them.

In most cases in corporations you are not interviewed by people you will be working with. Interview stage is a generic assessment by random people. Yo simply need to pass them. Also they are usually asking questions not related to the real job.

You're making the (large) assumption that the interviews are actually relevant to the position.

Generally that's why the soft skills questions generally want a response in a STAR (situation, task, action, result) format. It's a lot harder to lie about a story and keep yourself consistent through a back and forth.

I do technical hiring for remote senior Java roles. I have not noticed a fake applicant problem. Can you share more about it?

I see plenty of people with poor technical skills claiming to be senior. They seem to be real enough though.

In fairness, its probably a lot harder to tell llm java code from human made java code.

People who are serious about doing remote work are going to pass on anything that indicates hybrid. The simplest screening technique is to give instructions within the job post to submit via email rather than the job board form. Even before LLM slop became the norm people were spamming their resumes with Easy Apply.

What do you do when a real person says they'd be happy to meet your fake employee?

were honest with the candidate about why we asked the question.

As someone looking for remote work atm, can confirm this sounds fair to me: if the employer looks legit and would fly me out (like my current employer did), I'd be totally willing to do an onsite interview.

Right now my approach has been focused less on proving my skills, and more on proving I'm a real person. Hah.

What exactly you can do as a HM to make the life of a job seeker easy? I dare say nothing except to just make the quality of response better. Even after six rounds of interviews candidates who are not selected get not a single positive feedback and is treated like scrap with a soulless rejection. Beleive me as a job applicant I have zero sympathy for the corporates that hire me and I will use every thing at my disposal including AI to be more efficient in any way I deem fit. The job is just a business transaction to me and I don’t care about your high and mighty lecture as a HM. GTFO.

I agree with your sentiment. I am curious how this person will fare when they return to the job hunt. Then, they will see how adversarial the process has become, even for highly qualified candidates. Suddenly, AI looks like a good idea to game some of the process.

Since I think I'm the person you're referencing, I really do want to give good feedback, but experience has shown it's really perilous (discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42533899)

And I know how adversarial the process has become. I have friends looking for jobs plus I try to get to know my candidates. And I have my recent hires and their stories.

I want to make it a better process but I'm so burnt out figuring out how to make it better. Some people talk about professional 3rd party recruiters but I've been burned by those as well. When it comes to dating and hiring, both can be pretty brutal.

fwiw the article seems to describe a pretty mild type of automation to deal with tons of job ads and mundane stuff like cover letters that often get completely ignored by all sides, so why not try to automate that in good faith? didn't find anything about fake or cheating or misrepresenting one's skills in there.

That’s what I see, too. I see someone who is easy to manage, as opposed to someone leaking AI slop into production.

On-site interviews. This is not ideal, but is the way. As long as you're willing to shell out on my flight and cover the expenses, I'll fly anywhere for an interview.

> Then, I decided to throw out anyone who heavily mentioned AI, LLM, or data science.

As someone who graduated in the field of AI (so it's on my resume), and is now working in the Data Science field, often with LLMs, this hurts. Although I'm not sure what role you're hiring for, so perhaps I wouldn't be in the list of candidates anyway.

Nice. But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want. Flooded with auto submitted Resumes. I posted a job recently and got 100+ resumes in 2 days and 99% were not even remotely close to being a good fit. I struggled to sort through so many Resumes to find someone worth interviewing.

The problem is that with so much noise, good candidates may get ignored or rejected by mistake. And the cycle continues.

I get that the market is bad right now and there are lot of people looking for jobs but auto submissions and flooding job sites wont work. Not for the ones that matter anyway.

Were you able to find good candidates from your post eventually?

Not yet. It has been a week and I have 500+ resumes sitting in the inbox. Not fun.

Good luck! Sounds terrible

Just curious, do you use LLMs in your reviewing process? e.g. Summarization, prioritization, etc.

Thinking about it. Might build my own tool.

That's okay. You can just use a bunch of LLMs to filter through to the few resumes you would have gotten before people used LLMs to find jobs... ;-)

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. You are the reason people go for these kinda solutions. Hiring process is complete bs.

What do you suggest?

Add a tiny captcha-like task that takes a real candidate who read the job ad 20 seconds to do, but won’t get done by spray and pray candidates.

Bunch of services that can do captchas now. It’d maybe lessen the load on employers but then job seeking becomes pay to play. The candidate who can afford one of those services + automation beats out those who can’t. It’s already an arms race of sorts.

If one is not currently employed as an engineer?

Frankly, seriously consider a career change. The ladder has been pulled up for entry-level positions due to AI, interest-rates, etc. This will come back and bite us as an industry, but it’ll be 10 years from now and most people can’t wait that long.

I can’t speak for everyone, but 3000+ applicants for a single opening is typical at my org. The odds of any given individual getting in are essentially zero. Referrals get priority over everyone else, even candidates that are on-paper better qualified.

It sucks for everyone involved, especially for job hunters. But from the hiring side, truthfully, there’s no end in sight.

Oooooor work in Europe. Plenty of work here. I still get 1 job offer per 1 application.

My 5 year plan is to move to the EU, but it's a process. You're not going to be doing it as your next job hop from the US if you haven't been planning for it.

The trick is to get a masters or MBA in the country where you want to live. Germany and Netherlands are excellent for this. You can find lots of jobs with no local language requirements.

The fun part is that I went the security engineer route instead of SDE/SWE. It has some pros and cons, but seems like it's one of the "high demand" roles that gets more traction looking at others who have moved abroad.

I also have friends and family in Netherlands, France, and UK who help me keep tabs on how things are going in various places and where might be better locations to target for an American with a technical background looking to just up and leave the US.

Resumes must be dropped off at the office in person.

YEAH! Go back to the old Boomer ways of applying, lol. How ironic, but this seems preferable over the current sh*tstorm.

The internet is going to end up just a place for AI generated noise. Real people will only be found in the real world soon.

Have you tried using AI to screen the AI generated applications?

The issue is, if you're looking for only one hire out of a thousand applicants, you need a 99.9% accurate AI. HR isn't that good, so it'll be mildly difficult to train an AI to be that good.

What’s our alternative? It doesn’t seem to be “carefully consider and apply to a handful of highly relevant postings”. I don’t see the downsides for candidates to play the numbers game.

Hiring and placement agencies that do prescreenings and provide CVs in standardized formats to employers and them getting paid according to how much salary the hire will get.

win-win-win situation for every party, they got me my last two jobs in Vienna

Yes but now you need these agencies to prescreen for you which is a very expensive and time consuming process. Also, I have used some before and not all agencies are worth the time or money. Most of them are glorified Keyword scanners.

We only ever used body shops when we were really desperate.

I work in an industry where this practice is universal. That said, why don't more of these companies complaining on this thread try that model? I know the reason: Cost. Instead of wasted hours of their staff's time, they are faced with a realistically large bill that most managers would like to deny. For me, head hunters find me on LinkedIn.

Well, those companies can‘t have it that bad if they rather wade through 1000‘s of fake/ai/mismatched CVs and other slop themselves.

The costs will diffuse through a mix of incompetent inhouse HR and already overworked seniors and leads that now need to waste time on hiring.

Don't look at it as us vs them. Recruiters are part of your (future) team. Maybe not your direct team, but once you get bad people in your team you'll want them to do a better job.. Chicken vs egg. Apply where you actually want to apply and trust that the recruiter does his job.

I have trusted in the past, and verified that the recruiter does not in fact do their job.

The downside is that if all candidates are thinking like you, you are now hoping that the hiring team can sort through 100s of garbage Resumes to may be find you who may be a good fit. Your odds of being called for Round 1 is now much lower due to all that noise. Doesn't matter whose fault it is. Your probability of being called for Round 1 just went down significantly and this hurts you.

I can’t stop other people doing this, and not doing it if other people are is a disadvantage for me. Imprisoned in a dilemma of our own making.

What happens when you get an interview and spend time for a company you don't want to work for?

I’ll turn it down if further research shows I don’t want to work there? Why upfront my research if I’ll be ghosted anyway? Turning down interviews because “circumstances have changed” is hardly unusual

Ghost jobs on one side, ghost applications on the other. Some people will just send automated applications everywhere, every day, and check for responses. That leads to ghost responses, and the cycle continues.

Responding to someone to say you got their message but have changed your mind isn’t ghosting. Job hunting would be less miserable if rejections happened in a reasonable time frame

interview practice

You are happy you have anything to pay your bills ;)

Nice wordplay! (see Prisoner's dilemma)

I would have thought the one thing these ATS systems could do by now is filter the obvious garbage resumes.

The hiring teams are employed. If they aren't in a position to fix the dynamics then nobody can. HR enjoys a vaulted position under which their suffering KPIs allow them to point their fingers at the market and shrug the blame from their shoulders . It isn't like they are going to suddenly band together and boycott AI. We've all had our sip from the fountain of eternal laziness and now we all want more.

that ship has sailed. companies already get 100s of applications for every job post even without candidates automating applications.

Sorting a few hundred documents don't seem like a very hard task for a software company.

But this is a classic prisoners dilemma then... If I don't do it and everyone else does then I am only hurting my own chances.

Based on what you're saying, the only way to actually fix this is to fix the underlying systematic problem. No idea how you do that, but seems like the only logical way I can think of

Referrals and networking? When has submitting a resume to a portal ever been the way to find a job other than a cookie cutter one?

Apply like a bot, work like a bot.

I haven’t seen the power of referrals for 10 years now. At work I can give you a “referral” by uploading your resume to our ATS. That’s it. It receives no more consideration than if you were to click Easy Apply on LinkedIn as far as I’m aware.

That type of referral indeed is mostly worthless (it might get you actually looked at by a human instead of rejected before that). Useful referrals are the kind where you go chat with your friend, figure out what they want in a job, then go find the hiring manager and tell them about this amazing ex-colleague who's a perfect fit for the role. That gets the candidate treated seriously. Sometimes it doesn't work out, but definitely gives the candidate a fair shot.

At a former employer, I sort of hated the referral ambassador or whatever it was called thing (with financial rewards attached I think). I always felt it encouraged quantity over quality. I actually sent a couple people I knew off on their merry way and suggested a couple others just go to the job site. On the other hand, I got several jobs through people I actually knew and had worked with in some manner.

I referred two friends at my former employer and the process has changed in the span of 5 years; first one needed at least a short recommendation, second was pretty much fire and forget (and hope for the bonus if they get hired)

I wonder if we might see the rise a broad but weak "yes that's a real person" referral system as opposed to "I know that person will be good for the job" referrals.

Referrals in my company basically just guarantee that the resume isn't immediately thrown in the trash, doesn't really help anyone's odds otherwise. I suspect in most companies it's similar, if they even get that much of a benefit (unless you're upper management (aka nepotism) I guess)

Nepotism is most associated with relatives although I guess it doesn't have to be. But I've definitely gotten several jobs through senior managers I had worked with which largely bypassed the whole HR system where it existed.

> Nepotism is most associated with relatives although I guess it doesn't have to be.

IIRC "nepotism" is specifically family/relatives, and the larger Venn-diagram circle would be "favoritism."

Wikipedia disagrees even if relatives seems to be the predominant meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepotism

Charge $x for a candidate to apply for your job. Put the money in an escrow pool. Pay it to the person you hire for the job.

Idea 2: Bid to have yourself reviewed for the job. Money goes in escrow pool.

Betting currency is a terrible solution, especially at the junior level when people are trying to start their careers. On the other hand, forcing candidates to invest time and in exchange guaranteeing their application will be reviewed could work well.

Candidates aren’t going to apply until you can actually guarantee that their application will be reviewed and given due consideration. And that will never happen because the fakers will invest an unlimited amount of time, so your review process will fall over.

Huh? The problem is getting to the point where the company is able to have a candidate invest time and then review their work. If the candidate doesn't have the application fee, there could be a secondary market of people who would back the candidate if they were confident they could get the job and the escrowed application fees.

"Hey, if you want to work, pay us" sounds so fucking dystopian.

I already saw "work" offers where YOU have to pay them their salary. As in, to employer, for the "opportunity"

Idea 3: Use a prediction market to find the best candidate.

Meanwhile, I am flooded with recruiter "opportunities" that are nowhere near my capabilities.

There's noise all around happening.

Maybe the problem is that spamming people is free.

Absolutely. I mean I remember 20y ago when someone's solution to spam was paying a small fee. Not what you want, but it's gotta be somewhere there. There has to be a cost to it, but it probably shouldn't be directly monetary. Submission delay might work.

Requiring applicants to pay a fee will mean that the positions that I have to apply for that either do not exist, or are opened "just in case", or are market research, or the COA positions to push internal candidates, or any one of countless similar positions, will require me to pay out of pocket. Not exactly fair from my perspective.

Agreed, while paying to reduce spam may work in other contexts, in this setting the incentives don't align. Imagine if Linkedin got paid every time you applied for a listing, the pile of ghost jobs would be practically infinite.

Some of the listing services actually do charge employers per applicant, unless they are rejected within a certain amount of time (usually 48 or 72 hrs).

The critical distinction here is that the employer pays, not the applicant. This direction works, that's roughly how all job boards work if you squint, but if it was the applicant paying, the incentives would be opposing.

This system still does incentivize the board to accept (or at least not deter) junk or fraudulent applicants.

Isn't this Musk's solution to stopping Xitter spam? Promote subscribed accounts more, so it costs money to speak.

Isn't a better solution to create a reputation score just for email addresses? You start out very low, and sending emails further lowers your score. However, every email that is read (and not marked spam) increases it a little more. If reputations start out just marginally above the "straight to spam" tolerance level, then spam accounts can only get out a few emails.

And you can create a new address for every spam message you send and never get blocked?

How do they contact you? Email, social media, or LinkedIn? If LinkedIn, it is definitely not free. Recruiters pay a hefty fee for the right to contact people outside their network.

This situation is basically equivalent to the prisoner dilemma and requires jobseekers to spray and pray

More like tragedy of the commons.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/governing-the-commons/A...

Enjoy. It's Nobel prize material.

I've run into the same thing.

We don't even have the job posted publicly anywhere and we get >100 submissions per day. Many are duplicates. I've found some that with some minor research turn out to be foreign organized crime. A large number of them had the exact same cover letter with changes in the names and past jobs.

Not only is it difficult to find candidates that actually fit the job role, it's hard to go through any that are even real people.

I've told many friends of mine to use connections and not online job postings because it's basically impossible right now with the automated resume submission companies.

And then the candidate management tools such as lever told me that no, every one of those candidates that applied were real people -- even when I provided proof that at least 40 of them were linked to a single organized crime group out of China.

This is my experience as well. The candidate management tools (even the AI-powered ones) I’ve tried have been next to worthless.

It seems that many processes, from interviews to real work, are increasingly manipulated. I've noticed a pattern with candidates employed by certain consulting companies, especially in Texas and New Jersey. These companies often recruit low-cost labor from India, craft fake resumes, and submit them to platforms like LinkedIn.

During interviews, candidates use tools like HDMI dual-screen setups, ChatGPT, Otter AI, or Fathom AI to cheat and secure jobs. These consulting firms even fabricate green card verifications and other documents, enabling them to crack most interviews unless the candidate is exceptionally unskilled.

Once hired, these companies often delegate the actual work to individuals in India, paying them as little as $500 while profiting $4,000–$5,000 per month from the arrangement.

We uncovered this issue when we began conducting on-site interviews. While these candidates can handle medium-level LeetCode problems during virtual evaluations, they struggle with basic tasks, like implementing a LinkedList or solving simple LeetCode problems, in person.

Alarmingly, these consulting companies are becoming more sophisticated over time. This raises a critical question: how can genuinely experienced candidates compete in such a landscape?

What’s the outsourced work from India like? Anything worth having?

I've done this. It can be hit or miss. Get a great team with a strong lead and you'll love them. Unfortunately there's quite a bit of opportunity over there so once you've trained them up, they're always looking for their next (better paying) gig with their new skills. It's rare if folks last past a year on your team.

Time difference is tough, unless you're ok with 7am or 10pm zoom calls.

There are so many incredibly talented software engineers in India that want to stay in India for family/cultural reasons. The best setups I have seen have one very reliable senior person who experience working in EU/NA, then returned home. They can help with the cultural barriers with more junior hires. Further, if you pay 20% more than your competition, you can get way better candidates. My experience is also pretty similar with offshore teams in China, but their English skills are worse (on average).

I keep holding out hope that one day my totally genuine, slightly rusty, slightly nervous, takes all 40 minutes to solve the Leetcode medium style will be seen as so refreshing and honest I’ll be an insta-hire.

Not yet!

They are taking advantage of the incompetence at the workplace you're at. That's just what business is and has always been. If you're a fool, you'll be separated from your money.

why would you ever task an employee to implement a LinkedList?

Unfortunately so many people lie about experience that you need to so some sort of whiteboard test just to see if the candidate really is fluent in the language they are claiming 5 years experience with. It can be a really simple test.

In my two decades of experience, I've never seen another software engineer implement a linked list or even use a linked list. There are better, and more interesting, questions to be asking.

I personally wouldn't expect someone to implement one (end cases easy to mess up if they are stressed), but writing a function to reverse one (foreach, pop front, push front) is enough to catch the liars. You can argue about how often a std::list vs std::vector is a performance win, but I'd run a mile from any developer who wasn't highly familiar with the basic data structures provided by any language they are claiming to be fluent in.

> or even use a linked list.

You must work in a super specialized industry, then

The only real requirements to "never use a linked list" are a) use a language where some kind of contiguous-storage-based sequence (array, vector, whatever you want to call it; Python calls it a list, even) is built in (or in the standard library); plus b) not ever need to remove O(1) values from the middle of a sequence in O(1) time while preserving order.

But arguably, a candidate who hasn't ever had to contemplate the concept of "linked list" but can derive the necessary ideas on the spot given the basic design, has some useful talents.

Creating linked list is very simple in Java. It is just a simple class with next method.

I am sure 12+ years of experience should be able to do it easily.

>A large number of them had the exact same cover letter with changes in the names and past jobs.

I mean when I write a cover letter I take the cover letter I took the last time and change a couple of names and that's it.

Why do I want the job? I want the job because I do work for money, I don't have some idea that your SaaS is really giving me anything that any of the others I've worked at in the past didn't give me - no company means anything to me aside from having reasonably interesting problems to work on and hopefully not onerous working environment.

How are people finding the job that isn't publicly posted; and how does foreign organized crime (seek to) benefit from applying?

"Please don't flood us with auto-resumes"

...

"Click here to submit to having your resume processed by a bot that will do all the filtering for us"

This might not be you and your company, but it seems to be most of them.

Agreed. Both sides are bad. Most of these "bots" are useless and do a terrible job. I have seen that side as well. Many years ago, I was applying at IBM (don't ask) for a role and the recruiter told me that the online portal will reject me anyway. But not to worry because he knows what buttons to click to get me the interview because I was a really good fit.

> IBM (don't ask)

Lol I dipped out of further consideration once they sent me what the interview process was gonna be like. Like 6 rounds, whiteboard coding, leetcode crap, "behavioral" interviews, a talk with some pencil pushers and some extra stuff. I don't know how desperate you have to be to put up with that.

What do you think of https://wonderful.dev? You get notifications when candidates are interested in your jobs, then you can choose to reach out to the ones you want to apply.

I'm at a point where I'm almost willing to ignore the first few days of applicants. They're all spray and pray junk. A week or two in and the applicant quality is significantly better.

Really good point. But the issue is that some job sites (indeed for example) wants you to pay to play. If you reduce the sponsorship or daily cost, the resume count also goes down. But regardless, I have seen the same. 1st few days are nightmare. I am 1 week into the job posting and have 500+ resumes. This after I have rejected at least 100 already. Madness.

Ah, now I know to do my spray and pray on week-old job listings ;)

The current advice meta is that you want to apply asap since "many" companies ignore the stragglers.

Hiring agents have been spamming potential job seekers for years with garbage and then came up with the abomination known as ATS, which makes it very difficult to argue that job seekers should not use automation.

Either the market needs to come up with a good solution that encourages good behavior from both sides or the governments can step in and start regulating.

> both sides or the governments can step in and start regulating

How could regulations help?

Both sides already have good incentives to match positions to candidates; yet we are collectively failing.

Only sort of. Lots of employees are only looking for any job and the adverse selection nature of hiring makes the typical job seeker pool look worse than average.

On the company side, only some people in the organization are strongly aligned with hiring. The vast majority are indifferent or even somewhat negative as new hires mean more work.

More than that, the incentives are inversely aligned - companies want to hire a "good match" for as little as possible, and applicants want to be hired at the maximum possible rate.

I haven’t hired in years but I am surprised there aren’t AI agents that can intelligently rate the compatibility of resumes to your job posting

There are recruiting agencies who have tried this method: "Use AI to match the most relevant candidates to the job spec you gave us."

Spoiler alert, it doesn't work. The result is a mountain of overfitted garbage, with keyword spamming like there was no tomorrow. And they all find the same unqualified candidates.

If you're a recruiter, you're supposed to find the qualified, non-trivial to surface candidates. And yes, unfortunately that means it's a lot of hard work. (The top-notch agency recruiters value their personally built candidate networks for a good reason.)

As a hiring manager, I've chosen to opt out of this system altogether. Instead of public postings, I just poll my network and post job announcements in private channels in my professional community. Much higher signal-to-noise ratio.

Yeah, a lot of people here hate this but the few jobs I've gotten in the past 25 years or so were always directly through people I knew. The resume was pretty much pro forma.

But, yeah, if you don't have a network you're in a more difficult position.

>But, yeah, if you don't have a network you're in a more difficult position.

The lesson people should take from this is you need to cultivate your network through your career. Sadly it seems most people would rather complain about how broken the system is.

I wish I knew how to find one of these channels. My real human professional network has slowly evaporated over the last decade.

Advice from an old guy that went through this after moving to a new area and loosing my phat California income eventually. If you aren't working, pickup consulting gigs. They will probably suck and be high stress low reward, but it will help you build connections locally. Look for ones that don't just need a body but that really need help so you are in a position where your work is visible. Heck once I got in most of the 'come in and clean up our mess' jobs wanted to hire me to manage their teams/projects. Not ideal but it paid well and I have a pretty limited pool of bog standard dev work (or worse, internal IT dev) where I live anyways.

where do you find "come in and clean up our mess" jobs? i'd love to take on some of those (i actually enjoy doing that)

I am with you on that. applying for jobs indiscriminately is bad. but right now llms have got to a point where they are pretty good at pattern matching job requirements with skills in my resume. it's smart enough to not apply for php heavy projects/jobs when given a MERN stack developer resume.

I saw this as a marketing kind of problem, your conversion is based both on number and quality of your leads.

With automated hiring spam and our industry's tenuous grasp of basic integrity with actual HN posts proudly boasting of their apps to help you cheat during interviews using LLMs, several of my friends who assist in hiring at their companies have already returned to "on site" interviews to cut down on the proverbial chaff.

The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are being performed at shared workspaces. That's the world we live in now.

Thinking that "in person" will stop or prevent cheating is laughable.

For god-sakes, the chess world is freaking out over an ANAL BEADS cheating scandal! https://kotaku.com/chess-champion-anal-bead-magnus-carlsen-h...

https://github.com/RonSijm/ButtFish

A candidate who wants that job will figure out some way to have ChatGPT help them in a way you can't detect, even if it also has an impact on their ass health.

If you are dumb enough not to hire someone who is able to integrate ChatGPT from analbeads into a conversation while looking natural then that is on you.

As long as the interviewee also reports to work with their anal AI interface, what's the problem ?

You're right, you can't ever stop cheating. That's not the point. The point is to make it harder & more expensive. To make it not worth it.

Your comment is like "why use AES256? People can still brute force it." Sure... good luck

I’d be absolutely fine going in person to interview for a remote job if I thought I had any reasonable chance of success with your process. We are talking about where I’m going to be working for at least the next few years. That’s kind of a big deal.

Yeah, it's not about the in-person trip, it's about the trip multiplied by the probability that your application will be seriously considered as a near finalist.

Yeah I get that. My friends (the hiring managers) are in relatively large tech hubs (Austin and Seattle), so from what I understand 90% of the applicants have been "locally sourced". It'd be another story entirely if you had to travel a significant distance just for an interview.

> The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are being performed at shared workspaces. That's the world we live in now.

Nah, if I was running a 100% remote job company ten years ago before all of this, I would still absolutely want to meet each of my hires in person before inking a deal. Maybe I'm old-school but I've been very successful and lucky with hiring.

> with actual HN posts proudly boasting of their apps to help you cheat during interviews using LLMs

I mean, I don't disagree emotionally, but this is a lot closer in spirit to what the OG hackers did than most of the stuff you see on the front page.

I mean.... IMHO self titled "solopreneurs" throwing together a for-profit web app that runs in the background to feed an applicant answers from ChatGPT just so they can cheat en masse on an exam feels like a far cry from old school phreakers building blue boxes in their basement to stick it to Ma Bell.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/capn-crunch-whistle

The next logical step is for exam proctoring facilities to begin offering interview and resume proctoring services.

What I find most infuriating is that people just don’t care, even when faced with enough evidence that their strategy of mass applying even when they are not a good fit is failing. It just makes it harder for everybody else as you said.

This is the human condition. "If everyone would just," but everyone will not just. All of civilization is full of these tragedies of the commons.

it's number's game anyway on who gets the initial interviews

hate the game playa ;)

It all ends up being a nasty feedback loop. (Especially) junior people in a somewhat tough market for tech end up spamming resumes so companies respond with pretty crappy algorithmic filters which basically somewhat randomly toss most of the resumes into the bit bucket. Rinse and repeat.

But per downthread comment, applicants don't care if their actions make things worse for the market as a whole. And it's not clear if they should as a one-turn game. (As someone else remarked, Prisoner's Dilemma and all that.)

There's actually a solution around this: name and shame! Just like bad companies get called out on GlassDoor, companies should create a reputation system for prospective employees (e.g. a professional credit score). This already exists for potential tenants, so I don't really understand why it doesn't exist for potential employees given they occur at about the same frequency and have a similar amount of money trading hands.

Applicants have long sprayed and prayed even when it involved sending physical letters. Some of the current systems have decreased the effort per company applied-to but, for entry-level employees, it was rarely a carefully-targeted thing for new professionals. It was always a numbers game to some degree although admittedly the scale and tools involved have changed.

The smaller scale in the past made it so managers either knew (at least by reputation) the person submitting the resume, or it was not too expensive to find out. Nowadays, jobs are getting 100x as many applications, most of which are far lower in quality.

University admissions has followed a similar trend, going from 5–10 being "spray and pray" twenty years ago to 20–30 applications nowadays. However, it didn't increase as much because (1) each application costs money, and (2) most universities expect a cover letter. It still costs quite a bit to filter the applicants, but the fee helps pay for that.

The "solution," such as it is, is that companies strongly bias towards referrals and managers towards people they personally know. And, from some conversations I've had, that is exactly what is happening. With the result that it's tough for junior people with no real networks (OK maybe their school is a signal) because companies really don't want to sift all the junk they're getting and I don't really blame them.

That's a solution, but I'd prefer a system that, when ideal/efficient, is optimal.

I'm not sure what other solutions look like: Gatekeeping of various forms including institutions and certifications, letters of introduction like essentially the US service academies, standardized tests, informal networks, etc.

There's two distinct reasons why more qualified candidates might get skipped over:

1) There is too much noise occluding their signal.

2) There is a form of gatekeeping going on.

Gatekeeping only really works in exploitative systems (e.g. "me and my children are the masters, and you and your children are the slaves") or when the noise is so high that companies wouldn't gain much from not gatekeeping (e.g. Harvard admissions in the late 1800s).

So, if you don't exist in an exploitative system, providing more signal is going to both benefit deserving candidates and punish gatekeeping companies. I don't see why a reputation score would increase gatekeeping.

At the end of the day, every applicant could be ranked on their ability at the job. Wouldn't it be best for everyone—companies and prospective employees—to know where they rank up, so they don't waste time applying to hundreds of jobs or sifting through hundreds of applications?

The only people who are hurt are the hustlers: people who spend far more time hustling for a position than gaining the skills needed to do well in that position. Their goal is the extreme limit of noise, where success rate is directly proportional to how many applications are filled out, and I have no sympathy for the destruction of the commons (that I have to live in).

For a lot of things, hustling is probably at least as important to me as a hiring manager as rather amorphous "skills needed to do well in that position" at least as an entry-level employee. Of course, I don't want someone who has none of the skills needed for the job in most cases but they probably don't know most of what they need to learn anyway.

>OK maybe their school is a signal

"School" is quite variable.

Weak signal: you only went to class and did OK in them.

Strong signal: you had an internship, or undergrad research experience, or part-time employment as a TA/tutor, or have a completed project to show off, or some kind of non-trivial community/group/club/fraternity leadership.

Really strong signal: you published a paper with someone I know and they recommend you to me.

Typically, undergrads aren't publishing papers. I did co-author a paper in grad school though it was irrelevant to my eventual job.

Most people are looking at whether you just went to (whatever they consider) a top tier university.

Absolutely, it's very rare for an undergrad to be on a paper. But that's what makes it such a strong signal: it shows they had the grit and maturity to contribute to a research effort to completion, in a team with people more experienced than they are. In an interview, it gives them something non-trivial to talk about and be proud of. That's very likely a strong junior candidate.

There are a ton of things you might look at for a newly graduated undergrad beyond grades: research and other academic projects, sports teams, editor on a newspaper, etc.

Why are sports teams important signals?

The weird thing to me is that I don't see this happening at the large FAANG companies - referrals don't seem to move the needle whatsoever anymore, and not just for me but for quite a few of the people in my network.

On the flipside I'm not finding good resources to find startups to apply to that don't have hundreds of applicants already. There's no good answer the market has come up with as far as I can tell, so everything just gets worse for everyone as a result.

About uni apps in the US: Most people limit the number because there is a modest fee associated with each. I doubt it is 2-3x since last generation.

You’re talking about blacklists.

They are not a new idea, in fact they are well known, but also prohibited by law in many places because of their widespread abuse.

There’s also a more general idea in competition law that companies shoul, well, compete their fields, and allowing cartel-like behaviour on the labour market is contradictory to this.

A reputation score is only a blacklist if you target specific people to tank their reputations.

Yes, that's what happens.

Is this also your opinion on credit scores used for loans?

Define the objective metric that you would use to assess a candidate's work ethic or reputation credit score. Would LinkedIn issue it, as if it were a popularity contest?

And come to think of it, actually, credit scores can be gamed. It's well known that when companies and territories get credit scores they are largely a con game, as in based on the conifdence the raters have on your future performance, and not objective reality.

Likewise, credit scores can be juiced and tools exist to help you improve them and track them. But a bad credit score doesn't always mean fiscal mismanagement. It could be loans from a predatory lender or due to a medical expense or something completely outside the context the credit check is to be used for. Credit scores tell you if someone has lots of money first, and if they are smart with their money second. People with financial means often have good credit scores but can be as likely to default if their circumstances change. Perhaps more likely if the amounts of money at play are greater. People got those subprime mortgages with great credit scores, somehow.

So... Yeah, credit scores for loans are a form of outsourcing of responsibilities. But the point is somewhat well taken. The equivalent in hiring to a credit score isn't to ask banks but to do reference checks and ask a network or former manager about a hire.

Credit scores can easily be discriminatory as much as criminal charges (without due process, at least) and other unfair systems. We just normalize it because it works for most people. We poke fun at it when other countries try to come up with e.g. a social credit score, though.

Yes

Just like how many companies have methods available to them to remove bad glassdoor reviews (or make fake 5-star reviews), this system is even more rife for abuse.

Credit scores seem to be pretty robust? Maybe this kind of system would work:

1. A third-party assigns everyone a hidden score, and gives them a cryptographic signing key.

2. They can sign off on one-time lookups to companies they apply to. Every time their credit score is looked up, it decreases to disincentivize "spray and pray".

3. Companies are incentivized to go directly to the third-party (to ensure truthiness), and not divulge the score to other companies (since they are in a competition).

4. The actual algorithms used to determine scores should stay hidden to avoid manipulation. However, how do you also ensure accuracy? Maybe have several dozen reputation companies, and apply Shapley values based on hiring decisions. To avoid correlation, you should only update a reputation's weight when the hiring decision didn't query it.

College degrees from reputable colleges used to serve this purpose, but grade inflation has greatly weakened this signal.

You also want colleges to signal to their applicants, not force them to also signal for their alumni. The two will naturally be correlated, but you can do better by specializing.

    > many companies have methods available to them to remove bad glassdoor reviews

I never heard about this. Can you share more details? Is it rumors or verified?

>companies should create a reputation system for prospective employees

I guess that would work in societies where this was legal - not sure if I know of any though.

Maybe not your company, but it seems hiring companies brought this upon themselves with immediate AI rejects of qualified candidates, ghost jobs, ghosting candidates after interview, etc, etc.

If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to land a single interview, then can you blame someone for automating it? I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already found a job!

100%, this is a natural reaction to the situation companies have created. When you get a rejection response mere minutes after submission that claims "after careful consideration..." then of course I'm not going to spend any more time than that applying to any jobs anymore. Prove a human actually took the time to review my resume and I'll actually apply to your company like a human.

If I get 500 applications to a role and spend 1 minute writing each person a personalised no sorry, that’s 20% of my week just writing rejection emails (never mind actually reviewing the resume).

I’ve hired for 3 companies for engineers from entry level to staff level, and for non technical candidates for other departments. Applicant tracking systems like greenhouse send me an email for every application that comes through, you get the resume and cover letter attached. There’s a reject candidate button where you choose why, and it auto fills in the template for you with the reason you selected (and the email was pre written).

Don’t mistake an automated email for assuming your resume wasn’t looked at.

Maybe it is time for a set of unions or guilds to do that certification for you.

This. Just as doctors or lawyers or civil engineers can't do their jobs before being vetted by their own professional bodies it's time we do the same for software engineering.

If all you did was an entry level "bar exam, it'd be pretty much useless. A newly graduated CompSci student, is really just an apprentice, who may then (if they continue to work hard, and are given challenging work) go on to become a master craftsman/journeyman over the next 5/10/20 years.

The same is true of those other fields too really - I certainly wouldn't want a newly qualified doctor operating on me, or lawyer defending me, or civil engineer designing a bridge I'm driving over. It's nice to know that someone has been professionally educated and passed some entry level exam, but to be useful in a field it's experience that counts.

Doctors go through residency after passing their exams, we should have the same for engineers. Civil engineers have layers of seniority and designs of junior engineers have to be reviewed and approved by senior engineers, we should have the same.

I don't assume it "wasn't looked at", but I absolutely do think that a lot of the time it "wasn't understood" because the recruiters reading it only have very simply "keyword lookup" ability, instead of actually reading the resume.

I don't fill my my resume with a bunch of spam buzzwords for every adjacent technology I've ever used, because certain things are kind of implied by other things. If I put "set up multiple clusters across different Linux systems", I don't also cram in "systemd, bash, upstart, scripting, ls, cp, du, nohup", despite the fact that I know how to use all of those things, because I think they're implied by "me setting up Linux clusters".

A software engineer reading my resume would come away with a decent understanding of what skills I have, but a recruiter who doesn't know anything outside of keyword-matching and hitting the `fwd` button in Outlook (which appears to be most recruiters) will see "HE DOESN'T KNOW BASH, SEE HE DIDN'T PUT IT ON HIS RESUME."

Now, of course, most of this is on me, it's up to me to learn how to play the game, whether or not I like the system doesn't really change anything, but as far as I can tell, the "solution" to this is to turn my resume into a low-quality SEO-spam piece of shit so as to try and satisfy the most incompetent person who might read it.

> but as far as I can tell, the "solution" to this is to turn my resume into a low-quality SEO-spam piece of shit so as to try and satisfy the most incompetent person who might read it.

If a posting gets 500 applications (which is about how many apps the last 4 roles I’ve listed got before we closed them) and we have an engineer spend 5 minutes per resume reading through each resume, that’s a full week of engineer time spent on screening alone. That’s not a good use of time when most of the resumes are a straight no.

I’m assuming your writing style is different in professional environments, but if it’s not, and I saw even like 10% of the snark you’ve put here, I’d instantly dismiss you unless we were hiring for a principal into fellowship IC role and you were a 100% match.

If you’re writing your resume to be read by software engineers or sysadmins, you’re writing for the wrong audience. That’s not their fault for being “incompetent”, it’s yours.

I don’t really put any snark into my resume, so I can’t tell you how successful that would be.

I don’t write it to be “read by software engineers” per se. I describe my skillset and things I have worked on. I don’t load it with a million buzzwords of every single noun that I am aware of.

I acknowledge that I probably play the game “wrong”, insofar that there’s any “right” way of doing it, but I don’t have to like the game, and I certainly am allowed to think that it’s very frustrating that I have to fill my resume with SEO spam of synonyms because most recruiters are unwilling to learn anything more than basic keyword matching.

God, I wish I could respond to denied applicants like a human, but the threat of legal action prevents me from giving good feedback. I know it sucks, but I'm not sure what to do about this, and I'm already so burnt out from the hiring process as it is, it's hard to work up the strength to do this fight as well.

Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...

I tried giving honest and actionable interview feedback at first.

A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me. I had people trying to argue that my feedback was wrong, someone stalking me across social media and trying to argue everything there, and eventually someone who threatened to use my feedback as the basis for a discrimination lawsuit.

So now we’re back to simple “we’re proceeding with other candidates” feedback.

If we’re going to play the blame-game, then you have to see the full picture. Many candidates can be awful and even vengeful. Many people do not handle rejection well.

> A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me.

This happened to one of my bosses. As a result, I've never attempted it.

Except once, a candidate realized at the end of a technical screen they had done poorly and demanded feedback. I gave an initial bit (shouldn't have, my mistake) and instantly turned it around on me.

At least some kind of feedback is greatly appreciated. A simple, "No" would do so much more for me than being ghosted.

The line isn't between detailed feedback and brief, uninformative feedback.

The line is between saying something brief and saying nothing.

Somehow, it has become standard to say absolutely nothing instead of telling people a simple no.

I've even had situations where people said they wanted to keep talking to me, and then went completely silent.

But brief feedback is probably more likely to result in pushback / being sued by candidates, since candidates will feel like you didn’t properly consider them.

The sad truth of the situation is that all the incentives for a company point in the direction of giving no feedback at all. This isn’t because hiring managers are sociopaths.

I'm not arguing for feedback, I'm arguing for an answer.

It's just common decency. "Sorry, we're not continuing" is not going to get you sued.

See after just having through 3 rounds of recruiting over the past three years, I don't think the ghosting is intentional from most companies. I would say 60% of companies give a "not continuing" response after 1-2 months from application, while ~25% seem like they have a configuration/software mistake that causes it to send the rejection 6 months - a year later, which people in the meantime think was just ghosting. Not sure why this is so common

I think there's something wrong with a hiring process where it takes 1-2 months to decide whether to proceed to next step (screening call, or interview, or offer) with a candidate, not to mention the fact that a well qualified candidate isn't going to be waiting around that long - they'll be applying to other jobs at the same time, and if good will be snapped up.

The time to send the "Sorry, not continuing" email is as soon as the company has decided that, and if that really is 1-2 months later, you may as well have just ghosted the candidate.

I think part of it may be they're not saying no until someone else is actually hired just in case they need a fallback, so everyone else gets to wait however long it takes for the role to be filled, most likely...

> So now we’re back to simple “we’re proceeding with other candidates” feedback.

Hell if companies would even do that - I've spent a lot of time (7+ hours) interviewing with some known companies including meeting with the VP of engineering and then they just stop messaging and ghost you (looking at you Glassdoor..)

I've also seen the "your feedback is wrong" pushback. Like... do they expect me to say "oh woops my bad. actually here's an offer"?

I agree with what you're saying, but it can be immensely frustrating when you're rejected for a job when the interviewer themselves is actually wrong, which has happened a few times. I've been given technical questions in interviews, and I answer the questions correctly (I always double-check when I get home), and the interviewer pretty much tells me that I'm wrong.

For example, in an interview once I got the typical "design Twitter" whiteboarding question, and it's going fine, until the topic of databases and storage comes up.

I ask "do we want consistency or availability here?"

The interviewer says that he wants both. To which I say "umm, ok, but I thought you said you wanted this to be distributed?", and he said yeah that's what he wants.

So I have to push back and say "well I mean, we all want that, but I'm pretty sure you can't have stuff be distributed or partitionable while also having availability and consistent."

We go back and forth for about another minute (or course eating away at my interview time), until I eventually pull out my phone and pull up the Wikipedia article for CAP theorem, to which the interviewer said that this is "different" somehow. I said "it's actually not different, but lets just use assume that there exists some kind of database X that gives us all these perks".

Now, in fairness to this particular company, they actually did move forward and gave me a (crappy) offer, so credit there, but I've had other interviews that went similarly and I'm declined. I've never done it, but I've sort of wanted to go onto LinkedIn and try and explain that their interview questions either need to change or they need to become better informed about the concepts that they're interviewing for. Not to change anything, not to convince anyone to suddenly give me an offer, but simply to prove my point.

Not sure how the dialog went irl, but if the conversation was that adversarial and with as little diplomacy applied, I'd not hire the person nor accept the role if I was on either side of it...

I think people are just upset when they submit a resume, or even go on an interview, and get NO response at all .. I don't think most people care about feedback - they just want a response. A one-line auto response would be fine.

Yep. As an undergrad, one of my first "proper" interviews was with Mozilla for an internship. I was obviously super excited since I actually cared about their products. I spent a lot of time carefully preparing for the two rounds of interviews, just to get ghosted! Sent a follow-up email a couple weeks later -- no response! I was crushed!

That seems "on brand" for Mozilla, based on the sheer number of WTAF moves that org makes

And I say that even while writing this comment in Firefox

>I wish I could respond to denied applicants like a human, but the threat of legal action

... Legal action on what basis, exactly?

Not the person you're responding to, but if you give any kind of specific feedback, then you're effectively saying "Reason X is why I didn't hire you".

Dumb example, say you didn't hire someone because they wore a Marilyn Manson Antichrist Superstar shirt to an interview and you think that's not appropriate attire for an interview, and suppose you put that into your feedback for the rejection letter.

Now the candidate has a specific "I was rejected for this shirt". They might come back and say "Actually I'm a satanist and this shirt is part of my religion, so I'm going to sue you for religious discrimination". Suddenly you have a lawsuit on your hands, simply because you thought they were dressing unprofessionally.

Obviously this is a hyperbolic example and I doubt that there are a ton of Marilyn Manson fans trying this, but it's just to show my point: It's much safer to simply leave it vague with something generic like "while we were impressed with your qualifications, we've decided to pursue other candidates" email. They can maintain plausible deniability about the reasons they rejected you, and you don't really have fodder to sue them over that.

That said, I absolutely hate how normalized ghosting is in the job world. A candidate isn't entitled to a job, but I do think they're entitled to a response, even if it's just a blanket form rejection.

> 100%, this is a natural reaction to the situation companies have created

Hiring manager here. I don’t like the situation either, but to honest a lot of what you’re seeing is a natural reaction to the shenanigans that applicants are doing.

When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application.

I think their main complaint (or at least mine would be) is the laziness in many companies recruitment strategies. As an applicant in the software space I used to only apply to roles where I fit 70% or more of the qualifications but there is no difference in how often I get an interview compared to blindly applying to anything in the web space. I have 0 incentive to take the time to only apply to jobs I'm qualified for.

This is one of the few aspects of hiring I feel government employers handle better than private. My state hold monthly events where you can just show up and talk to a representatives and if you pass the vibes check you are virtually guaranteed a proper interview.

  >When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application.

Then why not send the automated responses (or nothing) to the obvious spam appliers and save the feedback for the clearly more legitimate applications? If the argument is that so few applications are legit, then it should be proportionally few emails to send.

Awhile ago I applied to an internship at one of the larger, successful startups that most tech workers have heard of (several thousand employees). I got a response from a real person in a day. There's really no excuse for not being decent.

The weird part is that your response to being ignored as a unique person is to treat companies as though they are all exactly the same. The relationship is not assymetrical. I also wonder whether the signals we interpret from the application process have much correlation with whether the job is actually worthwhile?

I also find it hard to sympathize. This is an industry that is notorious for emailing software developers with irrelevant job offers.

We know from the irrelevant offers that many professionals have automated the processes for casting a net. How it is a problem if individuals do that in reverse?

> it seems hiring companies brought this upon themselves

You're missing the point. The primary people who suffer for this environment isn't hiring companies—they'll eventually work through all the resumes and find someone who will be qualified to fill their open roles, it's just much more expensive—the primary people who suffer for this is qualified employees who now have to work that much harder to stand out from a sea of garbage.

Your odds and my odds of having our resumes thrown out summarily are 100x what they were a few years ago, because time-per-resume has dropped dramatically. That's the fallout from this trend to be concerned about, and we're the real victims of it, not the hiring companies.

Alas, in this case it appears that unchecked competition and automation have led to a divergent outcome, creating worse outcomes for everyone.

Who will champion the necessary regulations? In terms of financial incentives, employers can pay lower wages when candidates have a tougher time getting interviews, and individual candidates usually can’t afford lobbyists.

I’ve been hiring for teams for a few years now, and I’ve heard people lament these things like you are. In practice I’ve not seen any of these “smart” scanning techniques used, it’s a recruiter comparing resumes to a checklist I gave to them (5-ish years experience, maybe a degree role dependent, or something that you think is super relevant, one of c#/java/kotlin, hiring for a mid level role so we expect some amount of experience at being self sufficient) and they filter the hundreds down to 10-15 that they screen and pass 4-5 on to me.

We did some spot checks on resumes that were passed on to make sure we were filtering ok and the quality was awful - a significant amount of people were applying for jobs asking for 5 years experience in a Java-like language with no experience, no degree and a half assed cover letter about being a good learner. A decent number were data scientists who had 2 years of python experience, and a surprising number were wildly over-qualified people who I realised after speaking to one or two they were actually trying to sell us their consulting services. That’s before you even get to “are they lying?”

Sure - that's how things are meant to work, with recruiters providing a valuable filtering service, but it does seem that many companies are now using (poor quality) AI screening, as well as a slew of abusive application practices (the ghosting. etc), and it seems any mutual respect between hiring company and candidate is disappearing. I don't know what the solution is.

My point is that that had been my experience hiring in a 10 person company and a 30k person company, and that the “suggested” AI screening isn’t happening - it’s probably that your application is the same as the other 300 applications that went in.

I haven't experienced it myself (haven't applied for a job in a long time), but there are lots of reports here on HN of people getting online applications rejected withing minutes, or late at night - definitely some companies are using software to filter resumes. This has been going on for a long time - it's not just a recent "AI" thing - resumes used to get rejected for not having the right keywords on them.

> lots of reports of people getting online applications rejected within minutes

Possibly the single most distracting alert on my phone and pc is my work email. It’s probably prioritised wrong, but if I have 200 candidates for a position, and I get an application that doesn’t meet the tech stack or YOE requirements when I have 20 who do, I’m just going to reject them.

> or late at night ATS let you schedule emails. I used to send mine at 4am EST despite being in the UK

> definitely some companies are using software to filter resumes

I don’t doubt it, but I doubt that it’s rampant to the degree you’d believe on this site. I’d instead that it’s far more likely that the hiring manager, or a recruiter, is spending about 15 seconds looking at “does the tech stack match, how much experience, and how many other candidates are there that I think have an edge”. The people on this site are a small minority of very smart folk, but if you spend any time in a comment section of a topic you are an expert in, you’ll quickly realise that you shouldn’t take everything you read on here as absolute.

Another suggestion - Reach out to two different recruiters and get them to review your resume. (You might need to pay them to do it). You’ll get two totally different responses. Both might work, and neither might work. At the end of the day, a human makes the call, and even if the ATS is automated, a human set those criteria. Honestly, having spent so much of my time hiring over the past 5 years, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was literally no ATS scanning, and everything that was sold to fix that problem was snake oil.

What's the time frame here, what's your sample size for applying to jobs yourself, and what's your sample size for doing hiring (ie how many different companies)? I'm guessing that your personal sample size is extremely limited - not just in quantity but also in geographic area.

Of course my guess could be way off, but what you are saying is definitely the exception to the common narrative nor does it match what I've seen.

> AI screening

There's been aggressive keyword filtering since long before LLMs exploded.

I’ve been hiring in anger since 2018, applied for 1 job (sent about 10 applications) and hired over three companies. First was an 800 person company that grew to 2000 while I was there, second I was hire number 2 for a startup and I hired the full 15 person engineering team, and a decent chunk of the non engineering product/test roles into. 50 person company . Third (current role) I’ve been involved in hiring about 8 people in the last 6 months that I’ve been here. It’s a 45 person company, but a subsidiary of a 30k multinational whose hiring practices we use.

> but what you are saying is definitely the exception to the common narrative nor does it match what I've seen.

As an anecdote, I posted on who’s hiring here, and we used a separate job requisition for HN, (this was my last job where we went from 2 -> 15 people). We got about 30 applications in the 7 days following that on that req, and of those 30, only one came even remotely close to meeting the requirements on the JD - we were looking for someone with a few years experience in a Java like language, in a Europe/US time zone. Most of the candidates failed both of those criteria, hard. My point being that people who are frustrated with their situation are likely to be more vocal than someone who isn’t.

I’ve spent enough time on HN reading about topics I know a lot about, and seeing people confidently claim how X is easy or if they just Y, and they’re totally wrong. I know a decent amount about working on the hiring side - it’s been a core component of my job for the last 6 years. I’ve worked with recruiters both internal and external, spent far more time with greenhouse than any engineer should ever have to do.

My feeling is that there’s far less sophistication going on, and the dearth of human responses (which is problematic) lets people make up their own reasons as to why it’s not working when the reality is that there’s just a hell of a lot of applicants for every single job.

> If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to land a single interview, then can you blame someone for automating it?

Yes, a candidate is responsible for their own actions. This logic only sounds good until you’re on the hiring side and you see the stark difference between the LLM abuser applications and the people who are genuinely applying.

Those people who have to apply to 100s of jobs are probably in that situation because they’re spraying low-effort LLM resumes around and most hiring managers can see right through this game by now.

> I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already found a job!

Doesn’t work that way, in my experience. The people who game their way through the application process don’t suddenly switch to honest and high performing employees after they start. They continue the process of trying to min-max their effort given to the company, riding the line of finding how little or how low quality work they can get away with.

The mythical lazy applicant who suddenly becomes a brilliant and loyal employee isn’t realistic.

> Yes, a candidate is responsible for their own actions.

Yes, but I think it is overly reductive. As a candidate, you’ve to now apply for a magnitude more of jobs. Tailoring resumes per job takes time, and given how many more I’ve to send, this doesn’t scale.

Additionally, whatever ATS system is being used might auto-reject it because the algorithm decided it’s not a match. If tailored resumes increased hit rate, that would be a different story but that is not the case.

>This logic only sounds good until you’re on the hiring side and you see the stark difference between the LLM abuser applications and the people who are genuinely applying.

Thanks to the automated systems put in place on the hiring side, you often never see the applications of many of the people genuinely applying because your stupid automated filters determined they weren't qualified.

As a side note, for a person with a decade of experience in IT, its currently taking roughly 1500 applications per pre-screen interview to give you an idea where the market is at today (and over the past 2 years with the mass adoption of AI).

Less than 1/100th of 1%.

You should also see what I had to say about the history of slavery, and wage slaves, and what anyone can expect from them. The TL;DR is that what you are looking for no longer exists if it ever did, because you have adopted a scorched; salt the earth strategy for finding labor.

What you call lazy, may actually be incredibly hard working (given the current environment) to even get to the point where you see them. Is it their fault you didn't recognize them for the value they could potentially provide? If you pay wages comparable to an office assistant for skilled labor, why do you expect to get anything more than what that first role provides? The economics of things are important.

You need to re-calibrate unreasonable expectations (delusions) back to some more close to reality.

> Less than 1/100th of 1%.

?? 1 in 1500 is 1/15th of 1%, which is more than 1/100th of 1%...

> Those people who have to apply to 100s of jobs are probably in that situation because they’re spraying low-effort LLM resumes around and most hiring managers can see right through this game by now.

Just came off a brutal 7 month job search. And that's with a resume good enough, and care enough in jobs I applied to, that I got to the hiring manager with 1 of 10 applications (vs 1:100 or worse which is what I've heard is normal).

I think I interviewed at 50+ companies, which makes 500 or more applications.

Yes, this clearly says something about my interview skills, but there is a difference between interview skills and engineering/software skills-- I've done well in my career without having to heavily interview before (senior IC level) and I came by that strong resume honestly.

So please be careful about generalizing. I'm an example of someone who had to apply to 5x as many jobs as you say would be needed, and it would have been 50x if I didn't have a strong background and work ethic.

Responsibility needs to be taken on the hiring side. Some companies post jobs with no intent to hire [1]. 70% of hiring managers surveyed say this is a morally acceptable, 45% of hiring managers have said they’ve done it.

This increases the risk on applicants that their investment on a carefully crafted resume/cover letter is time wasted.

Fake job postings punish the behavior you desire from applicants and incentivize spraying low-effort LLM resumes.

If you do not post fake job postings, I applaud you. If you know a colleague who does this, I ask that you have a conversation with them about the damage they are doing to your industry.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fake-job-listing-ghost-jobs-cbs...

That is true. Companies are using LLM in ATS to filter resume.

If they can bullshit job description to reach more applications why candidates cannot do the same with CV?

The result we are going to is almost every CV now will be a 99% matching to the job description thanks to LLM tools.

And cover letter is even more useless now.

It's certainly a mutual escalation issue. Even a few bad-actors on either side can catalyze more bad-actors on the other, especially since most of the badness involves abuse of scale.

For sure, I’d hire this guy. He’s solved a challenge with a technical solution. He’s proving his qualifications by punching back at a system that could be made much less painful than it is with automation.

Now it’s ATS’s turn to fix its own mess or someone else will. Start creating private benchmarks. Select from problems that LLMs can’t easily answer and use those for screening. Complaining that the genie won’t go back into the bottle isn’t a productive use of time.

'We can use automation tools to just throw away your resume, but heaven forbid the average person does' isn't a take average people care about.

I look forward to the day the average person has the same level of access to agents to counter all this. Oh, Wall Street Journal you want to make it difficult to unsubscribe? You want me to call, waste time on the phone, etc. OK, I'll just have my AI agent call and take up your calling agents time, increasing your costs.

... my AI agent goes through phone tree... finally connected to agent... WSJ Support Person:'Hello, Wall Street Journal support' My AI Agent: 'please hold as I connect with my human' hold music plays... My AI Agent: 'sorry, we are taking longer to connect than normal, please hold while you are connected' hold music plays...

I've had situations where a reapplication to the same spot (with the same resume/details) I got auto-rejected from would yield an acceptance.

I blame all the ASTs and companies that fail to give any feedback whatsoever other than a generic "We went another way". If you can't give people the 5 minutes of effort of looking over their resume, why do you expect them to respect your time instead?

I am sure it’s tough for you, but imagine being someone looking for work when you probably don’t even realize the massive amounts of noise on the employee side. I get friends asking me for input on whether I think that a job listing may be a fraudulent or scammy listing, and that’s from the top job board sites. People have zero trust in the system because the corporations have created this toxic hell of commoditized humans where you are now all the sudden competing with the whole rest of the world in this poss as t-American transitional hell we are currently in.

There have been posts here on HN about people applying to 500 jobs in 8 months and not even getting so much as a human reply, let alone a job. There are other posts proving that companies are posting false job openings to give the impression of growth to Wall Street or also just to argue that more immigration is needed.

You may complain about it, but just be happy you haven’t been replaced by AI application reviewers, because that is coming. I suggest you start thinking about pairing down expenses and increasing savings. No, seriously. Worst case, you have more savings.

Public job board listings have always been flooded with low-effort spam applicants, but AI tools have supercharged the problem.

The saddest part to me is watching the AI and social media malaise infect young mentees. I’ve been doing volunteer mentoring for years. Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max. It’s sad to see smart, motivated young people get their opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit and TikTok, which teach them that trying is lame and the only way to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a job, lie your way through interviews, and “quiet quit” by testing the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok swoop in to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies and CEOs, not their own decisions.

The recent tech recession was a huge wake up call for a lot of these people. The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug malaise to being very humbled when they got laid off due to their own low performance. It’s depressing for me and other mentors who have been trying to warn that workplace behavior has consequences for years, but the weird tech market of 2021 and 2022 led a lot of young people to think the worst thing that could happen to them was that they’d get fired and get a new job next week with a 20% raise.

The new version of this malaise is believing that AI will take their jobs anyway so the game is to use LLMs to bluff your way through applications, through interviews, and then use LLMs to coast as long as possible at their jobs until the next one.

The problem is so bad that one company withdrew from partnering in our internal job board, citing rampant LLM-generated applications and obvious LLM cheating in interviews. The other side of this is that anyone who makes any effort to be genuine and learn (rather than rely on LLMs for communication and coding) is automatically in the top 25% or so.

I don’t know how this ends. My sense is that the job market is continuing to bifurcate into jobs that people take seriously on one end and jobs where everyone just does performative LLM ping-pong as long as they can get away with it.

> Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max

Can you blame them? Other comments mention that automating applications is just the response to automating rejections, so why wouldn't an employee min-max their job when companies are min-maxing their employees?

Yes we can. Resume spamming is not a new phenomenon. Ten years ago we were already struggling to sift through the nonsense at the big co i worked for, llms just expanded the “tam”.

I don't understand why more companies don't leverage in person events. It's something my state does for government jobs and as an applicant, it's so much easier to chat up an agency rep about what they're looking for and schedule a formal interview.

It’s used by every single big co and a lot of smaller ones too. It just doesn’t scale well when you need to hire hundreds of engineers every year. I never actually seen public job postings bring in many leads that actually convert to offers. It’s one of the worst channels which is why candidates are getting such crap experience going that route

Public job board listings have been spammed by fake jobs called ghost jobs. Candidates must overcome that to find real jobs, and the boards in general do not remove said postings. Candidates are forced to identify characterize and remove listings on their side (extra work and cost), through strict OSINT background searches. Businesses have forced candidates to bear increasing arbitrary costs just to find a job and this is a longstanding trend (half a century). Comparisons could easily be made of a slave master in uncivilized times, where mental coercion and torture has replaced physical torture.

What is happening is the same mechanism that RNA interference plays in cellular networks. Equilibrium means no one gets jobs, and its far more cost effective to ramp up the spam (and indirectly the lagging, but adaptive noise floor) than to correct the underlying issue. Nothing else works.

Also, there is a big problem with wages when you can't support yourself a wife, and multiple children and because of cooperation among companies in various little things they have integrated, this has gotten worse (like a sieve) over decades.

The recent tech recession is manufactured and AI driven. You have execs looking to use AI to replace wholesale any workers further driving wages down while vigorously replacing any workers that would dare to pace their wages independently of inflation (just keeping them static in terms of purchasing power, not even increasing).

The malaise is because jobs aren't available, and people are working for slave wages, they are no better than wage slaves in many respects. Companies care far more for short term profits than they do for sustainability, despite there being clear documented evidence that slaves are the worst most costly type of labor because of that lack of agency (malaise as you call it).

Slaves do subtle sabotage, and front-of-line block with minimal output, they also don't have children. If you read a bit of history this goes all the way back to where Spain during the inquisition had to outlaw slavery by decree in the Americas because threatened their colonies there (from the destruction of the natives, i.e. killing themselves in granary, or killing their children so they wouldn't have to suffer). How bad did it have to get for the government responsible for the inquisition to at the same time say, no we can't have this. (The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Landis)

Business chooses what they do, Candidates don't choose for them. When business has adopted bad assumptions and frameworks, you need to re-examine your premises.

Qualified labor didn't just disappear, you filtered it out, and the fact that people don't see this shows just how blind people are today.

Also, when you black tarp out a landscape for long periods of time, of course everything dies underneath it, and its barren even if you change and remove that requirement, for a good amount of time.

Intelligent candidates have options in that they are flexible (and go to other sectors for business when no jobs are available). This is a sticky psychological decision, and they rarely as a general rule return to previous bad investments.

When you and most other businesses scorch the earth in pursuit of profit, why is there any surprise that talent can't be found? You selected and filtered against talent in the first place by the actions taken.

You can see this perfectly in the fact that for most companies, any gap in employment (not continuously employed, larger than 6mo), puts you at the bottom of a pile or straight to the waste-bin, regardless. False association says its because there is something wrong with the candidate, when in a downturn there may be nothing wrong. Its completely irrational when these people then say they can't find talent. The brain drain is real.

Incidentally, experience at companies outside your given sector is also considered another redflag as well, with a discard or waste-bin non-response. Perfectly competent candidates which your HR department, or 3rd-party pre-screener (AI), ignored, and that isn't even touching on all the protected class violations silently occurring in unenforceable ways, thanks to AI's black box characteristics (where age, gender, and other things are being used to decide).

The inquisition being as bad as you think it was was mostly protestant porn/propaganda. Protestant countries burned far more people and for centuries after the catholics had stopped.

You are very mistaken, and it shows you haven't studied enough to rationally discuss the subject matter.

Of course later, in time, countries impacted more people. Population grows with time, and any rational comparison along these lines would need to be normalized against population, but the truth in the ambiguity of the latter phrase doesn't make the former phrase true.

The inquisition lasted quite a long time (1478-~1820), it has been attributed to the collapse of Portugal/Spain as a national superpower of the time (which was dependent on sea power), the brain drain from fleeing refugees (mostly Jews) was also quite impactful (for France), and it was self-financing. The events became less about heresy, and more about seizing wealth domestically, while creating an environment of persecution for cover. The impacts of it are still felt today in those localities where it was worst.

In terms of the many domains important for measuring the health of a country, these events dramatically impacted the state of things towards the negative across multiple critical domains, as well as their neighbors.

Its improper to discount, minimize, and nullify (through fallacy) both events and their effects, that have been well established by experts without providing some proper basis.

Characterizing it solely as propaganda in isolation isn't a valid characterization. Many people died, or were imprisoned and abused, and the surviving records show this.

The Inquisition killed fewer people per year than the State of Texas. About 5 minutes' research will establish that.

You are mistaken, and compare apples to oranges.

Population levels are not the same, this comparison is without basis.

You also assume the formal documented executions are the only deaths where people were killed and died, they are not.

About 5 minutes of 'proper' research based in method, will establish that you are mistaken and don't know what you are talking about. This is the problem when you try to have an AI think for you, you get it wrong, and potentially become delusional.

The inquisition lasted almost three centuries. At its height, Spain had a population of about 7.5 million people. Many prosecutions occurred, but few executions as part of trials. The majority of people died from maltreatment, torture, and executions (absent trials) and these records are sparse in the historical record, but there are credible records to support more died than were executed.

The mortality rate was also significantly higher than it is today, and the families of the accused individuals often died from poverty as a result of fear from guilt-by-association (if you were to include that, most don't). Additionally, the Spanish inquisition inspired surrounding countries to similar acts of terror, and in the Latin America's as well. We are only talking about Spain here. The full global death count as a result of the inquisition is much much higher.

You can find established historical material linked at: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/39443/what-was-t....

This is the sixth result down on google.

Let me take a wild guess and say that your upbringing is… protestant?

According to wikipedia (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisizione#L'Inquisizione_sp... they put to death 826 people, so that's less than 3 people per year and less than 2% of the people they judged.

We know this accurately because it was a legal proceeding that left paper trails which can be studied.

Your claim that it led to the collapse of portugal and spain seems quite wild. And certainly doesn't explain why you think it had no ill effect in protestant countries that kept burning people for 200 years more.

Agnostic, and you are quite wrong about a lot of things.

Wikipedia isn't a valid historic source, this is consistently repeated in introductory college courses and throughout academia. Any derivations you make on unsound data remains unsound data and nothing more than your own personal opinion, you shouldn't make it out to be less or more than it is.

You neglects quite a lot in an attempt to nullify, discount, and minimize to suit your biased narrative, like the fact that established estimates show roughly 150,000 people were prosecuted, and the fact that confessions of the time were extracted using torture. Many died without ever being formally executed.

Yes there are legal proceedings that did leave paper trails which I have studied, as well as where those paper trails stop being accurate.

The claims were "collapse as a superpower", not what you improperly referenced as a quote.

When you omit important context intentionally to try and put words not said in other people's mouth (as you did here to strawman), its fairly blatant that you are operating from a place of delusion or severe bias, or potentially malign personal hidden agenda.

Portugal/Spain was known for their technology, seafaring, and maps right up until the inquisition.

This is not wild at all, when you have mass migrations of intelligent and educated people wherever they migrate to benefit from their intellect whereas the places they travel from stagnate.

In any case, the fact that you tried to change what was said kills any possible credibility you might have, and there is no impetus or need for me to respond to you any further.

There is no value in unnecessarily giving a platform in the guise of discussion to the delusional or the malevolent. Best of luck to you in correcting that vile behavior, deceitful behavior is not tolerated by rational or intelligent people.

>It’s sad to see smart, motivated young people get their opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit and TikTok, which teach them that trying is lame and the only way to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a job, lie your way through interviews, and “quiet quit” by testing the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok swoop in to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies and CEOs, not their own decisions.

I was given Tech Lead duties after being hired as a Senior SWE, but when it came time for the promotion and pay bump at the end of this year, I kept my current title and only got a 3% pay increase. All of the feedback was good. If there was criticism or bad opinions, it was withheld. I have to wait until next year to see if I can get that now while still carrying those duties, which is ample time to look for new positions.

I was also shown a chart where I was under the 50th percentile (roughly 33%) of pay of other Senior SWEs at the company. That was a nice disclosure, but they don't want to do anything about it. That is patently saying they believe I am below average even though I am doing regular senior SWE work plus tech lead duties without the title and pay. But they don't have any feedback for that. It's possible I just accepted a lower salary and they want to keep it as low as possible.

There could be other reasons why I didn't get it, but I have to guess at those reasons. I'm not going to do more than the minimum if they don't give me actionable feedback and don't reward taking on additional duties. Their move is to not give rewards for working harder, my move is job hopping for that increase.

You can't have many of these experiences before you become jaded. I am definitely not spending a minute outside of work when I take up additional duties on the job and still don't get rewarded for it.

I'm going to act like a business of one and just take as much as I can for as little as possible throughout the career. If that means spamming LLM applications for the next position, then so be it I guess.

Playing the blame game about whether workers or businesses caused this is pretty pointless, but the simple truth is that many people get far more money for far less effort than a Senior SWE (and certainly more than manual labor at all levels below where I'm at).

All of these stories we hear paints a picture of how the world really works, so can you really blame people for getting ahead that way and not taking the path of hard work when it doesn't reward you? I don't want to be taken advantage of and be a sucker - do you?

Why do still work there?

He hasn't set up his bot to apply to other jobs yet, so he gets autorejected

> I kept my current title and only got a 3% pay increase.

I've been working for nearly 30 years now. This is pretty standard. Talk to your friends who dont work in tech a 3% raise is pretty good.

In my whole career I've seen 0 correlation between effort and rewards.

How long has your career been? I’ve been doing software professionally for 20 years and the correlation I’ve seen is huge. Not necessarily inside a single company - but after awhile you get jobs from networking & people you worked with in the past. If none of your ex colleagues want to work with you again, it’ll become a lot harder for you to get hired & promoted.

15 years?

I've seen a strongly positive correlation over a 30+ year career.

It's not perfect, but it's far from zero in my experience.

When I see stuff like that I can't help but wonder if the people who are satisfied by it are the ones who fall upwards and of course say the system is working perfectly.

Maybe I fell upwards. Maybe I earned it. Doesn't matter for the following:

I'm now on the side of the table where I frequently make personnel decisions: hire, promote, offer a new role, offer a new assignment, merit adjustment, expand a successful team, disband or merge an unsuccessful team into another, transfer in, transfer out, put on a PIP, etc. Most of the good things on that list go to people who demonstrate ability and results, and rarely do those results come without effort. Most of the bad things on that list go to people who demonstrate an inability to deliver results, which is sometimes related to a lack of effort.

'We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us'

I see sovietization everywhere in the country now.

> The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug malaise to being very humbled when they got laid off due to their own low performance.

I saw people doing great get laid off all the same. Not really how things should work, should it?

> But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want.

Job seekers do not care and should not care what you want. They want the job, you are paid to find the best candidate. Just arriving at a situation where you get flooded with hundreds of resumes, means that you or your organisation has failed with what you were trying to do. You should have had hand picked candidates ready in the pipeline when it came time to hire. You are a hiring manager after all.

>But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want.

This is just a natural response to the automatic screening methods that have been used by the hiring side for years. Finally the sides have more equal power again in this arms race started by the hiring side.

Of course the consequence is that everyone loses and is worse off than if this arms race never started, but you (not you personally, hiring managers in general) should have thought about that before screening automatically. This is on you.

Exactly. I've referred many ex-colleagues to a specific position, their CV was perfect but an automated system rejected them so that was that. I can't even as a human being go talk to the director because the applicant status was "rejected" so their hands were tied too.

It's absurd, and only getting worse.

Too bad, fix hiring. A five interview cycle that takes nearly two weeks which keeps me from applying to other companies who are shitting up job listings with fake or ghost listings is reducing the SNR of hiring dramatically.

The solution is likely some kind of highly curated list you have to pay to be on, for both sides to increase signal and get rid of scammers. Many friends of mine have gone down the line of replying to recruiters only to be met with “contract to hire <20% of market rate and you must move to Nowhere, MN” when clearly your profile says what metro you are attached to.

Things are gonna be worse longer I think. Leaning hard on my network.

Most (not all) position descriptions for software engineers include requirements for experience with particular tools, applications, or 'frameworks'.

Would you hire a statistician that didn't have 'n' years of MS Excel experience, or had never used Pandas?

If I were a statistician with 20 years experience, would I even apply to positions listing those as requirements?

It's an interesting problem, as giving information on the position requirements clues applicants into the game they need to play and also runs the risk of turning some otherwise qualified people away.

What exactly you can do as a HM to make the life of a job seeker easy? I dare say nothing except to just make the quality of response better. Even after six rounds of interviews candidates who are not selected get not a single honest useful feedback and is treated like human scrap with a soulless rejection. Beleive me as a job applicant I have zero sympathy for the corporates that hire me and I will use every thing at my disposal including AI to be more efficient in any way I deem fit. The job is just a business transaction to me and I don’t care about your high and mighty lecture as a HM. GTFO.

I also wonder how many applications are from people who just send applications to hit the minimum needed to receive unemployment but don't actually want the specific job.

As someone who automates everything and normally loves this type of thing, my approach for job hunting has been way different. Instead of spray and pray, I spend a week or so deeply researching where I want to work and figure out how to get there role-wise. Everything 100% manual and focused, no more than 8 total companies.

Maybe spray and pray works if you’re more junior, but later in your career you’ll want to be very picky about where you spend your time interviewing because the roles are long term and have a huge impact on your life.

That investment isn't worth it to just be ghosted

Agree. You need to see it from the other side. Most likely, they are receiving 100+ applications, so the chance that your application will be seen is too low.

This.

I also limit myself on how many applications I see in a day (no more than 20 on a busy day, 50 on a not so busy day) so that I give every resume a fair read. A team can only do so much in a day. It's disheartening when you see a blatant AI use (and it goes into the trash bin right away).

Do you have a technical background? 50 seems quite low for someone to get the gist of the resumes and have a sense of the applicants.

If recruiting departments really suffer at parsing about 50 apps per day per recruiter, I can see why this got so bad so quickly.

I think GP means they stop at this point to ensure that they are giving all of the resumes a pretty fair shake by being fresh.

Afaik, any kind of slush-pile reading (including grading, which is probably the best researched) tends to get less fair as the process wears on the reader.

GP isn't optimizing for finishing the pile, but for making the most of what's in it.

Yep. You got it.

I do. Credentials-wise I have BS in one of the STEM and currently enrolled in MS CS with intent to pursue PhD in Maths/CS. I have around 8 YoE and worked from Series B startups to IBs.

I want to give everyone a fair shake (including reading cover letters) and for me, resume fatigue sets in if I read more than 50.

I think you missed this part, emphasis mine:

I spend a week or so deeply researching where I want to work and figure out how to get there role-wise.

Figuring out how to get there means figuring out how not to get ghosted, not just blasting off a quick application and crossing fingers. I imagine that probably means reaching out to people in their network at the company, learning about their hiring practices and how people get hired there, etc.

When was the most recent time you tried this, and for what level of role was it? I believe this could absolutely be effective pre-2023, or for very high level roles. I don't think it's currently viable advice for ~Senior level engineers, who are currently competing against thousands of other applications, many of whom were generated specifically for the given role.

Speaking as someone currently involved in hiring for Senior roles at my company: We have hundreds of resumes, most of which are garbage. We're not seeing a lot of evidence of large numbers of people working hard to tailor their resume to the role, so doing so would absolutely help you in our case.

Even more so, if we got a referral right now from within the company we'd absolutely skip them straight to the interviews. Dealing with resumes sucks right now as an employer, and we want to avoid that stage as much as you do.

I’m not going to get into my specific work history in the spirit of trying not to put more metadata about myself out there, but I can confidently say referrals are still king and I have witnessed those results.

I have a hard time believing that the market is as dire as people say it is at least right now approaching 2025. I see peers who are getting laid off get back into jobs, it’s just taking a few months longer than it used to. It’s just not a magical hot job market like it used to be.

A good indicator is to look at Meta’s employee count. It’s down dramatically since 2022 but they still have more employees working for them than the last day of 2021.

https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/meta/employees/

Or look at layoffs.fyi, where layoffs are reported at their lowest level since early 2022.

Basically my approach as well. The problem is that your well-thought-through application will get lost in a sea of applicants (many using tools similar to the one shown above). The tools used by the recruiters/HR also suck and can be easily gamed (ie strategically spreading keywords/phrases throughout the resume even if the candidate has no actual experience). The end result is hiring managers cannot find good candidates to interview, and good candidates cannot get interviews.

The core problem is not that the systems suck but that so many people in IT lost their jobs in the last 2-3 years so that they don't have a choice other than to spray-and-pray (in the end of the day you need to put the food on the table).

Things won't improve until hiring recovers (increase in labor demand), and some IT professionals probably will pivot to other industries (decrease in labor supply), as it happened in 2000 and again in 2008.

This sounds like a good and noble pursuit, but I would be able to take exactly one ghosting or premature rejection before abandoning it completely. There are so many BS reasons applications are ignored, I can’t see this approach working well. Maybe if you can network your way to a manager or something

There are no foolproof methods. Shotgunning makes it much harder to get past the recruiter screen. Yes the high touch method leads to larger feelings of rejection but its also more likely to actually work.

With that said, an LLM to a) generate a LONG-list and b) help you zero in on your short-list; is something I would pay for.

I agree! Not that it’s worked as of yet.

When was the last time that worked for you and what's your background and the types of roles you were applying for?

So do you network yourself into the companies then to get an interview? Or do you apply online?

I'd like to know more about a manual approach.

I think both approaches are valid. I took the automated approach to online dating, married now. So that worked out.

Taking the automated approach for companies will probably work in a similar fashion as online dating. However, unlike online dating, I feel very strong targeted approaches have a chance of working better as long as you get to the interview stage.

Targeted approaches don't work with online dating as the biggest issue is figuring out with whom you have chemistry. For work, there's no such thing to figure out - not to the extent as it is required like romantic intimacy.

> Targeted approaches don't work with online dating

What would a targeted approach to online dating be?

From GP:

> spend a week or so deeply researching where I want to work and figure out how to get there

Replace "where I want to work" with "who I want to date" and it sounds concerning.

> What would a targeted approach to online dating be?

Courting someone, winning someone over. It's done in the offline world. I haven't thought about it much when it comes to online dating. I should've been a bit sharper on that.

When it comes to dating, I always went for the high volume approach. So I really shouldn't be speaking about a targeted approach. I guess I did because I was trying too hard to draw a parallel to applying to jobs.

So my mind just went:

              applying online    online dating
  volume           1                  2
  targeted         3                  4

But perhaps quadrant 4 doesn't really exist and I really was just shoehorning approaches of applying to jobs online into online dating because I saw this 2x2 matrix.

I did this as well and landed a job in 3 months. The most tedious part before I automated the process was copying and pasting relevant infos into my cover letter, updating stuff, creating the word document for the cover letter and a copy of my resume in a folder for that company/offer. Also, I auto added job details to a Notion table (a Kanban board) where I tracked open applications.

The whole process took me previously half an hour to 45 minutes. Afterwards it took me less then 2 minutes. I didn’t apply for more, but could write an application in a fraction of time. And then focus on researching the company and the job.

Chatgpt made the whole process super smooth. We live in wonderful times.

For hiring managers, if you getting a flood of resumes here is a possible solution for a filter: unpopular things and manual instructions.

1. Manual instructions. On the application submission page mention something like: All resumes or cover letters must copy and apply the following statement or will be dropped from consideration. This tests that candidates actually read and follow the instructions and rejections can be automated with a simple string search.

2. For that 1% of candidates that do follow instructions that during the technical filter phase of interviewing they will be required to do something unpopular as a demonstration of prior coding experience. In my case as a JavaScript developer it was walking the DOM from one node location to another. I was able to filter 22 candidates down to two and that doesn’t include the larger number that dropped out.

The first one would be solved just as easily by an LLM though.

> they will be required to do something unpopular as a demonstration of prior coding experience. In my case as a JavaScript developer it was walking the DOM from one node location to another.

Is this open book? I can walk a DOM in many ways. With my eyes closed, I could hack something using `childNodes` and `nextSibling`, but the best way would be the the TreeWalker class, which I have previously used, though I couldn't write a working implementation on a whiteboard without briefly consulting MDN for a refresher. If you're just filtering candidates based on if they've memorized the ever-growing web standard, you're going to lose a lot of good candidates.

Yes, that is the entire point of why something like that is a good filter. It is stupendously simple and trivial to demonstrate live in code. The REPL of the browser console even helps with suggestions. Yet, 95% of people writing JavaScript would rather commit seppuku than try it live during an interview.

> The secret to good cover letters? Context.

I know a lot has changed since I had to look for a job (a little over 4 years ago), but I disagree. The cover letter is the only opportunity to show some of your personality, not that you read the posting and tweaked your template to include details about the specific job you're applying for.

I have found that a good cover letter can be a game-changer. I landed my first dev job because the hiring manager/senior devs loved my cover letter. It's a great filtering mechanism for whether you'd be a good fit. I always throw a little humor in there, because I am not a very serious person and don't want to work at a place that expects me to be. When I had to do some hiring earlier this year, I would spend a few extra minutes reading cover letters to see if I could spot one that included something unconventional, but no dice. Every single one just followed the boring template from a cursory Google search of "how to write a cover letter".

Your resume isn't going to convey anything about whether you're the type of person that I want to work with. I had 200 resumes from people that were all capable of doing the job we were hiring for. If you're competing with 199 other equally skilled people based on resumes, a good cover letter could be a competitive advantage.

That being said, I know it's a very different hiring landscape these days, so my perspective could be completely wrong. But I imagine there are probably still hiring managers out there that take the time to read cover letters. If I decide to start looking for a new job at some point, I'll be spending a few extra minutes on my cover letter.

I saw the prompt snippet and thought the same as you. Honestly, giving it samples of your prior cover letters you’ve written yourself would be a vastly more personal touch emulating your writing style and personality.

Anyhow, problems with the spray and pray aside, applicants should match the effort the hiring managers puts in. Which is automating the first few passes, and last mile is human read. As in, proofread your own generated cover letters.

It really depends on the company. I've interviewed 200+ people, I've never seen a cover letter.

This is pretty cool, though it seems more beneficial as a neat demo project than for its actual functionality. First, automated job application submission probably doesn’t endear you to hiring managers. And, moreover, you probably don’t want to optimize your life for job hunting in the same way that you probably don’t want to optimize your life for being very good at first dates. Life is more fulfilling if you can find what you want and keep it for the long run.

Agree.

It also feels like it's optimizing for the wrong thing (getting past the screening for as many job as possible, regardless of fit). I personally felt like the most successful experience I had with job search (and retention) is if I knew someone at the company and just bypassed the initial resume screening altogether and hand-crafted a nuanced resume and cover letter with a strong backing from people that knew me.

I realize not everyone has that luxury but I made diligent effort to network in and out of work and it has mostly helped me filter out bad jobs/fit and save time for both parties.

In the middle of fruitless multi-month job search, I manually view LinkedIn/indeed job sites daily and look for new positions, going through requirements, making sure I have the skills and experience (also helps with understanding if I need to upskill in certain areas), then look up the company, the industry it's in, etc. By the time I'm ready to apply to the position I know I'm interested in and a good fit for, there's a few hundred applications already (LinkedIn shows the count to the applicants). I'm like, how is this possible, it's only been 3 days?..

Well, that's how.

well, manual application is also a thing, there are people who literally make it their job to apply to job listings. you can find people offering their services on r/slavelabour. some times they take a flat rate/job application, sometimes they do percentage of your first paycheck on new job.

https://www.reddit.com/r/slavelabour/search/?q=job+applicati...

Often it’s 100 applicants in the first hour.

My advice for both sides: don’t use job boards. Use your own website.

Or hand out business cards at meetups.

Just for your consideration, in my experience Linkedin is pretty much the worst place to look for a job right now if you're a real human that actually knows how to do their work. Everyone just clicks apply to everything just to see what sticks and the signal to noise ratio is absolute garbage. If a company has a jobs section on their homepage, that should always be preferred.

A bit like Amazon with vast numbers of oddly named Chinese resellers.

I've been told the LinkedIn count is absolutely not what you think it is.

I can't remember the details, but I stopped taking it seriously.

Someone who works at LinkedIn told me that Linkedin measures success by how many times a user opens the app. It would not surprise me if the numbers are exaggerated to make someone look good for a promotion. My take is that it must drive engagement somehow.

In a similar way, recruiters post ghost jobs to gather data and make companies look like they are growing.

>making sure I have the skills and experience

A great way to test this is to wait for the email inviting you to an interview.

The emotional rollercoaster of selling yourself on a company only for it not to work out hurts too much. It's also a cost borne only by the applicant. It's easy to want to kick that can down the road until you're sure that you have a shot where some part, at least, is within your own control.

It will never be entirely down to your own performance and actions. Lots of job descriptions out there are for roles without a budget, or at companies with hiring moratoria, or where there's already a successful applicant waiting for a formal job offer.

The effort you put into researching an application, IMO, should be a function of the effort required by the applicant to proceed and the respect given to applicants by employers. The effort for a phone interview is very low. The respect is near zero.

When I see posts like this, I think either I'm doing something wrong or they're doing something wrong. I never wrote hundreds of applications. When I'm looking for a job, I investigate a couple of companies where I'd like to work, write a handful of thought-out applications, and generally get at least a response, in most cases an invitation for an interview. Granted, I have a university degree but I guess many people here have one, too. I also live in a medium-sized German town, but if anything that should make it harder to find a job, not easier.

Isn't there right now a shortage of skilled tech workers? I feel like right now the hiring criteria in many places is "whoever comes through the door". I know we'd probably hire anybody who knows how to code, is reliable, and can work in a team.

I suspect Germany is different. I see here work is much more word-of-mouth, and so I think LLM spam hasn't taken off, because most jobs are not much advertised as they are in the UK/USA. People are like "I know someone who can do that" and then a friend let's you know there's some work you could do.

I also live in Germany, and my experience is that while there might be a shortage, unless the CV experience from the last year reflects what HR is asking about, it doesn't matter, even you happened to do that lets say five years ago.

Oh, and better have those recommendation letters free of any negative stuff disguised as positive feedback.

There is an abundance of tech workers. There is a shortage of good tech workers. It is incredibly difficult, at the resume stage, to tell the difference. When you post a job online, you get hundreds of applications in a few days.

Imagine you are a good tech worker. You applied to a company, along with 200 other people. Your resume gets swept into the trash because they had to automatically delete several applicants and your resume somehow didn't make the cut based on a simple heuristic, or maybe you got unlucky and they just delete the bottom half without looking at them

What do you do now? Do you spend a lot of other time and repeat this process next week, or do you just lower your standards and apply to 200 other companies?

>There is a shortage of good tech workers.

I wish someone quantified what 'good' is. Ask 2 tech workers to rate each other and they are most likely to rate each other mediocre by each's standards. Each would nitpick on what the other didn't know.

This does not match my experience. Most of the time it's quite clear who is a high performer/multiplier in a team

Missing the point by a large margin...

At the resume stage?

At the interview stage

If they're both nitpicking then they are in fact both mediocre at best.

You cannot say either way. There was a point I was trying to get at: Devs access each other just as several religions people do : one's own religion is the best, and that there cannot be any other right way to do things. This why the whole hiring/interview process is broken.

I understand the point you are making and I disagree with it.

Software is not a religious text. There is good software and bad software and good and bad ways to make software. Usually the devil is in the details and context matters a lot in practice, so it's hard to just write down the answer to all things in all scenarios.

But in a technical interview things are pretty cut and dry. There are in fact right answers and wrong answers and if an interviewer is nitpicking during an interview then they are in fact not doing their job as an interviewer well. If they do the same thing on the job then they are at best a mediocre engineer.

If you are not FAANG or some other large company, the question is not if somebody is "good". It is if they are "good enough".

I feel there is often a bimodal distribution of applicants. Those who can do the job and those who are completely not suited. There is a shortage of workers, so you try to get as many as you can from the first bin. It doesn't matter if they are 10x rockstars or Joe Blub.

You just try to sieve out the ones who apply for a DevOps position and then it turns out they are "good with MS office". Or those who neither speak the local language nor English good enough to communicate with anybody. Or those who show up on day 1 and are clearly not the person who interviewed.

I's a luxury to have more than 4-5 good candidates who you'd have to rank. (But to be honest, I'm in education / public sector and the pay here is not competitive with big tech...)

>It is if they are "good enough".

Thanks, that is the right way to put it.

I was picking on the person who was saying that there are not enough good candidates, where I have worked in most cases they were good enough, so it baffles me when people frequently say that there are not enough good candidates. I'm just wondering if my sample data is different from others . Again I think quantification of what is good enough will go a long way example: Must be a able to solve the fizz/biz example.

I remember talking to techie friends about this a couple years ago. With the advent of AI screeners, it would only be a matter of time before candidates figured out how to craft and rewrite not just their cover letter, but their whole resume to semantically best-fit a job listing. It could even A/B test for the best response.

Everyone laughed and said it was too much work. I predicted it would be a YC company before long.

Only a matter of time before AIs will be talking to AIs to have a technical interview and negotiate salary.

It’s astounding that we, as an industry, are so averse to licensing developers. It solves the resume spam problem and the repetitive LeetCode round(s) that every company now wants. We also don’t have to settle for the licensing process other industries have—ours can be more inclusive of alternative development backgrounds, while still providing a meaningful quality filter.

Yep, I've talked about this at length for years. We need to bring back the PE Exam to help guarantee some minimal level of competency in prospective applicants.

https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin...

But this is one of the most entitled industries in the universe. Even the mere notion of suggesting academic degrees, PE Exams and other forms of "gatekeeping" is tantamount to shouting Voldemort's name through a megaphone.

To be fair, there is a very good case for ignoring applications that list different certifications if you’re hiring. I fear the same would logic would apply to licensing.

Most non software engineers do not have the PE.

Because MCSE was such a success?

This article unintentionally perfectly rebuts the idea of licensing: https://mcpmag.com/articles/2005/05/11/the-death-of-paper-mc...

Our industry is one where actual skills should and do matter, and much gatekeeping has been reduced.

Professional rote learning is great for mandarin jobs where you are working within a static prescribed framework (legal, accounting, building codes). It is terrible for jobs that require professional taste.

Tell me how you would create a license for a graphic designer or UX specialist.

I actually fail to understand idealists that believe that licensing might even work. Who are y'all?

> Our industry is one where actual skills should and do matter [...] Professional rote learning is great for mandarin jobs where you are working within a static prescribed framework (legal, accounting, building codes).

Saying things like this reflects poorly on our community and demonstrates a poor understanding on how much creativity and thought goes into legal and accounting. There's a reason there is a large pay band for lawyers and accountants.

Creativity and thought going into accounting ought to be illegal. Albeit I am sure there is plenty of demand for “creative accounting”.

Nope nothing wrong about it at all. Some company’s may structure their business in certain ways to take various trade offs, exactly how software devs make certain trade offs. Then of course there’s shady and illegal stuff you’re getting at, but that’s a separate topic.

> Creativity and thought going into accounting ought to be illegal

Our society is poor at creating scales and then selecting a cutoff point for illegality. There are 0b10 types of people: binary thinkers and grey area thinkers.

  All-or-nothing thinking (often also referred to as ‘black and white thinking’, ‘dichotomous thinking’, ‘absolutist thinking’, or ‘binary thinking’) is a common form of cognitive distortion or ‘unhelpful thinking style’. People who think in all-or-nothing terms may also act in equivalently extreme ways. They may veer, for example, between complete abstinence and ‘binges’, or between extreme effort and none.

Up to 80% of practising engineers in the US are exempt from certification: https://www.engineeringnz.org/news-insights/how-do-other-cou...

Certification doesn't prevent accidents - the only thing it provides is scapegoats for faulty systems.

yeah I had a MSCE, I took it off my resume, I think most people with qualifications use it to show they've reached the minimum level. It doesn't show you're in the top 10% or even top 50%.

What do you mean with licensing? What’s the difference to a university degree?

The paper ceiling is a silly gatekeeping done by those who have made it.

I would be in favor of licensing knowing it would probably exclude me unless of course it does not require a university degree. I was not born into a family of means and being autodidactic allowed me to excel beyond my upbringing.

The best path would be to have journeyman type of pathway.

No.

You'd still need to interview people because there's no license that will tell you who the good/great candidates are

Vocational education vs. academic.

Basically you find a grad right now and make them do a coding test. Something is broken there.

A degree could include the vocational qualification as a 1 year study, but having the vocation qualification alone would save youngsters a lot of money and reduce the burden on hiring. You could even still interview coding questions but the application process can remove the spam/ai bullshit to some extent. "Can they code?" is answered.

And now you've moved the job of administering and evaluating coding tests to an organization that only does that.

Who would want to work at such a place? Why would I trust the opinions of people who work at such a place?

It is good enough for plumbing, bricklaying, food service etc. Why not coding.

I'm going to make the extremely controversial statement that writing software is a lot more difficult than all of those things.

I acknowledge that some feel their contributions are at that level, but that doesn't mean it's the norm.

Licenses should only ever be used to protect consumers. Abusing licenses to protect a labor class is a 10th century solution and is absolutely immoral

Surely CS degrees should suffice, yet we still have leet code testing?

Interested to hear if you have a different thought here

What about honoring our multi-year college degrees. Isn't that licensing enough?

Have you been recruiting people, like at all? It's clearly not a strong signal.

What percentage of what you do as a software engineer has direct linkage to computer science?

My guess for most of us is "not very much at all", several of the best people I've worked with as programmers did not have a CS degree, and I've interviewed people with CS degrees who could not write a function to sum an array of integers in any language of their choosing, meaning "honoring their degree" would have been an unwise choice.

What does solving random puzzles from Leetcode have to do with day-to-day engineering work? IMHO, the emphasis should be on previous experience, CS domain knowledge and systems architecture / design. Maybe degrees need to be fixed to convey more useful knowledge...

I'd prefer an application to automatically fill in my data in those junk ATS systems, such as WorkDay, that pretend to parse my LinkedIn profile or a PDF resume and inevitably makes me do all the copy-paste twice.

A couple of years ago it was so bad that I stopped applying as soon as I saw that WorkDay crap pop up, regardless of the company.

Workday is a hostile environment for applicants. Perhaps that is intended.

If the domain of easy applications is automated entries and copy paste, then Workday is indeed the desired tooling. LinkedIn Easy Apply serves the applicant, but I can't imagine any recruiter loves it.

For Workday, use a very simple resume. No columns, no bullet points (use asterisks), no tables.

There's usually an option to upload another file near the end of the form. After it has filled in the fields using your plain resume, delete it and upload the nicer one.

I worked on a side project that generated the AI resume and cover letter. I did a controlled experiment applying for jobs with the generic vs AI customized resume. The AI customized resume out performed the generic resume by 4x. https://customizedresumes.com/custom-vs-generic-resumes

That's like comparing your "AI customized resume" to shitting on the hiring manager's desk

You'll be shocked to find out which performed better!

What's so bad about a "generic" resume? I assume this means one that just honestly describes your experience rather than tailoring it to the job applied for to make it seem you're a better fit than you really are. It's up to the person (hopefully) reading your resume to decide whether you're enough of a potential fit to take to the next step (technical screening call?).

A cover layer is there to show how you fit the role. This cannot be done with a genetic cover layer

Telling facts about yourself is done in the CV, not cover layer

Sure, but the parent was talking about customized resumes, not cover letters. The cover letter of course needs to be customized, else it serves no purpose.

I don't want to hate on your side project, but the AI is clearly hallucinating things to fit the job description. In the ServiceNow result (first I saw with an interview/reject difference), the custom resume claims Jenkins experience, which is in the job listing but nowhere in either the AI base or generic resumes. Same for NinjaTrader and distributed systems + Scala + Github Actions, Upside and data engineering, BigTime and C#.

The AI resume - was it a real human resume which was optimized in some way for the role specification, or was it generated from scratch for the role specification?

Kinda funny that LLM creates an personalized cover letter which in the end will be deciphred to list summary by another LLM because this will be automated in no time.

https://marketoonist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/230327.n...

Article link: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

I wonder if a type of escrow service could help solve the problem of hiring managers getting flooded with low effort applications and simultaneously solve the problem of applicants being passed over when they are obviously the most qualified for someone else who looks good on paper but who is actually mediocre.

There could also be a case for some kind of ante that applicants have to contribute to when they apply. Pass the different levels of interview and you get a portion of the pot. Make it to the job acceptance and win the pot and if you accept the offer you get what the employer staked.

Maybe something like that could help solve this issue. Either way we definitely need more structure and better defined processes for both sides of the job hiring process (looking for a job as a prospective employee, and hiring to fill a position). It would be great if we could automate this in a way that is mutually beneficial to everyone involved and had more transparency in the process. Right now there is zero accountability on either side, and as TFA demonstrates, the balance of power has shifted towards the applicants recently.

I would get rich posting ghost jobs and winning the whole pot for myself every time.

I was thinking the job poster would have to put up the bulk of the pot, let's say a 20% "signing bonus" that is distributed amongst the finalists (job offered). Applicants would each stake a small amount each, which would be shared amongst the applications who are dropped out at each gate prior to job offered gate, say 20% of it is shared amongst the first round as an example. It would have to be structured to mitigate gaming the system on both sides, e.g. professional applicants who drop out after job is offered (never accepting a job).

I want to see a site or ATS that makes it non-free to send an application and non-free to ghost an applicant.

Employers can earn revenue from automated applications that aren't qualified. Applicants can earn income from fake jobs until the fake jobs can't afford to post anymore.

One of those cases where the act of building the system serves as sufficient qualification in itself, even when the results of the system are mediocre.

that's how I got my new job offer!, I talked about this system I was building during a technical interview.

I've thought about the optics of talking about my own automatic job application system or including it on my resume, but I thought it'd be risky given the topic (like how listing your own startup is frowned upon, if I'm not mistaken?). Is it normally considered a bit risky or taboo?

well, it was during the technical interview, and it was just a couple of engineers doing the interview. I was just geeking out on all the problems I was solving (and creating).

and to be honest, I was too nerves to think about if it was risky or taboo.

> Format the response as a JSON object with these keys:{ "status": "success" or "error", ...

Would it not be better to ask the LLM to generate the status key last, since it cannot know ahead of generation whether the generation will actually be successful?

Yes, you are right. Not to be too snide about it but this is not optimal.

You get provably better performance if you let the thing analyze the situation / think through the problem / whatever before letting it commit to choosing a status like that.

thanks for the feedback!, that's something I haven't though of!

It will be interesting to see a SaaS that applies to jobs come up.

I wonder if the application process will switch up in the near future to people posting their profiles for then company recruiters/AI to reach out and contact since if they post a job they just get 10k automated applications.

A fun variant:

- scrape linkedin and apply to jobs based on the result

- take the responses with "positive sentiment" and then contact the linkedin person

Service is now connecting people with companies that already thought their generated CV was close enough to what they want. Call this a "recruitment agency".

> - scrape linkedin and apply to jobs based on the result

That was my first thought when looking for jobs, but maybe I am naive, wouldn't this break their ToS?

Whoopsie, guess OpenAI et al broke a few million ToSes while training their models!

do you really care though?

I mean scrape it for candidates as well as jobs, generate CVs for the candidates, apply to the jobs with the generated CVs, contact the candidate after a positive hit. And yes, I expect that's completely against their terms of service.

There are many, search for jobs copilot or job application copilot.

If any students or aspiring career-switchers are paying attention, now is a great time to start 10Xing your networking game. Stand out by being known.

What do you mean by being known?

I mean "be known by people, specifically people who know you as trustworthy, likable, and intelligent, and who might be able to help you get a job".

One of the major reasons why applying for jobs sucks so much is that companies are flooded with more garbage applications than they can process.

So hurray for the tragedy of the commons, I guess. It was nice knowing everyone.

On a personal level, I consider the practice espoused by this article of flooding the world with automated messages without care for how it impacts anyone else to be narcissistic and morally reprehensible, not admirable, but whatever floats a person's boat.

Time to go back to handing out resumes in person

Exactly. It’s funny someone would be so self-unaware as to brag about doing this in a blog post

It doesn’t matter though. The way to get actual good jobs is to be poached. And to get poached, you need to build real projects of your own that get peoples’ attention. Resume spamming is for the plebs.

Yep, the glee of the author reminds me of my younger days when I had a lot of edgy, but truly shitty development ideas. Luckily I never saw them through and can't be embarrassed by them today.

This all makes me glad I am not actively looking for a new position. I always keep an eye on the job market though - I've noticed anecdotally the amount of applicants on any LinkedIn position have really amplified the last couple years. I knew the LLM driven application process was coming, but it doesn't make it suck any less.

With so many comments on the state of the job market, I'm surprised to not see even one mention of career fairs. It's quite common for universities to host these and while they have their own set of disadvantages, it seems they could also provide a lot of value in the current market. The physical presence would ensure that it's a real person and it makes cheating significantly harder. Deciding a time and place would allow lots of companies and applicants to meet within a few day period so it would be pretty efficient. A larger sized fair might last for a week or two and most companies would stay the entire time while applicants would just buy a one or two day pass. They could potentially even do in person interviews within the same period which would further save on hiring costs. Have a few of these in each region per year, it seems like it would be doable, it's just a matter of getting everyone on board (of course, easier said than done).

You could maybe even use the fair as a screening to give applicants a boost in future online applications - if they seem like a good applicant after talking in person but perhaps not the exact fit needed for current open positions, just flag their career account internally as a verified high quality applicant.

Short of career fairs, verifying identity and employment history might be valuable and it seems like LinkedIn or some competitor should be able to do this. If a company can verify itself through a reliable process and then publicly mark accounts of employees who have been employed there for whatever duration, that seems like a low hanging fruit. In fact it sounds so obvious that maybe there's a reason they haven't done this yet? Any reason someone could think of for why this isn't already happening?

Sounds pay to win

Okay so people keep calling these "fake applicants" but the new reality is that for a good number of our roles realistically any old person person with good communication skills and some basic critical thinking skills will be able to functionally replace us given a some good AI tools. It will continue to look like these are "fake applicants" until you accept the new reality, which is that quite soon this whole thing will be smoothed over into a normalized surplus of "programmers".

This is just the beginning and it shouldn't really be a shock to anyone who's been watching this unfold over the last five years.

That said, we really don't need to rip each other up over this. This latest golden era of good old fashioned programming is winding down. Look ahead to what's coming next! What are the challenges we will face now?

Get creative and stay open minded about what you're capable of and willing to do. Be proactive and use your imagination with all this new stuff. Don't take real relationships for granted, cultivate them. Don't isolate yourself!

The current hiring situation is so broken. Because of AI and automation.

One developer job on LinkedIn - 1100 applicants, 1000+ don’t even live in the right region, so clearly it’s automated and they’re not reading even basic requirements.

Next time - video interviews all the way through. Any hint of AI in the interview process, they’re done. If a different person shows up for the first day of the job, they’re done.

LinkedIn? Anyone who has a LinkedIn profile is automatically rejected. Signals low quality.

> Submit resume + cover letter

Does anybody here actually read _cover letters_? I almost never submit them, unless required. I feel it's a remnant of pre-digital age where you would apply _in-person_ and the cover letter makes it _feel_ personal.

I write a cover letter if there's a field for it. I don't know if it matters.

Yes, I absolutely read cover letters. But I work in Germany which has different customs around applications, so maybe that's the reason.

We get a lot of low effort applications so I look for something why the candidate wants to work at our place. Did they research the position at least a bit before applying? Do they have an idea about the work, and does it mention how they can contribute?

If it looks like copy-paste or completely AI generated, there is a big chance that it goes to the round storage bin.

> ...why the candidate wants to work at our place.

Sorry to be blunt, but - to earn some money to feed their family? Just like applicants are not unicorns, neither are companies - unless you are FAANG nobody really cares about your shitty company really. (Maybe not even if you are FAANG.) If the CV matches the JD, why do you have doubts if they have an idea about the work? They obviously haven't the faintest idea, but how could they (unless your code is open source).

From the applicant's perspective, they are applying to multiple places at once. Investing emotionally at step 0 (when they don't know if their CV will even be considered) is taxing, and unfair. Once there is a connection, you can expect them to invest more, but not until then. Because they will apply to 10 places, get ghosted by 5, get an automated NO response from 4 (usually a month later), and maybe, MAYBE they get an invite to the last one. Get a conversation started first and THEN expect investment.

It's totally fine if somebody just wants the money. We are all in it for the money to some degree or another. No need to fake enthusiasm. Actually, many applicants I see want to work part time (e.g. 2/3) and just want something to pay the bills and be able to pursue their hobbies.

But I'd like to know, why did you send your application to our company and not one in another industry?

I work for a university data center. Many of my colleagues have a scientific background. If not in academia, they could do coding, R&D, devops, science communication, product management, finance or many other things. They are 'lateral entrants' in any profession.

If people can't answer "why did you apply here specifically", it means one of two things: They don't have a clue what their job would be, and they and we are likely to be dissappointed when they show up. Or: they sent their application to everybody indiscriminately. That signals that they likely aren't a good match for the skills needed, and also that they have a high rejection rate.

> The irony? I got a job offer before I even finished building it. More on that later

Nothing succeeds like success. If you are on n attempt, and you are geared up for what you will do for n+2, usually the problem surrenders its self on n.

It’s my understanding that most hiring managers have a similar AI-assisted filtering tools. So there are humans in either side, it’s just a bunch of garbage in between

Something has to give. As a hiring manager I can’t filter through 100s of resumes or profiles.

Using all the top sites as well that are supposed to make the hiring process easier.

That something is hiring a recruitment consultant.

Is there a solution that doesn’t expose you to the entirety of the internet at one time? Proactive networking maybe? Asking existing employees if they have friends looking for jobs?

I am not a hiring manager, but I will occasionally get asked to help with technical candidates in our org.

Any slight hint of AI prose could mean a direct No from me, let me explain why.

Our process is fair IMO:

1. one CV (if you apply to jobs you should have that one already)

2. a cover letter that shows that you know how to map your CV to our org and the free position. That cover letter could be text in the email you sent the CV in

3. (if invited) an 30 to 45 minute interview with a roughly 1:10 chance of getting in.

If you think you need to game that fair of a process you are the wrong hire anyways. That means the approx ten people who get invited are invited based on their (vetted!) CV and on their cover letter. That means your cover letter is read by a human who will judge your text.

I am not a fan of artificially driving up the effort canidates need to make when applying. I just want to know they informed themselves about my org and gave a few thoughts about the position they applied for (what job it is, why they like it, why they would do a good job etc.) - thst should not be a high bar to clear, but over 80% of candidates struggle even with answering that.

All the jobs I got over my career, I got by filling out a non-conventional long job application form.

I always assumed it's because that's where most job seekers would drop off.

It's how I got a job as an HVAC tech without any trade school exp and how I got a software dev job without any college, bootcamp, or professional exp.

Just some advice for any job seekers out there. The more annoying the job application process, the more likely you are to get hired.

While agents and HR may be looking to match the bare requirements, the hiring manager is likely also looking for “alpha” the stuff that escapes formal requirements. My hires are usually those that passes the base reqs and provide that unique something that the cover letter seems to reveal.

This is blogspam - the author opened the blog barely a few days ago and filled it with content that at the very least is AI "assisted" content.

It's lucky for some people that I'm not hiring right now, because I'd probably perma-denylist anyone I caught sending me LLM-generated text, especially for something that's supposed to be one-to-one, like a cover letter/email.

That is such a obvious imminent plague upon society, in so many ways, and the only thing I can do is nip the few buds that are within my reach.

I feel the same way, but it’s actually not easy to detect LLMs. Anyone who experimented with writing styles and been using them for a while, can easily create texts that are indistinguishable from a real person.

Fine tune a small LLM to your past emails, cover letters, resumes and etc. then go ham.

Right, and the last thing you want is false negatives here.

Without reading any comments below, I want to praise the author for fighting fire-with-fire. From what I hear from my new colleagues and ones laid off, the landscape got pretty dystopian. HMs want to minimize their effort to 1% by happily renting LLM services which work 10% of the times and put up weird garbage(please record a 10min video to tell us why we should hire you, please also upload a cover letter that we clearly never read, please state your salary expectations, please choose a time slot when we can reach you but all time slots will be effective working hours only, please paste all your social media links) in addition uploading the résume+cover letter and then again pasting your top 10 skills and experiences. Then you get an auto reject 30min later or after a prolonged screening call only to see that opening taken down in 2 days and reposted after a week and repeat the same for months. What I hear from my friends and colleagues and insane all in all and I have zero sympathy for any HM and would be happy to start a new startup with LLMs to automate them away entirely.

Am I too cynical? Yes, because I do not like people who play games with desperate people.

(Now please all HR/HM downvote me because I told your truth).

> I want to praise the author for fighting fire-with-fire.

On the contrary, I think these automated application games are most likely to land interviews with the companies doing LLM-based hiring and interviewing.

From what I’ve seen, the automated job application results are generally pretty bad. The few companies that get interviews are just bad at screening and interviewing, so even if you get in you’re going to be working with a lot of other people who self-selected into a company with a bad hiring process.

> HMs want to minimize their effort to 1% by happily renting LLM services which work 10% of the times and put up weird garbage(please record a 10min video to tell us why we should hire you,

I’m in a big Slack where people ask advice on hiring and interviewing. I can think of only one time someone asked about applying to a company asking for videos, and the advice was universally to skip that company.

I think these things happen very rarely, but angry internet culture never forgets and before long people act like these weird practices are happening everywhere when they’re definitely not.

I can’t even imagine what hiring manager would want to have to sit through 10 minute videos of each candidate. The whole thing doesn’t make sense and it’s definitely not common.

Not sure about US, but here in EU, most big ones use LLM(or AI!) based platforms to rank and summarise applicants. While I do not have a public stats, but I can tell it from my friends’ account that a rejection takes 1-3h after submission.

> I’m in a big Slack where people ask advice on hiring and interviewing. I can think of only one time someone asked about applying to a company asking for videos, and the advice was universally to skip that company.

I would very much like to name and shame but these are actually fairly prominent on my side of EU. When a bunch of people is laid off and they have a family to feed(or even a newborn recently), desperation can lead to not skipping regardless of whatever junk particular systems put up.

Good summary. Wish I could upvote you many times over.

In my nearly 20 year career, I have never gotten a job by applying directly. The few times I’ve tried it was shockingly bad. I feel for anyone where that’s the only option they have.

My advice is to invest heavily in your professional network and when you have one, treat it like the special garden that it is. This takes years to cultivate. I also see people try to come at it from a very transactional unauthentic angle which will always fail. The right way to approach it is honestly quite simple: make friends. Be nice. Help people. Mentor. Etc. Don’t expect anything from it. People remember that stuff. Opportunities find you.

Being able to do something 1,000 times faster is worthless if it means you are doing it to a level of quality that doesn’t meet a minimum threshold.

Will be curious to see how many people succeed with this approach. Maybe if everyone does this the sheer volume of shit will at least help realise how broken the current process is on both sides.

In general, people have numerous reasons for posting fake ads for applicants.

I would say the signal-to-noise ratio is so low now, that entry level positions at any firm are impossible for domestic applicants.

* Contract rules in institutions that show your faculty interviewed at minimum 3 external applicants before tabling your preferences

* Corporate youth-employment tax credits that incentivize purging anyone over 32 to save money

* Immigration scams that need to show at least 5 domestic workers don't qualify for the company needs (usually list proprietary internal software and languages the public never hears about...)

* Staffing agencies posting nonexistent positions to run a lead-generation scheme, and legally exclude applicants from their product pool via a contract catch-22

* 10% of your towns population arrived in the past 3 years, and understandably will say/do anything to get their Visa secured

* Cons illegally farming data for their AI/LLM project, and various other scams

We need more investment bankers and CEOs that work for regular wages.

Fun Times =3

Scrolling down to the bottom of this post brought up the "please subscribe!" nag screen and also immediately sent me back to the top of the page. The modal has poor contrast on the close button, so it was just confusing.

If you must nag for subscriptions, you might want to try and find a way that does it without interfering with page interactivity.

I'm so glad I retired and can afford to say "No" with an occasional "Yes" if it's interesting :-)

Congrats on your privileged position! I'm glad you are able to retire, but not sure this is the best time to crow about it.

I'm trying to eke out enough money to put in my 401K and hope that when it's time for me to retire in a few decades, I'll have enough to scrape by on and the economy hasn't exploded by then and render my investments worthless.

Not very smart of him to post that while looking for a job. I know it is nerd smart but it is not real world smart. Any prospective employers looking for any excuse to reduce the number of candidates will find the blog post and reject you.

And yes, I understand that this automation is but a reaction to the way companies handle applications

This is one of the big reasons why it's so hard to get an interview these days, it's pretty lame.

Someone should build an engineer-matchmaking service with a fresh revenue model that can challenge LinkedIn, whose platform is now so heavily optimized for profit-taking that it leaves both employer and job searcher unsatisfied.

Using LLMs to write your applications is a sound idea. But why not have a platform do this for everyone in the equation? I would much rather - as a hiring manager - put my qualifications into a service and have it automatically and intelligently find great candidates, than dig through 1,000 ChatGPT-customized cover letters with yet another LLM cover letter bot…

Seems stupid to not put something in the middle that the employers pay for that automates both sides of the market to everyone’s benefit.

All platforms like that have failed because fundamentally companies don't trust others with hiring, unless you can very quickly get rid of someone (body leasing).

This is really fascinating to me, as this same problem drove an down a collection of side projects, ranging from a scraping pipeline[0] to a WIP full-stack application[1][2] for quick-swiping through results (also to better enable other use cases like scaling out to different data sources, but less about the auto apply). Development pace isn't at all breakneck, since I keep getting rabbit-holed into other ancillary stuff -- periodic bot detection issues, upstream pull requests (like user agent switching in Astral, for the bot detection issues), so on -- and have more broadly prioritized using the thing I've been tinkering on over throwing all of my energy into building it... but it's incidentally been a lot of different stuff to tinker on. I've been more intentional about DIYing over LLMs -- for the experiment of it, and to have stuff I can show off -- and it's gotten me into TypeScript for the first time, Deno KV, browser automation, and as an added bonus my understanding of selector logic has made enough of a jump that so far I've been building this entirely in vanilla CSS.

My other consideration is that I'm running on CPU and don't love depending on cloud services, so I've also been mostly getting stuff out of a DOM where I can... but it's occurred to me that there are scoped reasons to consider this, like deeper parsing from job descriptions, and I occasionally toy with it on stuff like HN posts. The prompt format here is a lot more thorough than what I've tried, and I might have to go back and experiment with this some more. I haven't gotten great consistency with this yet myself, and I'm not sure how much that's my prompting and how much it's that I'm using smaller (mostly ~7B) models. Which LLMs are you using for this -- ChatGPT throughout, or are there others?

I've been trying to avoid too much prior art while working on mine, but I'm definitely interested in hearing more about what you've been building around this.

[0] bhmt.dev/blog/scraping (warning: this is 10000 words + code samples, as it goes from browser console to browser automation and covers a few different side projects)

[1] github.com/chaosharmonic/escape-rope

[2] github.com/chaosharmonic/escape-rope-ui

Is cover letter important? Do hiring managers/recruiters read those?

Depends. As a Hiring Manager, I love cover letters but only if it is not a generic copy paste. Don't get me wrong. I don't mind a Cover letter that may have some generic stuff about you but you must add something specific about the role/company that you are applying for and why you will be a good fit. This will get you miles ahead of others in the queue.

how would you rate this?, this email was written by the system from the article.

Dear Hiring Manager,

I hope this message finds you well. My name is David Dodda, and I am writing to express my interest in the Software Engineer position at WIA Software Systems Inc. I am a Senior Software Developer with extensive experience in full-stack development, and I believe my skills align well with the requirements outlined in your job posting.

With a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication and over 5 years of professional experience, I have honed my capabilities in various programming languages and technologies, particularly in React, Node.js, AWS, and SQL. At Black Beard Development Group, I led the development of a privacy-focused AI platform and played a pivotal role in establishing CI/CD pipelines that improved efficiencies across our team.

Your job description emphasizes the importance of developing software solutions by studying systems flow, data usage, and work processes. In my previous roles, I have consistently evaluated user feedback to improve system designs and have successfully executed the full lifecycle of software development. Additionally, my involvement in agile methodologies and my proficiency in AWS aligns perfectly with your requirement for cloud and DevOps experience.

Furthermore, I have experience collaborating with teams to coordinate the development and integration of computer-based systems, ensuring optimal functionality and performance. My recent project involving a fantasy sports DApp required me to coordinate with various stakeholders, manage expectations, and lead technical efforts, making me well-equipped for the responsibilities at WIA Software Systems Inc.

I am particularly excited about the hybrid work arrangement offered for this role, as I believe it allows for both collaborative in-person engagement and the flexibility of remote work, which enhances productivity.

Thank you for considering my application. I have attached my resume for your review and would welcome the opportunity to discuss how my background, skills, and enthusiasms align with the goals of WIA Software Systems Inc.

Best regards, David Dodda https://daviddodda.com

Honestly, this is a typical generic one where may be you just edited the pargraph a bit about "Your job description emphasizes the importance of..". I would rather have you give me concrete examples. Instead of saying "I have consistently evaluated user feedback to..", give me an actual example.

Also, a bit too long. Make it shorter.

thanks for the feedback!

I’m in a completely different field, working in healthcare. This letter would rank well above the average one I get.

I receive cover letters with typos, the wrong word used, poor punctuation etc. If candidates could use a spell checking it would be a good start.

While I would not mind getting a cover letter like that, I would not score any points.

It just has zero value. A well written cover letter on the other hand would net you a big plus

Way too wordy, overly formal, and generic

I am not a hiring manager but something about these mini-paragraphs puts me off. It's like those tabloid sites where every sentence has its own line.

It's highly dependent on the manager I'm afraid and impossible to guess who's on the other side of that.

The process outlined in the post also isn't a path to writing a good cover letter. You don't want to just go over your resume again you want to either talk about things that wouldn't be there (e.x. why you want this job specifically, because your 100% applying because this is the unicorn job for you, not because you need money to feed yourself) or expanding on how something on your resume uniquely qualifies you (I worked on this project that's very similar to what your doing)

If it's lining up your resume to the job description (you want someone who can write Scala, I have used Scala in my past 3 jobs) a resume is a better format for that. But that's all the LLM has context to do.

Oh yeah, ideally you'd also tune your resume to the job too.

> (e.x. why you want this job specifically, because your 100% applying because this is the unicorn job for you, not because you need money to feed yourself)

In 99.9% of jobs in the world, there are zero applicants for who this truly holds. You might be working at a company hiring for a job that's part of the 0.1%, not sure. Otherwise, you're just selecting for those who are willing to lie as blatantly as required.

> Otherwise, you're just selecting for those who are willing to lie as blatantly as required.

That's a pessimistic way of looking at it, but I'm not going to claim it's wrong. I think my phrasing made it very clear that in most cases I expect if someone includes something about this their interest is going to be ahem embellished.

All the same look at it from the hiring managers side. Say you have two candidates, who appear to otherwise be equal. One seems to think the job is just like any other. The other actually seems genuinely interested in the details of food brokering, knows of your companies involvement in <big name>'s success and has thoughts on how they can apply their background in data analytics to the challenges you face.

Which candidate do you hire? Or do you really just toss a coin?

I just find it very unlikely that you really have two candidates who appear equal after 10 minutes of talking to them.

I guess it depends on how much freedom an HM has. Where I've worked, the answer has been "more than enough". Which means you can easily ask e.g. a philosophical question. Ask something unrelated to the job, see what kind of person they are. Chance they'll both respond the exact same way is negligible, and you'll very likely come out preferring one of them. Only few people lie when you give them a good question that doesn't sound like it has a "wrong" answer that would get them a minus.

Does this mean you'll necessarily get the best candidate? No, but it's better than selecting on a proxy for willingness to lie, that's how you end up with people far too good at political games, to detriment of the org.

In places where the HM has little freedom, I guess there's little choice indeed. But even then, I'd try to go with whorver sounds most happen and genuine, rather than most interested in the company per se.

> I just find it very unlikely that you really have two candidates who appear equal after 10 minutes of talking to them.

We're talking about a cover letter, no one's been talked to yet. The HM has 100+ candidates who have done web applications with Python or whatever qualifies one for said job, and literally doesn't have time to talk to them all. They also can't ask them random clarifying questions about their life. There's 2 data points, cover letter and resume.

I suggested two ways to make your cover letter more than a rehash of your resume and your latching onto one of them.

Here's the thing: you'll notice in my example I didn't suggest you write "I'm deeply passionate about food brokering" (an actual company I've hired software engineers for). That's not likely to move the needle, it obviously nonsense (Even the owner is didn't meet that description), and much like saying "I've got a deep mastery of Python" it's just empty words without something backing it.

Instead I suggested learning about what the company does, thinking about what the job entails beyond just "writing software according to the tickets" and what it actually accomplishes and expressing what about that interests you.

Is that person's interest going to end up exaggerated? Sure probably. But they're actually interested enough to put in the effort to think through that, and that effort, like it or not is a signal. Even the most pessimistic view means at least they were willing to work harder at it.

But look, maybe your applying at a subprime lender or something equally parasitic and are either so desperate that your doing it anyway or just cynical enough to not care, yet still have some moralistic hangup about this. Then don't. I suggested other things you can bring to your cover letter that don't fit on a resume. But if you make your cover letter your resume but in paragraph form (which is all the AI can do, since that's the only data it has), then you've reduced those data points the manager has to decide if your worth talking to from 2 down to 1. You might as well have skipped the cover letter entirely and at least saved them some time. (Actually that's not true, because often a cover letter is expected and they'll ding you for not having it, but including a bullshit rephrasing of your resume for that reason is no less performative than the expression of interest your already bothered by)

When I worked as a recruiter, I’d make candidates write two paragraphs of prose to summarize what they could do. Much easier to read than picking through a CV looking for clues.

I have no clue in general. When I go through applications, I go through all the material and anything else I can find about the candidate, and cover letters are sometimes helpful. Put yourself in my shoes:

- If the cover letter is a rehash of your resume, it's a waste of your time and mine. It certainly isn't helpful to your application, and if I have too many well-qualified applicants then it might be harmful.

- Poorly written cover letters suggest that the applicant doesn't care much about this specific opportunity, it's some sort of AI/oversees/... scam, or the applicant can't write well. They're very helpful for me when there are already other data points suggesting identity theft or similar automation (nail-in-the-coffin material). Otherwise, they're not necessarily a negative, but it's rarely advantageous to advertise a lack of some skill, and it does disqualify applicants from some roles.

- Some cover letters are especially compelling. Suppose your resume just has you as a pizza delivery driver, but your cover letter goes over the app you wrote and the data science behind it to optimize your hourly earnings. Suppose your work history is in web tech, but you're actually better at low-level optimizations and are applying here because you think that skill set is a good fit. I prefer varied backgrounds anyway, so you'll probably get some form of screening interview unless there's enough other evidence that you aren't qualified (e.g., junior experience for a senior role) -- I try to bias toward giving everyone a chance while not wasting too much of anyone's time, and I'm fine having a busier calendar to make that happen.

None of that helps you get the job though; it helps you get an interview. If your experience is that you're well qualified and usually land the job once you get into an interview, and if your cover letter has some information your resume lacks, you should definitely add one. If you normally struggle through the interview process, it'd be surprising for you to have an honest cover letter which would help you land the job in the first place, so I probably wouldn't bother.

In most cases, they are not important. All the offers I received asked for a cover letter, and I always submitted a one-line PDF that said I would discuss my work history and why I'd like the job only in an interview.

At the bigcorp where I work, I don't see cover letters. Applications comes through some crappy platform, I just see resume files and autog-extracted versions of them.

Might be worth putting a little summary / objective in the resume file itself because of that.

The biggest issue for me was filtering through software engineer job listings, since I wouldn't be interested or qualified for listings using various tech stacks.

I made a Chrome extension for LinkedIn that would filter out listings to exclude certain keywords, e.g. "Rust" or "Java" and find only listings that applied to me. From there I could manually apply and track my job application status. This saved much more time. I had a few macros to paste information which sped up the process.

What's the alternative to application spam if someone doesn't already have contacts and doesn't live in the city where they can attend meetups to network?

From what I can tell? Traveling to those meetups, which is a serious expense.

OP wants to automate the email send but should not do that. Sending bulk automated emails is a big no-no.

There's a big reason why OP was fighting with providers to set up something to what amounts to marketing email without an unsubscribe link...because it's not something you're supposed to do.

I don't think you should automate talking to a recruiter, anyway. At most this system should just generate email body and allow OP to review and send it out manually.

That being said flagging e-mails coming from known IP ranges of those e-mail providers seems like a pretty good idea for ATSes to detect non-human spam.

> So I went old school - manual HTML copying. Yes, it's primitive. Yes, it works. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best solution.

So it isn't automated at all

With all the automated scamming on both sides, maybe showing up to the place dressed well to drop off a resume isn't an antiquated idea after all.

I tried this during peak Silicon Valley days. I remember two things:

1. I got laughed at for wearing a suit by t-shirt devs

2. Around 40% of the places did not allow people to walk in the door at all.

I would be pleased with this kind of "analog" solution to this noise though, even as someone who missed the previous in-person paradigm entirely.

Hiring is so broken now that it might be worth trying.

Cross posting a comment I left

---

Just wanted to share that I've been working on a schema for job descriptions.

https://jsonresume.org/job-description-schema

I released about 6 months ago, hopefully some of the models use it in their training data. So you can just say "make an example JD, return it in the jsonresume job schema"

---

Just realized I should call it jsonjob or something

man, thank you for this comment!

I have been using reactive resume for sometime now, but never know it was built on this standard.

you actually saved a lot of research time from my next project!

This is part of the fucking problem. It started with recruiters using AI to filter candidates, candidates caught on and now use AI to massively apply to jobs, overflowing the response rate, so recruiters have no choice but to use AI. Meanwhile I've manually applied to over a thousand jobs that I am explicitly qualified for, I have 25 years of experience, I have tried writing resumes and cover letters specifically for the job I am applying to and I maybe got 5 calls back.

This timeline fucking blows.

This is the second post I read talking about the current state of hiring. I haven't applied for a job in 15 years. I have 20+ years of experience and chose the worst time to find a job. I had to hire several people over the years and always felt it was hard. But now from the perspective of someone applying, I see it's way harder. Maybe there is also an opportunity there.

This is basically the email spam problem all over again.

This is some next level bs spam. I know job search in IT is difficult these days but this kind of automation will not make it better; if anything, the opposite.

The most recent place where I applied and my earlier workplace both asked for a video recording early during the recruitment process. I guess employers will ask for in person interviews next.

Yup, in person and worst, only in network.

So you end up using technology to de-evolve society back to tribes.

Still, at least we are other people who are creating this AI technology and all of its application ... so we see the pain up close and we can start to steer it in a better direction that's more healthy for society.

But you know we have to find our integrity first.

Every job I've applied to has involved me researching the company, deciding whether I understood it, was right for the role, and wanted to work for them, and then tailoring my resume and cover letter to what that role needed. In my life, I've maybe sent 25 applications, gotten 6-7 interviews, and been hired 4 times. Pretty good batting average, and I'm not by any means especially qualified or accomplished. For me, automated spam has not been the answer, laser targeting has been.

How long ago did this last succeed?

The only applicants I hire are like that. If you cannot show you chose this company why would I assume you would like to work here?

Of cause this assumes you are a good fit in the first place regarding your skills. But the latter is usually much easier to filter out

I too would like to know more about @karaterobot's specific circumstances here, because while I understand your sentiment, it's a numbers game for SWE applicants like me. Of course there are some companies I would prefer to work at, but I don't think @karaterobot's experience is realistic right now.

Seconding Uvix's question.

I was looking for work in 2021-2022, and an approach like yours got me a job after interviewing with circa 10 companies. Unfortunately ended up on the wrong side of office politics and had to leave in early 2024.

At the start of my 2024 job search I again tried targeted search, targeting was good enough that I had a circa 1:10 application to interview ratio. It took over 50 companies before I found my current role. The market is much tougher now than it was a few years ago.

I hear there was a time when companies were eager/desperate to hire. Those were good years for job seekers.

It’s the same for me. When I read people say they send hundreds of job applications I don’t understand how that’s even possible. Any time I’ve been looking for a job I usually find maybe five jobs that actually interest me and I think I would be a good fit for, and then another five that I maybe don’t quite meet the all the requirements or don’t seem that interesting but it’s near enough that I might as well give it a go. I usually don’t make all those applications at once because I find managing more than about three applications to be a hassle.

As far as I can recall I’ve never not had an interview from an application.

I do generally use recruitment agencies so maybe that’s a factor.

As a candidate, I strongly believe in not applying, in letting the company find you. Applying is a waste of time.

Also, one can get falsely accused of using ChatGPT in online interviews, so just don't start if the role doesn't have at least one on-site round. If you get ghosted or falsely accused anyway, report it on Glassdoor at once. Always also report the questions you were asked.

> As a candidate, I strongly believe in not applying, in letting the company find you. Applying is a waste of time.

Easier said than done, innit? I'm privileged enough to have a relatively highly trafficked blog, as well as some social media following, so this could possibly for me, but plenty of candidates who are arguably more qualified than me don't have either.

There are simpler ways besides the standard social media, namely: LinkedIn, StackOverflow, GitHub. Among these, LinkedIn ought to be sufficient for 99% of candidates. It has landed me all of my new jobs over the last decade.

> If you get ghosted or falsely accused anyway, report it on Glassdoor at once

And why is glassdoor trustworthy?

I worked for a company that laid off 75% of their long term staff with zero severance right as glassdoor was getting popular. They off course got a bunch of deserving negative reviews. Within one year the company had buried all the bad reviews in a sea of obvious fake reviews.

Can't imagine what llm's are going to do for the entire fake review industry.

Some questions this thread brings up:

1. Why are there so many fake resumes/applications? Who's "applying"? Is it a foreign actor trying to gum up the works?

2. What are people's salary expecations? Are people still asking for salaries of $250k+?

Hate how this has become the job market. I finished my degree in July but was only able to find a job in November. Might not sound like a lot but it took almost 50 manual job applications, all with varying experiences.

I couldn't imagine being a manager having to sift through so much garbage just to find a candidate that's worth their salt.

Roughly 15 years ago when I entered the job market, I spammed my resume to 36 roles within a single company so 50 doesn’t sound too bad.

It was a Fortune 10 company so plenty of roles and I eventually got in.

I graduated from a second tier uni in 2001. It was hell finding my first real job (more than two years). I had to move across the country to find it. After that, no one ever cared about my shit uni again!

You can use firecrawl.dev to get markdown content for any page you want. It’s open source and you can host it locally.

I'm curious which companies still use emails to receive resumes and job applications! This sounds like hell to manage.

So did a million other people. Think your bot is better than everyone else’s? Think it will matter even if it is?

This seems like an excellent use of LLM.

Find someone over the age of 50 and ask them how to get a job.

First point: you won't like what they say. You won't like it at all. You'll probably absolutely hate it, and even start to hate him a little in the process.

Second point: you'll have a job in under 6 months.

This should be a Ask HN. Do you want to post it?

"Ask HN: How are those of you over 50 years of age getting jobs?"

What does this even mean? Go to Google headquarters and try to talk to HR? lmao

2025 - ai agent mass spamming incoming

I dont fully get something here. Being a good Engineer is a trait I would seek in a candidate, not really the actual hard skill knowledge.

That is changing every day, and if you are a life long learner, you will master it. I get that domain specific experience matters.

For example I passed the CCIE 10 years ago but today using Aider and LLMs to boost up Network DevOps related developments. I think using LLMs for code generation is a powerfull use case , is not really cheating, but a new way of working. Why would an employer not value this, and hiring managers, why are you not testing candidates in open book format on real world issues, giving candidates access to the latest State of the art LLMs, instead of using good old puzzles?

Today in development and Infra engineering space it might make more sense to ask candidates to build something real instead asking for a motivation letter and if they used Sonnet 3.5 v2 that is just a proof for trying to be effective.

I love the system he built, but the kicker would be to enable auto-filling and submitting on the various career portals. I question the efficacy of submitting job applications via email in 2024 (but perhaps I'm in the wrong industry.)

We should use this to flood companies with applications for people who don’t exist and make it impossible to find real candidates. Then maybe they’ll reform this dumb process that doesn’t work well for anybody.

Companies would just lean even harder into hiring only friends of current employees, but I appreciate the sentiment.

What would you suggest changing?

I think the hard part is everyone knows that it's bad but no one has any ideas to combat the problem.

Unfortunately the power balance is in the side of companies; people do need them (eating and sleeping somewhere is generally considered a good thing), companies do not.

Don't blame us for wanting to pay our bills.

There is much to reflect upon from these interactions (I thoroughly enjoyed every moment—thank you, HN!).

As a recent graduate from a developing country, I am truly grateful for the valuable insights gained.

If you automate your application process, you risk getting a job you do not want O_o

Talking to a company is mainly to determine if you want to work there so I really don't get why you would want to automate it

I made jokes about having a dead man's trigger that would automatically send out resumes as soon as a paycheck was not deposited on schedule. This is half of it right here.

>Automated job application process

And, just to confirm, you got a job?

I have a very nuanced view on this.

While I'm partially glad someone put this together and did this, having seen firsthand what an utter shit show that job hunting has been for the past two years with no offers, dismal conversion ratios (x100 -> x10000), and this with a decade of directly applied professional experience in highly regulated sectors, as well as having all my colleagues amazed at the competency of the work and solutions I put out (which has just been going to waste these past two years).

I'm still only partial on this; however, because I don't think this does anything but make the problem anything but much worse in the long run for everyone.

Individuals using this are simply just treading water with assistance while drowning others like them (without), and businesses will adapt to the flood of applications (by not even manually reviewing them) and bad actors will simply increase the noise.

The people left out (those not using AI), will not find any work. No work, no prospects, despite education, investment, and direct experience; this is unacceptable and leads to unrest, and eventually something akin to 1776. Similar jobless conditions were present leading up through the 1760s prior to the American Revolution.

I think it should come as no surprise that this is a hellscape when you depend on work to get food and other life necessities, and businesses that adapt sign themselves up for deflationary spirals of doom (not being able to find qualified applicants). People won't put up with it. You see people turning to crime in California over retail thefts, and then laws being passed making it more draconian, then violence becomes commonplace. Its a vicious cycle and its preventable if one is rational enough to see it.

The process people have been using is not good at qualifying people, and really most of what people are looking in specific jobs is magical thinking that doesn't correspond to their actual requirements. Time is limited; on both sides.

Now what is the underlying problem? It is that the same mechanism used by RNA interference in a cellular network, is being created by AI in a communications network from both sides of the participants creating interference so labor relations is sabotaged and fails from interference. I would not be surprised if many of those ghost jobs out there are actually digitally fabricated by China. They have the most to benefit from destroying the underpinnings of western society and driving people crazy in a pre-war footing setting.

If people are unable to regulate themselves, and this first goes to the producers in an economy, then laws need to be made so that those unintelligent people don't destroy society for everyone else.

the only thing worth using LLMs here for is the cover letter.

maybe I'm wrong but turning HTML into structured data example by using an LLM is bug prone and lazy.

the real challenge parts are pretty basic as well..

don't get me wrong I am not judging automation, but using LLMs for these trivial tasks is IMO a waste of time as a software engineer.

So did a million other people. Think your bit is better than everyone else’s? Think it will matter even if it is?

I'm an engineer at a company of about 70 people (about half of that engineers), and I personally review most applications to our engineering roles. About 60-70% of applications we receive are low-effort or automated spam of the kind generated by the author. We have screening questions that ask to describe a personal experience in your own words, specifically without LLM, and yet almost half of the applications we get have LLM answers, or a cover letter that is just an LLM-generated reflection of the job ad. Regularly the same candidate applies to all engineering roles, and then a few weeks later again, and again.

We use Recruitee, and ironically it doesn't have good automatic ways of filtering out the kind of spam generated by the author. On busy weeks, I spend about an hour per day screening and responding to applications. About half that is wasted on low-effort applications and automated spam generated by people like the author, and a significant part of that are repeat offenders. Nowadays I send one warning, and then I ask Recruitee support to ban the person, which due to implementation reasons on Recruitee's end prevents the person from applying at any company using Recruitee. It's harsh and I often feel bad about it, but after having to deal with this nonsense for multiple years now, I'm so sick of it, and I just ran out of patience.

I’ll genuinely handjam every field and be met with the same result of the spammers because I didn’t include the correct keywords for the ATS…

I'd certainly feel free to use any tactic their sales team would use.

Dare I ask: what did people do before the internet existed?

In person networking, it still works and the ratio of signal to noise has only gotten higher post-internet.

SW/Hacker types have this on easy-mode compared to other industries because of how many professional / enthusiast groups we have floating around in every city. We do our jobs outside of work for fun. That's doesn't work for an accountant. Companies seem to vastly prefer recruiting from these events and they get you past the screens. I've never once not gotten the interview emailing or name dropping the event / company rep I talked to.

The internet but not the www existed when I started out. Cover letters were handwritten, the CV was typed and the lot was posted or delivered by hand.

My first job was from an ad in the local paper, I sent a copy of my resume via mail with a covering letter and my home phone number. Also agents were actually useful, they were a hub where employers went to look for people and the agent had a list of people looking for jobs.

"part 1", I hope he will do a "part 20" or ex post look at ideas like - start at 500.000 USD/year salary - go down until you get positive responses

and runs this script for ten years, even while employed.

Congratulations, you are part of the problem.

saw similar project on an AI subreddit that got a lot of upvotes

I know this form of procrastination and action avoidance. :-) Never in my life have I applied to more than 3 companies, and never in my life did I need (or receive, as a hiring manager) a cover letter. My CV was always quite sufficient. The most idiotic part of the whole process (besides the interview loop, that is) is that I can't just submit my LinkedIn profile and be done with it, every single company insists that I enter my info (which is quite extensive, 25 years in) into their system manually. For resume I just export my LinkedIn as PDF these days.

I really miss StackOverflow Careers because they had exactly this feature - I enter my career details once and SO Careers allow me to generate nice CV in PDF format. Personally I’ve found couple great jobs though SO Careers, it is sad that SO decided to shutdown Careers business.

I recently automated this process, however, in a very different way.

- CLI run for every job you want to apply for (this is important)

- JavaScript (Deno) with Puppeteer to run the JS for the page

- Create a directory for all the artefacts <yyyy-mm-dd-ms-pagetitle>

- Save the webpage link (artefact)

- Take a screenshot of the page (artefact)

- Extract the HTML (artefact)

- Convert HTML to Markdown with a CLI (artefact)

- Send Markdown to the Grok API to extract just the Job Description as Markdown (artefact)

- Send Job Description and Autobiography to Grok API to generate a Resume (artefact)

- Send Job Description and Autobiography to Grok API to generate a Cover Letter (artefact)

- Use pandoc to convert the Markdown Resume and Cover Letter into Open Document Format (LibreOffice) (artefacts)

The important differences here are:

- You need to find the job you are interested in. Why automate this?

- Run the CLI `job-hunter https://job.site/jobid` (50sec runtime)

- Open the ODF documents, review, edit, save (human involved is important)

- Use a bash script running LibreOffice CLI to convert ODF documents to PDF

- Review the PDFs

- Manually click the apply button on the site and upload the documents

I also keep a spreadsheet with the details for each job I apply for so I can track interactions, think CRM for job applications and recruiters. This could be automated, however, I got a job so have lost interest.

Points of interest:

- Markdown is a fantastic format in general, but for LLMs as prompts and documents, it's awesome.

- If you just curl the page html, you don't get the recruiters email addresses in most cases, hence the use of Puppeteer.

- Having all the artefacts saved on disk is important for review before and after the application, including adding notes.

- By using an Autobiography that is extreme in detail, the LLM can add anything and everything about you to the documents.

- Use Grok and support Elon. OpenAI can stick their "Open" where it fits.

- I don't end up having to format the documents that are generated as ODF files, they look great.

I can apply for around 10 to 20 jobs in a day if I try hard. Most of the time it is around 5 because I am doing other things. They are only jobs I'm interested in though, and I can customise the documents. Also, If I am applying for a job that includes AI, I add a note at the bottom stating it has been generated by an LLM and customised.

There's probably more interesting points, but you get the idea.

My TODO list includes a CLI switch to only open the page in a Firefox profile so I can authenticate to the page. This removes the stupid "automate auth on ever job site" issue. Simply authenticate and keep the cookie in the hunter profile.

The repo is private for the time being, but I could make it public.

Edit: formatting.

Yeah, there's commercial services such as ApplyAll that automatically applies to jobs for you for a fee. Workday is the worst to automate. Companies can add in unique required questions such as "tell us two extraordinary things you've done", so edge cases like those are common.

Why do people ask “please” to an LLM is beyond me. It’s a machine, it does not care about politeness! Treat it as a machine ffs.

Because for some weird reason it tends to work.

Has this been properly analyzed?

Probably. By whom and to what end I have absolutely no clue.

Have a look at this analysis by @minimaxir about offering tips to LLMs: https://minimaxir.com/2024/02/chatgpt-tips-analysis/

So I don’t lose the habit when talking/writing to people

"Please" is for your sake, not the bot's.

Roko's basilisk

>Why do people ask “please” to an LLM

did you ever notice how your google-fu got worse over time, as google adapted their technology for the mass market? I predict your LLM-fu will also deteriorate.

I'm not saying "good for Google, what they did there", I'm talking about how you will experience the world.

This is genius

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