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Comment by sunjieming | Hacker News Reader

We're seeing a flood of fake AI generated job applications basically DDOSing our hiring funnel. Not sure how widespread it is but it has become enormously frustrating to sift the complete garbage from the good resumes. I'm sure a lot of good people have been accidentally filtered out

It's rough out there right now. Also, not even sure what the benefit or angle is for spamming fake job applications. State actors trying to sabotage?

Edit: We can tell that some of the applications are fake because we have people fail background screenings and often the attached LinkedIn profile is using AI generated images and job histories that don't add up.

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> I've been a Full Stack Machine Learning Data Scientist DevOps Engineer for 3 years. I've used every cloud platform, every provisioning tool, every major operating system release (Windows and Linux) going back to 2003. I write code in every major language and have used every major queueing system, web server, application server, networking stack, and database engine. I read in binary, ternary, octal, decimal, and hexadecimal and process information at 12.9 exaFLOPS.

The reason you are getting spammed is because a) agencies are trying to secure an interview before they have a candidate; b) they are trying to convince you to use their offshore teams. Ask around inside your company if any offers from offshore providers have been submitted/talks are being conducted. DDoS-ing hiring funnels is a way to convince you that "no good people are available".

Clever tactic, info overload them, then sell the solution

Intriguing... Any other info you can provide on this, sources, articles, etc?

This is based on my own experience and conversations with hiring managers and recruiter over the last two years. I have also been involved in screening CVs. It's impossible to keep up with the flood of fake CVs.

Its perfectly nefarious! Was just wondering if there was anything written about it yet. Thanks!

When I see an ad for a hybrid role that pays £200 pd inside IR35 I know it is designed to "prove" that there are no suitable candidates interested in it in the UK.

> not even sure what the benefit or angle is for spamming fake job applications

Ok, tinfoil hat time. Suppose for a moment that the AI hype is true, and that two years from now everyone will have access to god-like coding ability on the cheap. Even if it's untrue, there are plenty who believe this is the case. Seems to me like there are two ways for that to go:

1. Coding jobs get scarcer and scarcer and the only remaining ones are populated people willing to work unreasonably hard to keep them.

2. Coders being the group with the most on-the-job experience re: driving an AI (acquired back in the days when coding was all it was good for) all quit their jobs to start their own companies--because why bother with the bureaucracy of a large company when you can now do the same work with four employees?

I'm not sure who exactly would want to influence the general vibe towards 1 and away from 2, I guess somebody who believed the hype enough to see 2. as a threat, but not enough to see it as an ideal outcome. Or maybe someone whose product is more valuable against a backdrop of an impossible-to-navigate job market. Whoever they are, DDOSing job applications would be a way to achieve that goal.

Its crazy at the moment, you can use bots to just automatically apply. Also the ease of Quick Apply on LinkedIn makes it so simple to just apply and not really consider if your right for the role. I suppose it feels like your making progress but your right it is spamming, I was 100% guilty of this for the first few weeks thinking it would be easy and quick to land a few interviews and offers!

Anecdotally, one of these AI generated people made it THROUGH my company’s hiring funnel, apparently HR didn’t check references. Not the worst performer I’ve ever seen, clearly a fake and they got weeded out after a couple of weeks, but it seemed way more like a “get as many remote jobs as possible and if you get fired from one then just keep the process rolling”

Thats sad and hilarious at the same time. Agree, I feel HR KPIs are based on number of applicants Vs quality or finding the right one

Exactly. LLMs make it worse for both the employers and the job seekers. Receiving hundreds of applications per day is extremely difficult to handle for a small company, especially that it's extremely apparent that around 1% reads the job description at all.

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