The Résumé is dying, and AI is holding the smoking gun
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Then, we transitioned into highly automated form submissions online, where it's so easy for the potential employer to collect applications that they don't bother to stop receiving them when they have filled the position, and they even keep fake job openings to goose the numbers. IMO, this development was a completely one-sided benefit to employers. They seemed to relish in wasting the applicants time, somehow.
Now, legitimate job postings are being inundated with slop due to how shit the online application process is and how much of the applicant's time it's designed to waste. Sounds like a form of justice, almost.
Maybe now we can go back to confirming a human exists on both ends.
When you stop taking it personally, and ask yourself how and why these business leaders were able to do this and continue doing it for decades, you'll eventually narrow in on the fact that money-printing has played a critical role.
Then ask yourself what happens when legitimate producers who are immediately constrained by a loss(profit) function face off against producers who are unconstrained (through non-reserve debt issuance with loans out 100 years).
What happened to all the local video rental places after Blockbuster? What happened to all the local SuperMarts after Walmart? What happened with Food Deserts?
Large well funded companies came in, slashed prices under where it was profitable, and outspent until competitors shut down. There is a reason since the 70s business growth/adoption plans follow the same curves as ponzi schemes.
Until the fuel that drives the cycle is removed, no change can be expected; and if we are being honest, the people making these choices aren't the brightest people in the room.
Every producer requires labor, but some use their unconstrained nature to manipulate the factor markets towards wage suppression. This creates untenable whipsaws eventually.
> Then, we transitioned into highly automated form submissions online, ... this development was a completely one-sided benefit to employers.
This was actually a big advantage to job seekers as you could apply to way more jobs at once and lowered the bar of starting to look for another job when the time at your current job was up.
As a millennial, I seriously do not know how people got office jobs before the Internet. I've heard people say, "Just put on your best suit, go down there and ask to speak with the manager and give him a firm handshake", but that just seems so old fashioned.
>> Sounds like a form of justice, almost.
You seem upset, like they did this just to screw you over, but perhaps there might have been other reasons that you hadn't thought of. In any case, the solution won't be eye to eye meetings to submit applications, but probably something digital so I wouldn't expect "The good old days" anytime soon.
Forty years ago, I shared a house with a guy who had recently completed an MA, and hadn't found any work related to it. I always knew when his family had been in town, because the Help Wanted ad section from the Sunday New York Times would be on the table. Memory may exaggerate, but I remember this section as fatter than today's Times is Monday through Saturday. The Washington Post had a similar Help Wanted section. In fact, I think that every job I have held since 1983 I applied for in response to a classified ad.
Obviously it would be better to be recruited, to have somebody call up and say, Hey, Dave says you're a great hand at X, are you by any chance looking to move? But responding to a classified ad is how an awful lot of us found employment back then.
I should say that there one would occasionally see ads for work requiring remarkable qualifications, but paying a bit better than McDonalds. It was only much later that I understood that these were placed to establish that one couldn't hire US citizens for the work and so should be allowed to hire someone on an H1-B.
Good riddance, they have long been obsolete.
Because filling out a new form for every position is a ridiculous waste of time.
Perhaps having the job application form pull from my LinkedIn profile would be a good solution to the problem of filling out the same information over and over.
I’ve had to submit my resume and fill out the same information again maybe 30% of the time. It’s definitely not every time.
I picked LinkedIn as an example because many (most?) job applicants have an account with them and it has most of the relevant information already, such as education, industry certifications, and job history.
I’d rather we mandate companies have AI/auto parsers for a regular resume instead.
LinkedIn would serve as a definitive superset source of truth so that I would only need to keep it up to date versus the current status quo. Ideally perhaps some sort of standard API could emerge where you could choose your favorite provider of job application information.
LinkedIn/Indeed are incentivized to keep ghost jobs up if those entities pay them money.
Ultimately, the best chance of success when searching for jobs is to network with people and make personal connections. If you’re relying on your resume to get hired you’re probably going to have a bad time.
Also, as someone who has made hiring decisions in the past I am not a fan of resumes. The lack of any standard for format or even what information is contained on a resume makes them a royal pain to sift through.
Hiring is messy. It always has been and always will be precisely because it involves human beings. I've been on both sides of the table often enough, and every hire is ultimately a coin toss. You try to weed out the people that are obviously horrible, and give a chance to the people that seem like they have a few useful strengths or might be able to grow into the role. Most important is that they can fit in with a team. There is no such thing as a perfect hire, and I would not trust a computer to do a decent job of building a team that works well together.
Moreover, I would have deeply serious concerns if someone working for me in a hiring position complained that resumes aren't in a standardized format. How are they going to cope with the emotional mess that managing humans is as soon as someone steps outside of the predefined box they have put them in?
"Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
During hiring, it's never been my experience that resumes are particularly helpful for any of these things. Interviews, on the other hand are incredibly valuable for these things. It's my opinion that the most effective way to do hiring is to weed out all the obviously unqualified applicants as quickly as possible, and then if necessary dwindle down the remaining applicants to a reasonable number to interview based on X number of individuals who appear to be the most qualified for the position. I just see resumes as unnecessary additional friction in the process of narrowing down who should be interviewed for a job.
If you can't be bothered to take 5 minutes to look at a resume, why should the interviewee commit to spending hours doing coding tests or traveling into your office for an interview? It's the bare minimum to ask that the hiring manager look at a document that gives them some idea of an applicant's background. Anything else is treating people disrespectfully. Your time isn't the only thing that matters. People aren't just cogs in a machine. This line of thinking is what's destroying the software industry.
This isn't totally new - I was doing this pre-AI, over a decade ago. But I guess it's now a lot easier.