Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

One of my friends mentioned how on the hiring side it's not much better.

Here'a a recent case for a remote software engineering role for a US based company:

A position is posted publicly, in 2 days it gets 300 applicants. Out of those 300, 9 are selected for interviews. Of the 9, only 2 showed up for the interview. Both candidates weren't close to a good fit (skills didn't match resume, etc.).

It opened my eyes on the process. Imagine an engineering manager getting handed a few hundred resumes and now they need to hand select ones that move onto the next phase. This takes a huge amount of time and it also indicates if your resume isn't strong, you will probably get passed over in a few seconds.

With that said, he told me most of the applications were AI spam.

View on HN

One of my job postings, I got over 100 applications. Most people weren't even tangentially related. They were spraying and praying. Worse yet, I had to screen everything by hand. A rather tedious job and made worse by Taleo. And as much I understand why people don't want AI screening and my company strictly prohibits it - by the end I was begging for one.

Finally, not even one application was matching the job profile and many had used AI to misrepresent their skill.

My company has a policy that once a position has to be opened, I need to fill it within 6 months. So, fed up I had to work with HR to message people on Linkedin.

This has basically dissuaded me using the spray and pray or AI generated resumes, if and when I start my job hunt.

That's unfortunate.

To be clear: I was only applying to jobs that were a fit for my resume, and my AI generated resume was 100% truthful about my skills, background and experiences.

I would not encourage applying to jobs that are entirely unrelated, nor lying on ones resume.

I pretty much only apply via personal email these days. Nothing else seems serious.

In the Czech Republic, the post-2008 crisis dragged for quite a long time, and the job market around 2012 was so bad that when we put out an ad for a secretary, we got over 300 applicants.

I don't think we answered every single of them, we were a small company (15 people at that time), and even our wish for basic courtesy was constrained by real lack of time and people. That is also why we needed a secretary...

I can't even imagine the same situation in 2025, with AI. Would that be 3000 applicants?

Maybe in 2030, everyone will have several AI agents constantly looking for their dream job. One job listing will receive 3 million applications. Companies will start requiring payment to submit a job application to show you're serious and not a spammer. Any hiring manager hoping to get reached out to by an actual human applicant via a job listing will be hopeless, and any individual applicant hoping to reach a human hiring manager will also be hopeless

I don't know in the Czech Republic but in the US for many years now, most of the job applications are garbage: complete mismatch between experience and position applied to, lists of keywords that are clearly BS, unreadable presentations... This is not new. But no, most of them have always been very easy to dismiss. It takes time but mostly because of the quantity. Not much time per resume. It was just one of these thankless tasks that needed to be gotten through. (And HR - for good or bad - did much of that.)

Perhaps the problem is that we all root for a non-standard application to be a great find. And that yes, sometimes they are! Probably looking for these in job posting applications is not worth it anymore.

Honestly these numbers don’t seem to change. I’ve had 200 resumes in 2002 posted on a Canadian government jobs board (for private sector) and the resulting resumes were like 2 good ones. Then about ten years ago a job posting on Stack Overflow attracted 450 applicants in a few days. Most were spam.

The only difference is that spam these days is custom tailored using AI. And it makes weeding out bad resumes more difficult. But absolute numbers remain about the same I’d say.

It's their job to go through applications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com