Hacker News Reader

Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

It seems more likely the HR people depend on LLMs to do the job of screening and LLMs unsurprisingly prefer LLM output and rank it highly.

It’s not lazy incompetence, it’s quietly getting the job done with 1% of the effort (that was a sarcastic pastiche, in case anyone was unsure).

View on HN

It's not uncommon to get hundreds or thousands of applications per opening for web tech, if the position is advertised on LinkedIn or a similar job board.

They'd need to use some automation, even if it is just picking ten at random.

Maybe? I've filtered 300-400 CVs by hand before, and didn't find it particularly time consuming to bin the ones which clearly didn't meet requirements or have any redeeming features. And hiring was not my full-time role.

The last time I posted on HN in the 1-st of the month hiring post, I got around 2 thousand resumes. Pretty much all of them were this kind of: "Increased the performance of the service by 23.123213%" collection of bullet points.

PS: I replied to most of them, I think, but I'm sorry if I missed somebody :(

At 90 seconds per resume, that would take up a full 8 hour day. Having gone through this myself, I don't think it's possible to do this much faster than that, even if you have an ATS that optimizes for that workflow.

I often found myself falling into patterns of poor judgement, e.g. mentally filtering out resumes based on the layout because, to my tired and bored mind, they looked similar to the resumes I had seen from unqualified candidates. I actually think some automation is helpful in evaluating them more rigorously.

Some automation is inevitable but fallible LLMs are the wrong tool for such judgments IMO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com