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Comment by AdieuToLogic | Hacker News Reader

From the well-written article:

  I have spent months adjusting my resume, applying for all 
  jobs where my skill set may be of use, building 
  proof-of-concepts using Claude, and doing cold outreach to 
  anyone who may be interested in my potential products or my 
  services. The well has gone dry.

A major quandary companies are finding themselves in is "resume fraud", which can be defined here as being inundated with applicants only to find 99%+ have used GenAI to produce a bogus work history tuned to satisfy the job posting. To the point where many companies simply give up trying to identify "real" applicants via online submissions.

It is analogous to email spam in the 90's, before anti-spam technology was mature.

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They wanna filter the candidates who used GenAI and then force the GenAI on the existing employees. Makes total sense.

Yeah it's pretty bad. Can't even browse projects on Reddit because a lot of them are just slop

Oddly enough, the solution lies in what was previously replaced; staffing firms.

Staffing companies have recruiters which vet candidates to varying degrees of success. At minimum, they establish the candidate:

- is a human

- lives where they claim to live

- has worked where they claim to have worked

- has eligibility to work for one or more of their clients

If nothing else, the above eliminates much of the "99% resume fraud" problem companies are dealing with now.

I've been thinking this for a while now, but I feel like especially with the rise of crazy salaries in AI research, it's time for software development to have its agency moment. Just like athletes and actors, I think the industry might be better off if there were reputable agents with a portfolio of people they represent, and something the equivalent of a casting director at companies instead of the current "cram leetcode" mode of evaluation.

> Just like athletes and actors, I think the industry might be better off if there were reputable agents with a portfolio of people they represent ...

This is what recruiters in quality staffing firms do. Granted, there are many staffing firms which are worthless body-shops. But those are not reputable. :-)

> ... and something the equivalent of a casting director at companies instead of the current "cram leetcode" mode of evaluation.

The equivalent has traditionally been hiring managers who work with approved staffing companies, both to ensure those companies provide value as well as to foster an understanding of the people/skills needed by the organizations.

Wise organizations use multiple staffing firms and perform internal audits in order to minimize complacency/corruption.

I’ve seen a setup like this in software for some specific high-demand SAP (ERP) consultancy roles. The nature of SAP migrations are per-project in nature (you wouldn’t want to migrate your company’s ERP all the time). The person had such a skillset that they had what is effectively an “agent” who would negotiate their next job assignment. The agent was even baked into the contract with the client as a party, I don’t recall how much of the hourly this agent would get, but they were invoicing the company separately.

At least this is what I recall.

Meta: this is probably the first time this year where I use the word agent to refer to a human. Feels odd even.

Already sort of exists in the high end contracting/consulting software dev business in Australia at least

All else being equal, the return of high-touch recruiting work is of course a reduction in industrial productivity and a negative contribution to economic growth. But it does generate more jobs! Put that in your predictions of AI’s economic impact and smoke it …

It's not a decrease of productivity?

If someone who contributed to the Linux kernel has their resume on par with a spammer who lied about it how do we know who is correct unless there is a verification system?

I think you have misunderstood what I was saying. I didn't compare total productivity with high-touch manual work from a recruiting agency in the actually-existing 2026 to total productivity without that same manual work in the actually-existing 2026. I agree (or certainly find it plausible) that in our actually-existing 2026 total productivity is likely higher with the extra manual work from recruiters than without it. What I compared was total productivity with high-touch manual work from a recruiting agency in the actually-existing 2026 to total productivity, without that same extra manual work, in a hypothetical 2026 where modern (GPT-4-or-better) LLMs don't exist (or at least don't exist yet). That's the relevant comparison when it comes to asking the question "what impact have LLMs had on productivity?" The actually-having-existed 2019 or 2022 are probably a decent proxy for the hypothetical 2026 here.

There is no need for this degree of obfuscation.

Put simply, organizations needing skilled personnel can delegate post-application screening to their set of approved staffing firms. Said organizations can employ initial screening techniques to filter out obvious fraud, such as requiring online applicants prove they possess the email/cell phone provided via industry standard mechanisms (while employing deny-lists as applicable). Given the remuneration commitment each hire represents year-over-year and the ability to hold staffing firms accountable, their fees are typically quite reasonable.

Why you introduced the question "what impact have LLMs had on productivity?" in this context escapes me.

> All else being equal, the return of high-touch recruiting work is of course a reduction in industrial productivity and a negative contribution to economic growth. But it does generate more jobs!

When the problem definition is "companies want applicants who are known to be humans having a minimally vetted work history", Occam's Razor[0] implies people can do so efficiently. If for no other reason than it being trivial for one person to converse with another.

How would the above result in:

  ... of course a reduction in industrial productivity and a 
  negative contribution to economic growth.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

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