The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

The bigger issue is the screening filters are flooded now (and also largely AI “enhanced”) so getting real signal through the noise is becoming basically impossible.

It goes the other way as well though. Companies are increasingly filtering resumes/candidates in a sufficiently aggressive fashion to the point that they're strongly incentivizing, if not actively selecting for, people that are gaming the system in some way or another. Quite odd this is all happening when ostensibly the unemployment rate is very low, which should make it an employee's market.

> This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”.

Yeah, but it's now 1000x worse. Before you needed actual skill (or luck) to create a good looking CV, especially for niche positions.

Now you take their job description, the company's "About us" webpage, your old CV and have LLMs generate a CV with pretty solid grammar and most of the verbiage they expect.

In the past the average unqualified person wouldn't even know the right words for a specific niche domain, let alone how to use them.

Oh, and single LLMs are kind of inherently multilingual, this makes it even worse, because you can have people that barely understand the target language generate a reasonable CV in that language.

The CV quality floor has been raised but the candidate floor has fallen through the pits of hell.

Honestly the problem is hiring teams -- they have created this whole issue. They ask for a resume and cover letter. Fine. But don't make applicants put in the work if you're not even going to provide a response, or any sort of feedback -- even when the position stays open for months. The result is that people looking for jobs have to submit huge numbers of custom cover letters, and tweaked resumes, with no feedback, all within a vacuum. Hence the feeling that they need to "pump up" their resume, just to get over the initial gate.

I have one project on my resume that I have trouble remembering some details of. It feels weird to drop it off (it was an internship at a sort of well known company), but it was a while ago. Is “can’t remember details” still a huge red flag from the employer’s point of view, even if the explanation is legitimate?

It’s not exactly the crown jewel of my resume anyway, so I guess I could cut it, it just adds to my backstory.

Resumes are written for hr

Ideally we submit 2 resumes one for the non technical people that need to be involved and one for managers.

Instead were attempting to write for two audiences (or 3?automated filters) and the less knowledgeable one will reject without talking to you

Devil's advocate: In a culture where lying and cheating is venerated once you get rich enough doing it, don't these candidates just demonstrate how they've deeply understood and internalized the most important rules? Fake it till you make it. Naturally, getting busted by follow-up questions reveals them to be bloody greenhorns who didn't rehearse enough.

I recently took a “one way interview”(I’ve had multiple recruiters use that term) where I had to be on camera, and talk to a machine that interpreted responses completely incorrectly causing me to have to try and negotiate with a fucking clanker that when I said I could work in the US I actually meant I could work in the US.

2 days later they replied back that I hadn’t had a long enough tenure in my career and couldn’t trust me enough to hire.

I don’t know what companies plans are because they are creating an environment where even the people they do end up hiring are going to resent them from day one based on the dehumanizing treatment they are applying to the interview process.

> I don't understand why tech companies are so reluctant to go back to in-person interviews.

Tech companies probably aren’t that reluctant, but I’d bet a lot of job applicants are.

There were phone screens before Covid

One thing is that it costs money to fly people out and that's a big investment when the person might arrive and not know jack.

you still need filter phone/remote interviews to select which candidates to have for on-site interviews, and this article centers on this initial interview being broken

Because like a lot of things, metric of "What does recruiting cost us?" is very easy number to quantify so companies will attempt to reduce it.

"What does bad recruiting cost us?" is very hard number to quantify because it's just sand that gets thrown into so many gears, but cost of that sand is across a ton of departments and so measuring for it is very difficult.

Here's the secret: it's still just gambling. Elon musk isn't a trillionaire because he brought something special to the table; it's because he was able to perform the martigale enough times and he arbitrarily reached the top.

Hiring is exactly the same thing, even when trying to do it on merit, people are simply poor judges of character, ability and the rest.

Most of society is governed by people who simply kept getting lucky and kept doubling down because their ego demanded it and their last roll of the dice didn't drive them to poverty or happiness.

I’ve worked with places that have had HR bungle the hiring and places that haven’t. The only difference is whether it’s HR or Engineering bungling the hiring. Writing a job description that actually matches what you want is hard work. Sifting through 300 applicants that don’t meet the requirements or lie on the application form is hard work. Doing 10 30 minute intro calls is hard work. Desigining “standard” questions for comparison is hard work. Wrangling 2 rounds of interviews per candidate, dealing with people who are too busy with work for hiring is hard work. Chasing people for interview feedback that isn’t just “yeah seems fine” is hard work. And then getting the group to stop saying “we want to speak to more people” is harder than any of the previous steps.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of people over the last few years as a peer, hiring manager, and as a “bar raiser”, and it’s just a lot of work no matter who does it…

The best hiring is generally expected to happen through referrals, so there's not a ton of pressure to improve the public application pipeline beyond the minimum required to keep it functional.

Because it is really hard to reliably hire good people. Almost all typical signals & methods (CVs, experience based interviews, …) have very low reliability. An IQ test has the highest reliability according to studies but would be illegal in most jurisdictions. Plus, hiring managers frequently don’t know what they want or they believe they want something that they actually don’t

I think being successful makes hiring easier because you can source better candidates, and being big makes hiring easier because candidates are more likely to know people at the firm who can use referrals to work around otherwise broken systems.

It’s perhaps also worth noting that lots of companies used to copy how Microsoft did interviews and later they copied how google did interviews so clearly there were some ideas that those companies were good at hiring. (I’m not sure this strategy was that good. The problem for the Microsoft or google type companies is filtering out acceptable hires from a deluge of applicants with acceptably low errors and costs; the challenge for less desirable firms is sourcing candidates who are both high quality and not about to be hired by Microsoft or Google)

One company that comes to mind when I think about being good at hiring was one that recruited a bunch from my university around when I was graduating. Their particular specialty was hiring illegible graduates with a lot of potential (eg classicists, science students without little programming, etc), training them well, and effectively underpaying them a bit for how skilled they were (which only worked out because the UK has a pretty shit job market for tech and because those people liked working there). I think it was more effective for them than trying to hire the same computer science graduates as everyone else would have been.

Lying on resumes is very common, so is lying on job postings. It's a really weird arms race where no one is getting what they want.

I will say that I'm not surprised by this at all. I think a ton of people have been convinced that basically all languages are more or less the same, so they are confident putting languages they barely know on their resumes. "I know python and Java, how hard can C++ be?". This isn't a new problem, or even a "coding bootcamp problem"

I studied computer science at a small university in 2006, several of my friends went to a much larger university and studied Software Engineering

They didn't learn pointers back then either. They learned Uncle Bob Java and that was basically it.

When I first tried to get a job, I listed three categories of skills: the ones I'm very confident in, the ones I have some experience with, and the niche ones I only dabbled in. The overwhelming advice, from everyone around me, was to never-ever admit that I'm not perfect at something. I found it perplexing, but after a decade or so, I started having to read resumes, and, indeed, I found almost nobody ever admitting they're not an absolute wizard at everything they put on their resumes. Before starting work at a company, I had this naive idea that HR and candidates are there to help each other, and that approaching it with honesty and goodwill is how it should work. Needless to say, it doesn't work that way at all - on both ends. I'm honestly frightened that I will maybe have to go through the hiring process again at some point, especially since my career turned adult and now my "years of experience" are a dead weight of "you're just old"... The whole process is so antagonistic, so brutal and stressful, that I can see myself going full YOLO and just spamming AI-slop resumes until I get an interview, in which - I want to believe - I'll be able to actually say something about myself and, hopefully, convince the interviewer that I can do the job. I know that would have made the whole situation a bit worse (and I'm sorry if I end up resorting to strategies like that), but the emotional burden of dealing with the "hiring process" before an actual face-to-face talk is so great I don't think I could bear it for long.

> Whatever the reason, it's very easy to assert a candidate competency with a 30 minutes to an hour interview in person.

It's not always that easy. Yes; there's a fraction of programmers who cannot code, and yes, it's usually possible to tell them apart with a FizzBuzz-style question. However, the vast majority will have some skill, and testing the limits of that skill (again, assuming we can't just expect the candidate to ever say "no, I'm weak in this-or-that area") in a limited time of an interview is hard at least on two counts: misunderstandings/communication problems instead of skill problems, and the need to wrap the obviously confrontational (instead of cooperative; it would be the latter if we could be honest with each other, but that's a pipe dream) process into something that doesn't look confrontational on the surface. It's indeed a "hiring theatre", and you need pretty solid acting skills and some psychology to pull it off as an interviewer. Of course, very few interviewers have the required combination of knowledge and skill; in effect, over the past year, I was able to form an opinion (good or bad, but at least an informed one) about the candidate's skills maybe half the time. In the other 50% of cases, I just couldn't pry any info about the actual skills from a candidate. It's like they're saying: "hire me if you want to see my cards" - and honestly, I can't even blame them too much! We're not exactly perfectly honest from our side, either, in the end...

Basically, I dread the possibility of being subjected to what has become the prevailing model of hiring in tech; I don't think I have it in me to either game the system or get good at using it, so the only thing I can count on is just dumb luck: that, at the exact time I will need it, some company will show up and either come to me directly, or will have both the process and people staffing it compatible with me by chance. If not that, I don't see myself ever getting hired again.

We had a process where C or C++ competence was acceptable and they would need to do some simple list creation tasks without STL. One guy was adamant about using C++ despite being assured C would be fine. It didn't look good when he new'ed an array and forgot to delete[] it when free() would have been mistake proof.

Apprenticeship? Actually spend time working with them on real work.

It's both hard and doesn't scale.

Recommendation from a trusted 3rd party.

Bill Gurley has a great line about this:

"I use LinkedIn like this:

If Person A reaches out to me and there is a Person B that is a common connection between A and myself, I want to be able to call Person B and have 100% confidence in their evaluation. That's the bar I set to connect with someone on LinkedIn."

From:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmYekD6-PZ8

Ask the best people you’ve ever worked with who the best people they’ve worked with are. Recurse. When names start repeating through different graph paths, make those people an offer they can’t refuse. Once they join, ask them to do the same, and give them the budget and role to make it happen.

We source our intern-to-Junior pipeline from a good state school from which we have a few graduates. We have about an 80% placement rate for the interns. We’ve yet to have any abusive or bad hires, this being a fully remote company. For Senior hires, a prior employee founded a Java User Group and sourced several high quality engineers from the pool of visitors. So, build a pipeline and play the long game?

Previously we’ve sourced candidates via a reputable recruiter from an in-town firm that our manager can routinely sit down with and build a relationship over the years. This had a good rate with only one bad placement. We ultimately traded time cost for money cost in that one, but I liked it.

The worst outcomes we’ve had were via LinkedIn jobs posts. By the time our in-house full-time recruiter would give us resumes half would be obvious frauds with most of the remainder being subtle frauds. I blame this in good part to having non-technical staff as the first filter in our pipeline.

Unfortunately the firm makes money hand over fist year on year so we are no longer a lean mean operation but a burgeoning beauracracy with room to hide, rest, and vest.

I think various ‘longer interview’ processes can be good by reducing the chance of particularly regretted hires. This could be internships (but note this goes two ways and you want interns to accept offers and recommend the programme to their friends even if they are not hired) or work sample tests. Both have the downside that they are more work for the candidate (especially internships or some other short-term-to-possibly-long-term position) and so experienced candidates who feel they have better options and less need to prove themselves typically won’t take part (this depends a bit on how much they want to work at your specific company of course). Potentially this isn’t so bad – competing to hire the same people as everyone else is going to be more expensive – or potentially it is bad – maybe there’s a reason those candidates are in high demand and you will suffer from only getting a look at people who didn’t fit the typical pattern. I think it’s going to depend a bunch on how good you are at sourcing candidates and how hot your firm is.

Yes. Figure out who your top performers are ask them for referrals. Some people will recommend "meh" people, but more often than not your top performers hang out with other top performers because they appreciate the same things.

I do quick interviews, then hire hourly for a single scoped task. Then see how they play, communication skills, code exploring all that happens on the task. Only works when candidate is not otherwise engaged, has never worked for non-coding/sysadmin roles.

I like the other comment regarding asking people you know or have hired for referrals. But there's a separate question about what to do when you don't have any referrals to rely on.

In the past, the answer was to rely on recruiting experts and your own experience to analyze resumes, and to hope that some fraction of your time interviewing was well spent. But as others in this thread have pointed out, the quality of resumes as a signal is rapidly decreasing with AI. So now the question is what the new signal should be.

The purpose of hiring is really just to understand three things: (1) can the person do the job, (2) will I and the rest of the team want to work with them for the foreseeable future, and (3) are there any red flags. The latter two are assessed in interviews or backchanneling. But the first, "can this person do the job," is the one that has gotten much harder to tell from the resume alone.

What does "can the person do the job" even mean in the era of AI? For SWE, a lot of teams are still leaning on outdated coding challenges that test the ability to write code by hand (quality, organization, efficiency, speed) and the direct knowledge held in someone's head (vocabulary, concepts, tools). But what we actually need to test for is much more nebulous: thought process, judgment, knowing what questions to ask, taste, context switching, and how the candidate does all of this with AI effectively. Traditional coding challenges (where you prohibit cheating as much as possible) get at some of this, but they're no longer the optimal solution. They're an old comfortable solution being applied to a more modern, complicated problem.

I said this in another comment in this thread, but the best thing to do is offer an open-ended question. One that doesn't have a concrete answer, and one they're free to answer however they wish. Like a Turing test, 5 minutes at most is enough. Want to use AI? Great. Want to curate your answer? Great. Ask them to architect something. Describe a bug and ask if it should be fixed. If they think it should, ask how they'd approach debugging. Or ask about a technical decision they've made that they're not sure was right, and have them make the case for the other choice.

The same approach works in other domains. For sales, have them sell to someone in a specific scenario. For marketing, ask about a campaign they didn't like and what they would have done differently. For accounting, ask about the most common problems they've run into with clients and internal stakeholders, and how they handled those situations.

The goal is to get them talking on video for 2 to 5 minutes about something real that matters to the role. And whenever they put in the effort to do this, give them transparency. Let them know you've personally received it and will watch it. Follow up with an actual response out of respect for their time, even if the answer is no.

To anyone worried about the time this takes: (1) it immediately weeds out low-interest candidates, (2) I'd rather watch a few-minute video than do a 30-minute phone screen based on a resume alone for someone who's obviously not a fit, and (3) multiple stakeholders can watch the same video and form a baseline for their own follow-up interviews. It makes the rest of the process better, not worse.

> Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call.

Funny because I do the same; I don't commit to doing any work/assessments before at least an honest interview round. Businesses have to understand that _they_ are the ones who have to solve for the filtering problem. Most great candidates that you are hoping to snipe are already in a stable job and do not _have_ to jump through hoops to get past a filter.

Are you picking a problem candidates can easily cheat on? Could Claude produce the answer in 30 seconds? If so, what's the test actually measuring?

The setups I've seen produce the strongest signal aren't the ones where the candidate can't see the answer that AI produces easily. They're the ones where there is no single answer. Architecture decisions. How you would investigate an outage. How you would tradeoff one constraint against another. The candidate can spend an hour with Claude on it beforehand and it doesn't matter, because the test isn't "did you get the answer," it's "can you talk through the reasoning" and "can I trust your judgement."

Hearing someone explain their thinking on an open problem is a much harder thing to fake. Even if they used an assistant to structure their initial pass, the live unpacking reveals where the thinking is theirs and where it isn't.

Much of it has been based on networking for a good 20+ years. Yes, there was a certain if you have a pulse era in tech at at a lot of companies--leet code notwithstanding though that was an issue--that has largely passed and a lot of people are reacting to tech hiring becoming a more normal multi-month process.

AI and remote interviewing have definitely exacerbated the problems that existed before though.

Leetcode was always weak, but now that it is easy to cheat on it is a negative selector, because the cheaters do best. Leetcode was originally supposed to be done in-person on a whiteboard to assess a candidate's collaborative problem solving skills, but with remote interviewing it has evolved into writing passing code with minimal or no feedback.

The real problem is that engineering departments are now filled with leetcode grinders and cheaters, who all live in permanent fear of being replaced by AI, and so any candidate who doesn't fit that paradigm is a threat that must be eliminated at all costs.

There's a spectrum of 'broken' and AI made it worse

Yes they just automated the broken now.

Most interviewers at big cos do in fact, suck. Very by the book, do you know this or that pattern/tool by name. Can you write this or that under time pressure with none of your tool stack.

Sure, and? Generally, someone has to be an interviewer. People dedicated to it are expensive and tend to become useless, results are also not properly measurable so whether one improves at it has nothing to do with whether one thinks one is improving at it.

Nobody is using AI to auto reject candidates. ATS’s are “scoring” candidates but I don’t know of any that are sending rejections on application.

As a hiring manager, all the applications come to my inbox (even if it’s 300 in a day), and I’m definitely guilty of screening during non-working hours when I get a notification.

In my experience, networking also helps sidestep a lot of that stuff.

Me right now

There is are loads.

They do not apply on the job application as they know of the AI screener will just filter them out.

It is no wonder why HR and businesses cry "Hiring is hard" and in reality, the talented people are:

+ Making their own startups / businesses.

+ Joined a much more attractive company and they don't bother go through the process.

+ Networks their way through other people.

+ They are fed up of the interview process and they check out of the job market altogether.

Also lastly, these people do not want to talk to HR, it wastes their time and creates friction.

I thought Google interviews were kind of fun, back in the days when they were done in-person. Most of my interviewers were engaged and helpful, and seemed genuinely excited when I got on the right track. They would get up and write on the whiteboard with me.

The experience really made me want to work there, because I’d never encountered coworkers like that before. I didn’t get hired the first time but went back for a redo as soon as I was allowed.

Online interviews are a lot less fun, but still seemed more or less fine until the recent cheating epidemic.

Refferal make sense, but all of mine ended with rejections. Clearly I'm not a moron since I'm getting reffered by ex coworkers and still ill even get an automated rejection...

> zero signal: resume & cover letter. applicants will mass-apply with ai-tuned resumes that happen to perfectly match our listing

How often do you interview candidates with bad or mediocre resumes, though? My impression is that a perfectly tuned (and almost certainly dishonest) resume is just table stakes now.

Could you be overlooking great candidates who didn't go to top school or have a personal referral, yet have the skills and would be great to work with? I've worked with many engineers who fit that category.

Both of those signals reflect prior selection by someone else. Admissions committees, your network's hiring choices. Those signals also correlate with class, geography, and network access.

I'm not saying that referrals and schools don't predict. They do. But no referrals and no top school doesn't necessarily mean a candidate isn't a fit. The more AI advances, the greater the need for a new signal.

In the not too distant past (like 10 years ago) flying people to a final in person round was standard practice.

Maybe companies should say “Wanna apply for a job? Come to our office during these hours for a pre-screening and to drop off your resume” you can’t email or apply online anymore

> It's very strange that the authors talk about how "making a bad hire is terribly expensive" but then call out "travel time and costs". Well, if B < A for each role filled, is it really so bad?

The cost of a bad hire they're referring to includes things like opportunity cost of not having a good hire in that position, damage they've done to the product (codebase, design, etc.), and second-order effects like demoralizing the rest of the team.

The actual hiring costs of a bad hire are a rounding error compared to the damage they can do.

Have you ever been on a team that was great until they hired one wrong person who made every work week a miserable slog? Attrition goes up as the good employees start to leave. The codebase starts accumulating a lot of tech debt. Even after they're gone it can take a long time to recover.

This is why it's so important to be able to fire fast, but that's another topic rife with difficulties.

Absolutely. It turns out friction is important in the right places.

It's just how you have to structure a large organization to spend responsibly. You assign a budget to each function, you tell people to do the best they can within the budget, and if they come back and say "actually I'd like to spend even more money" you ask them to generate an explanation for why that's in the best interests of the business. And generating that explanation is kinda the whole purpose of the source article: the Harvard Business Review exists for managers and executives to discuss amongst each other as arguments for why their proposals and budget requests should be approved.

I have what I think is a good analogy for this problem.

In the Olden Days [tm], jobs were advertised through recruiters, physical media (eg the paper) and connections. You had to review applications and conduct interviews. The cost of applying was relatively high, your reach was relatively low and the investment per applicant was relatively high. So imagine that there were enough jobs for everyone in a simplified model. 10 people applied for 10 jobs. It's not the same 10 people for each job. But there was a decent ROI on effort. It kinda just worked.

Fast forward to now and the cost of applying is essentially zero in terms of registering interest and submitting a CV. And you apply for a lot more jobs so instead of 10 applicants for 10 jobs, you have 200 applicants for 200 jobs. Still the same applicant to job ratio but way more inefficient for everyone involved. Applicants can't put in the same effort for 200 applications that they did for 10 and employers can't review 200 applications the same way they did 10.

So what happens? Employers, who have the power in this relationship, put up roadblocks in the name of efficiency. Now you have to survive ATS before ever going in front of a human. That ATS uses inscrutable logic that may filter you out for not including enough keywords or some other specious reason. You now have hiring assignments.

The net effect is that an applicant puts in 200 applications, get automatically filtered out from 180 of them and then has to do upwards of 20 take home assignments.

Plus there are more and more layers added. More rounds of interviews. Phone screens. Remote interviews then on-site interviews. All of this wastes time and, like you allude to, I don't think it's effective. But it's a natural response to the illusion of choice.

Let me give an online dating analogy. In years gone by, you'd rely on meeting people in person. Now, less so. And speaking in a strictly heteronormative sense, how it tends to go is that women on average have hundreds of choices and men have on average far fewer. A gender imbalance plays into this.

So what does a woman in this scenario do? They start adding filters to just make the numbers more manageable. Height, salary, location, same interests and so on. So the net effect is that that a lot of people are indepndently applying filters and filtering down to a pool with a lot of crossover. Conventionally attractive men, for example, will tend have far more options.

So I think the same happens with hiring. If you're a Big Tech company, you start adding filters. Did this person go to a top school? What internships did they have? Do these things matter for on-the-job performance? Barely (IMHO). But what you'll probably find is that a handful of people have a ton of options while others struggle. And it's simply the product of employers trying to make their applicant pool manageable but they're all doing it in very similar ways.

And I honestly don't know what the solution is.

I had a similar experience before [1]. I fully agree that too many interview tests select for dishonest people.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35496976

> I got some people who mentioned an Acronym (the project they supported "for years") and asked them to define it, and they couldn't.

That could be a valid test, but I do a lot of government contracting, and that industry is absolutely rife with acronyms nobody knows the expansion of, as well as names that were chosen because somebody thought they were cool but aren't acronyms, but everyone else assumes are acronyms, so they get the capslock treatment.

Haha, I get what you're saying but I've worked on several projects for many years where nobody knew what several key acronyms meant. We could guess what they might mean, but nobody actively working on the project knew what the original programmers thought they meant.

One example was a file extension called .phtm - the best I could guess it meant (and how I thought of it) was "parsed HTML", but that's kind of stupid because every HTML file is parsed. Maybe it meant "proto HTML" because not all of HTML was supported. Maybe it meant "Phil's HTML" or "perhaps HTML". Nobody had any idea. There wasn't an obvious P that related in any way to the business needs or function of the file format.

As a programmer, do you need to know what XML, SOAP or REST mean to be able to use them? Not really. And to give another example, back in the days when I also did sysadmin work and had to deal with both IDE drives and SCSI drives, I wouldn't have remembered what the initials meant, nor would I probably know what the e in NVMe is if I hadn't just googled it even though I've used them for years.

Comically I only know about 10 commands in vim and I’ve been using it for 30+ years. Qwxdypa$0 will get you pretty far in life.

I don’t use it as an IDE, I use it 5-10/year to read or edit a random file.

I probably wouldn’t remember “g” or whatever the goto command is. And hitting j 200 times isn’t the end of the world.

How do you make the determination that an applicant is fake?

Dunno, the old school "we'll get you started in the mailroom, and you can work your way up by gaining knowledge about the organization while demonstrating competence and professionalism" sounds like a pretty solid hiring strategy.

Although tbf I kind of doubt if this was ever really the case - probably this is imagined nostalgia for idealized bygone times. And given that this is a strategy that requires, y'know, long-term investment and planning, it's not like it's going to start happening anytime in the near future