Which itself is a symptom of companies getting drowned in AI generated resumes. It's becoming more common for people to use AI tools that will operate browsers to mass-submit resumes for them. When you receive 1000 resumes you have to start filtering somewhere.
What I'm worried about now is that we're moving to a situation where some level of proof-of-work that an AI can't easily do is going to become necessary to have some filtering. I don't know what that looks like, but I don't like it.
> Quite odd this is all happening when ostensibly the unemployment rate is very low, which should make it an employee's market.
Unemployment rate is not evenly distributed. If you were a licensed electrician or qualified as a home healthcare aid then you could walk from one job to another in many cities.
If you're trying to get a $200K or more tech job, then you're competing with everyone else for a shrinking pool of openings.
I would say that it is the exact opposite. IME, it is a tsunami of companies using AI as the gatekeepers as a cost-saving tool, instead of a human in HR, forcing applicants to use AI to get past AI.
It’s an arms race by the greedy looking to save a few pennies of payroll, against those whose CVs are just sufficiently non-standard, and so are culled in nearly 100% of AI filtering, so they have no choice but to use AI to write their CVs.
Sending a CV had already become mostly useless 3–4 years ago because of the huge amount of noise: candidates applying from all over the world, often even spoofing their actual location, FAANGs firing, flooding the market with (in theory) great candidates with great resumes.
The solution is the same one that has been successfully used forever: a trial period.
Luckily, a video interview with a senior developer is still enough to spot a good candidate.
Go through real code: add a bug to a branch of your codebase, have the candidate share their screen on TeamViewer, and let them debug and fix the issue. Ask questions live to understand how they reason about the system, how they would test whether the change works, and so on.
This will filter out 99% of candidates. But it is still possible to get lucky, which is why the trial period matters.
I’ve never had major issues and have always hired very strong engineers. I only had to terminate someone after the trial period twice.
In the UK, employment law is strongly on the side of the employee, and so I'd understand HR departments trying to do everything they can to protect the employer. But having a (typically 3-month) probation period is common in almost every company, and it's not uncommon for people to be let go in the third month when they haven't been up to standard. Everybody knows it happens, and in fact you can see people's attitudes shift - for the first 3 months, every new employee is tiptoeing around very gentle, trying not to offend anyone, going above and beyond so that they are seen to be making a positive impact. After the probation period ends, most people revert to a "normal" working attitude, everything's a bit more relaxed, you'd push back on unreasonable demands, etc.
In somewhere like the US, where the laws strongly favour the employers, I'm surprised that HR departments make it so hard to fire people in a trial period. If you can fire people for any reason, underperformance in a trial period seems the most safe reason possible for dismissal.
The opposite extreme is France where employment law favours employees so much, many companies are reticent to hire at all because it's so hard to fire someone once hired.
The gaming of the system has been happening for a very long time. When I was a teen looking for my first job, companies were being flooded by resumes due to cheap laser printing (either custom to the employer, or simply duplicated en mass). A few years after that, it was being flooded by online applications or applications via email. Each time businesses had to take a more aggressive stance at filtering since they had more applicants per opening than before.
I suspect that we are going to have to go back to the bad old days of relying on real social networks (not the imaginary ones people create build around finding work) or applicants walking door to do with printed resumes in hand (simply because it is going to be easier to vet someone who walk in the door than false positives from software that filters applicants out).
In the dating market, women are inundated with matches from hundreds of guys, so they just pick the hottest guy, have a short term fling, and the guy ditches her after a couple of dates and continues working through the rest of the women (often in parallel). So, the hottest guys are never taken off the market, meaning the middle tier guys get few chances, and women complain that "men are all the same" and only want ONS not a relationship.
We wound up trudging through the stack. In order to lighten the mood I told I joke I heard from somewhere else:
“We should shuffle the pile and throw half of them in the trash. I don’t want to hire unlucky employees”
Modern filtering using "AI" and ATS of all kinds is such a loaded dice that I believe an honest randomizing like you described would be a significant improvement for both ends of the funnel. Beyond jokes.
Last open position I hired, about eight months ago, received about 1000 resumes/day for the first few days. For my whole career I've made it a point to read every resume sent for a job. If someone took the time to write I will at least take the time to read it. Sadly, that's no longer possible.
Most of the resumes were a clear case of people giving AI the posted job description and their actual resume, with a prompt of "Rewrite my resume so it sounds as much as possible as the job description, fill in any gaps with vague experience claims". Spot checking some of these against their linkedin profiles, showed vastly different job history descriptions.
I'm sure some qualified people did the same, but no way tell.
The reason why you are so discouraged is because you are a unicorn.
Companies have been looking to automate the application process for a long time, now. AI is just the latest dehumanizing tool employed to seprarate wheat from chaff long before any human needs to look at the results. And the reason why people are using AI to rewrite their CVs is precisely because companies are using AI to do the filtering. It is an arms war, started by companies, in which applicants have NO CHOICE but to use AI or remain unknown and unseen.