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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> Apply for a job, within an hour get an email

Hiring has been crazy for years. It's worse with remote jobs because you get a firehose of applicants everywhere.

When I was doing a lot of hiring I tried to be as responsive as possible because you don't want to lose the best candidates. I would try to review applicants as fast as they came in. You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.

If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.

The simpler explanation is that a tired hiring manager was just clicking buttons to dismiss applicants who didn't make the cut.

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> You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.

This sounds like a dream. We posted a job a couple of weeks ago and had 1200 applications in around 2 days. Most are complete garbage. I'm confused why they took the time to apply at all, even if AI did it for them.

If you go through "Show HN" posts you will see multiple projects that partially or completely automate both search and application process. Just set up a bot that searches for newly posted positions matching whatever criteria, customizes the resume, applies. Probably costs a few cents for the applicant, but increases their chances somewhat. And the rest of us deal with the consequences.

Some fraction of applications that don’t really fit are submitted by people trying to keep their unemployment benefits. You have to keep applying to continue to qualify, but the jobs don’t have to be a perfect fit.

Being unemployed is hard and can be really demoralizing. Try thinking “I’m probably helping someone pay rent until they find a job listing that works for them” when you’re rejecting obviously unsuitable applications. It at least makes the “wtf”-ness of some of them seem a little less weird.

> Try thinking “I’m probably helping someone pay rent until they find a job listing that works for them” when you’re rejecting obviously unsuitable applications

I could believe this if you were in a population 5,000 town with few employers and the person applying had to work in person.

In our industry, where there are 1000 different remote job listings available to anyone at any time, there is no justification for this.

> In our industry, where there are 1000 different remote job listings available to anyone at any time, there is no justification for this.

Do you mean that there's no reason to send resumes or to wherever or that there's no reason to be unemployed given the theoretically endless number of postings?

Wow, did anyone read all of them, or did you cut it off somewhere?

A lot of them are also from hostile foreign powers trying to commit economic sabotage.

>You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.

Resumes are only a 1 page summary (2 if you're really experienced) and this kind of market has you doing hundreds of submissions if you lack connections (or your connections are also job searching). You don't have the time to tailor every application for every role.

A shame because LLMs should really be perfect at this. Most current tools are too obsessed with writing for you (and creating a blander resume) instead of just taking a master CV and drag and dropping the most applicable roles/projects/experiences in.

At this point why don't you try to go out and contact candidates yourself or via a recruiter rather than posting jobs? It seems to me that with LLM-based tools you are going to find it increasingly difficult to get those 2-3 out of the 40; all 40 will be LLM-written to perfect match your posting.

AI tools have devalued resumes and cover letters, personal repos, leet code scores, etc...

It's always been the case, but now it's more true than ever: your professional network is super important. If somebody on the inside can recommend you, your chances of getting an offer are good compared to throwing your resume on the pile.

Even for non-inside hires, I feel like it's more efficient for me as a hiring manager to go out and look for candidates rather than triage some AI-generated pile of crap.

>via a recruiter

While not as bad as applying yourself, they can be pretty damned awful.

Especially if the job is posted on LinkedIn. You can already just poll a list of the most qualified candidates and reach out to them with opportunities.

The problem is companies would actually have to make compelling offers to qualified people.

Yeah, I’ve never understood this - earlier in my career this was the standard to have technically skilled hiring managers look for and contact people.

Now people act like they must have this ridiculous firehose of resumes to sort through, then have non-technical HR gals sort and filter out based on whatever random criteria they use, and then by the time it gets to the hiring managers - they still have no idea if this person is a complete idiot or has any skills at all. The qualified people you actually want to hire don’t want to be treated like idiots or liars either.

I just don’t feel it has to be this way - there is zero value in a firehose unless you were looking for desperate and cheap people.

I don't think anyone really wants the firehose. It's just something that happens when you advertise on any popular platform.

However I'll agree with you, the non-technical people sorting CVs on unknown criteria is something that became very widespread lately, and is certainly part of what's contributing to the problem.

Perhaps managers starting to do it by themselves rather than having HR in the middle is the answer to the problem.

I do reach out to LinkedIn profiles and some social media accounts, but I'd never use LLM-written text to do so.

You have to appear like a real human. The candidates in demand get recruiter spam all week long. If you go LLM slop canon on their inbox they're not going to respond.

Cold outreach has a low response rate. It's worth doing, but you can't rely on it. You have to go through all angles.

Typically I'd be doing a mix of my own cold outreach, public job postings, an internal company referral program, and for difficult roles a trusted external recruiter who I know is good for candidates.

> If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.

That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder? Often times the difference is splitting hairs anyway ("we're looking for someone who paints brown houses").

But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them, I would just frankly not have the time to do so.

Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody. The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.

Consider the case... I've got a stack of 100 resumes and 2 hours today to select the top 10 candidates from that stack. I'll be ranking those 10 and give them to HR at the end of the day today. Tomorrow, HR will take the top 5 who are available and schedule interviews for next Tuesday. One of them will be selected from those who interview next Tuesday.

What can you do to increase the odds that you're in the top 10 (and preferably top 5)?

It's possible that a superficial reason was used to separate number 10 from number 11 ... and maybe number 11 would have been a great candidate and future employee. What I don't have is three weeks to do all day 9-5 1h long interviews for every candidate.

That makes sense for the opportunities that actually close after they are posted. I'm talking about jobs that disqualify you as a candidate same day, then repost the same listing next week. And next month. And next year. These are clearly ghost jobs.

Regardless - it would be nothing to show some basic human decency and respect:

- Review them more often until you get the 5 quality candidates to interview (there's no way in hell you actually review all 100 resumes fully - quit sitting on them for weeks and weeks)

- Take down the posting after resumes are reviewed

- Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration

- A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview

- Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job

None of these add any substantial time to the hiring process, but can go a long way to remember the human in a job market that's an absolutely brutal and soulless Leviathan right now.

I work in the public sector. There's a requirement (i.e. law) that the job posting is available for the public to read for two weeks. No selection may be made before all applications are received.

After two weeks, the posting is taken down.

> - Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration

If you have 200 resumes in the pool and 100 of them weren't passed on for additional consideration because they didn't meet the requirements (education, needing visa sponsorship, outside of the country, not following the instructions for the application), how long will that take?

Furthermore, in the litigious nation we live in, that information when provided honestly has tended to lead to lawsuits ("I wasn't considered because...").

> - A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview

That's another 100 candidates. Three minutes each to write the email? That's three hours of someone's day. Again, this gets to the litigious situations. It only takes the allegation of bias to lead to a lawsuit - that costs way more than three hours of my day.

This is the public sector, we don't pay a lot - that's why it's only 200 applications. In the private sector it wouldn't be hard to multiply that number by 3 or 4.

> - Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job

This is something that we're good at. The people who were interviewed know by the end of the week. Job posting opening to the selection being made is four weeks.

The simple and honest response can be an automated email that says you didn't meet the requirements - you would be amazed at how many job postings don't even do that.

I can understand the justification for all of the other choices. But it doesn't mean I have to like it. The whole process is degrading and dehumanizing, and it's something that has gotten much, much worse in the last decade.

The GP said the quiet part out loud. They are so worried about lawsuits that they'd rather make the job market worse for everyone (including themselves) than risk a lawsuit over the most basic feedback. The product of a low-trust society.

This isn't really a low trust society, it's a litigious society problem.

These lawsuits aren't a myth, if you hire a lot of people it'll eventually happen, even if you're not violating any laws. The lawsuits, even when you win, waste time and money. Giving reasons, especially customized "human" responses is absolutely going to increase your chances of being sued.

Low trust means assuming any and all reasons given out will result in lawsuits. It's precisely a symptom of a low trust society. A not-low trust (doesn't have to be high trust) society wouldn't assume legitimate feedback would be litigatable, and likewise candidates wouldn't be in such bad situations that they'd need to sue every rejection.

As you said, lawsuits take a lot of time and money. Individuals don't have that and would prefer to settle things privately. But if they don't trust institutions to do that, then the only thing to trust is the contract of a lawyer.

Individuals without jobs have a lot of time since they don't have a job, and can find lawyers willing to work on contingency.

More time than average, less money than average. But these people also need to apply to dozens of jobs, more likely hundreds. They can't sue every place.

I thought the threat of lawsuits was a lame excuse, so I tried to give good feedback to rejected candidates who asked.

It did not take long for one of them to try to turn it against me with threats. We would have easily won the case, but having a lawsuit hanging over my head and a target on my back as a liability for the company was not a good feeling.

I no longer give specific feedback.

Yeah, that's the product of a low trust society. It's not any single person perpetuating it, but it affects us all. A higher trust society would write it off as a bad outlier and keep going. A low trust society wonders when's the next time you get another person that causes an undue burden.

> That's another 100 candidates. Three minutes each to write the email? That's three hours of someone's day.

Minor nit, but it’s even worse than that: 300 minutes is five hours of someone’s day.

That's why feedback is important. If the reason was "we are looking for X experience and X is not on your resume" I can adjust that for later. If it was even as honest as "we found enough qualified candidates to interview and didn't look at your resume", that's still semi-actionable feedback. I either apply earlier or just accept that I was unlucky and it was not my ability.

Generic rejections like "we moved with other candidates" tells me nothing. So noise remains because candidates don't have feedback to improve upon. All because HR wants minimize lawsuits through obscurity.

I’m willing to be communicative and try to be helpful right up to the line where it puts me, my family, or my company at risk of some asymmetrically bad outcome.

Regardless of whether it’s due to a low-trust society, a litigious society, or El Niño, I will refrain from giving specific feedback if that puts those groups at risk.

> That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder?

It doesn't make the hiring manager's job harder if you decline to customize your resume. They press reject and move to the next resume.

> Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody.

If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.

If there was a hidden requirement to know Python but the job listing didn't ask for it, you get a lot of applicants that don't fit. Smart hiring managers will update the job listing as they review candidates. There are some lazy companies that will have secret requirements that they don't put in the job listing, but that only creates more work for everyone involved. It's not a secret trick they're pulling to be mean. They're just bad at their jobs.

> The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.

Unpopular opinion around these parts, but there's a high correlation between the best candidates and people who take the time to review the job posting and customize their resume before submitting.

I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.

> But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them,

Complaining about low response rates and refusing to tailor your resume are highly correlated, in my observation.

> If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.

The thing though is it's a bad requirement. There are any number of great candidates who could be proficient in Python - the skills are very transferrable. (It's like trying to find a painter and filtering out people who have never painted a brown houses)

The thing you're screening for by being so specific is not finding the most qualified person, you're going to end up with the person with the most time and patience to fib or lie on their resume.

> I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.

That's exactly wrong - the best candidates are going to be busy people who are great at their job - the people jumping through HR hoops to get hired are by nature going to be worse candidates.

So, I recently got about 600 resumes for a senior Python backend position.

Out of those about half had no experience in backend or python, plus weren't senior enough for us to consider. Or forgot to include all that in their CV. They get filtered out in the first filter phase.

While I'm sure a portion of those could do the job, I can't realistically interview those 300 people when there are other 300 who happen to have at least written that in their CV.

> So, I recently got about 600 resumes for a senior Python backend position.

Dear lord the job market is an absolute disaster right now.

People are clambering for the last helicopter out of Saigon.

Oh god, I should tell you about the frontend position, then, which got 1000 applicants and then we just closed within a week, despite naturally not having hired anyone yet...

>Dear lord the job market is an absolute disaster right now.

Indeed it is, I don't know and would never like to know the levels of desperation one needs to reach to accept writing Python as a career. (I jest, I jest)

In all seriousness, Python (and the same goes for with Javascript/Typescript) is a popular language that is taught at many bootcamps. I'm sure that has lots to do with the number of applications for these kinds of roles.

That’s a good theory, but we also get ridiculous numbers for C#, design, product management and, at a previous job, Ruby and devops we also got flooded.

Honestly the only language we do that gets a normal amount of candidates is C++, but the team that does it complains about quality too, a lot of CVs from people exaggerating their expertise.

> There are any number of great candidates who could be proficient in Python -

I don't think you understand.

You have to prioritize. You can't interview everyone.

There may be someone in the rejection pool who might be able to pick up Python quickly and enjoy it. It does not matter if I have 10 people who can bring 5 years of Python experience to the first day on the job, and 1-2 more people who can bring 10+ years and probably teach us something about Python.

> the skills are very transferrable. (It's like trying to find a painter and filtering out people who have never painted a brown houses)

I've painted houses. I've done programming. This analogy is not good at all. Some people don't adapt well to new programming languages. Some people try, then decide they hate the new language and start looking for new jobs. You don't have to risk any of this when you already have more Python applicants than interview slots.

Probably a dumb question, but when you say "tailor your resume", what kind of tailoring do you mean? I've seen this advice repeated a lot, but I've rarely taken it because I tend to apply to jobs with the same job title and roughly the same responsibilities; in general, I assumed that tailoring is mainly helpful if you have a diverse/generalist skillset.

Like, it's obvious to me why a true Jack of all trades would use different resumes for applying to a plumber role vs a carpenter role, but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.

Several months ago, having exhausted all other options in fruitless job search, I asked for assistance of a recruiter who I used to work with some time ago. Just to get some pointers on how I could improve my search, with his experience working on the other side. His advice on "tailoring" was very simple.

Go to the most popular LLM (ie Claude). Give it the job description. Give it your resume. Ask it for percentage match, it will give you a number. Then ask for advice on improving your resume, you can either ask to rework the resume by itself (if you're in a hurry) or you can work with the thing to modify the sections/entries yourself, one by one, if you have time. With each modification you will get better and better percentage match. Ideally you need to get to high 80% or maybe even 90%.

The idea is that automated ranking tools used by recruiters/HR are ultimately use the very same LLM, so you are improving your ranking assigned to your resume by those ranking systems.

I have to add that now this advice is mostly useless as everybody's using the same technique so you won't be standing up against others but merely be on the same level.

Add to it the fact that many job descriptions are inaccurate and sometimes downright misleading, and hiring managers use their own criteria, and you will understand why connections/referrals is probably the only way to get hired now.

> The idea is that automated ranking tools used by recruiters/HR are ultimately use the very same LLM, so you are improving your ranking assigned to your resume by those ranking systems.

Working in HR-tech, that is definitely happening, and "self-bias" is a thing with LLMs so if you can guess what the employer/screening-process is using then that's a bonus.

That said, we should distinguish between "Hey robot tell me if X matches Y" prompts, versus model-weights comparison. In the second case, the system feeds your resume into a model with no prompt, grabs all the magic math numbers, and statistically compares them to the magic-numbers if the model had been given some "ideal" resumes.

If the job is for a backend Java developer position, change the list of languages you know from:

    Languages: JavaScript, C#, Python, Java

to:

    Languages: Java, C#, JavaScript, Python

Many times people order their languages by familiarity or preference for working with that technology. Don't make the person looking at the resume have to hunt for the information. If it's last on the list, that may say something about how much you're interested in that job and how likely you are to stay.

> but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.

If one company is looking for a plumber to do PEX and another is looking for someone who is experienced with natural gas and black pipe, you might want to make sure that your experience in those two different domains of plumbing are at the front of the experience. They're both plumbers, but the heating and air conditioning company hiring a plumber is looking for different things than the residential new construction plumber.

It's so funny to me that a tech company will have no problem hiring a VP from, like, a beverage company - but heaven forbid you put your programming languages in the wrong order on your resume.

Hiring a CEO, you know (of) the person and its more likely a "the board wants to hire {that person}" and it really doesn't matter what the text of their resume says. At most there's a dozen candidates and a several month process for selecting one of them.

For developers, if the resumes are largely the same, then you're selecting for the ones that show evidence that they read the job posting and want to work there.

This isn't about hiring the best candidate - it's the least risky candidate that is hired. If you're listing the preferred language of the job and the language that is mentioned in the job posting last, you're more likely to be a risky candidate than one who lists it first. You may not know the language as well. You may not enjoy working on it (there's a reason I don't list php in the languages on my resume).

In a stack with less risky candidates, the one that has the preferred language last won't be at the top of the list for callbacks.

While this makes absolutely no sense to me, I'm pretty sure unhinged language fanatics would reject some resumes because "Java is not the first on the list".

HR people and AIs, as much as I criticise them: would not reject that.

AI wouldn't. It'll crunch the resume in milliseconds and sort it out itself.

HR is a mixed bag, usually without technical context. I'm sure most engineers in the 00's and 10's have some experience of "Java and JavaScript are similar, right?" In a recruiter call.

If I have 100 resumes, and 50 of them list Java first, and 50 of them list Java last, which pool of 50 am I most likely to find someone who knows and doesn't hate working in Java?

You're going to select 10 people out of that list of 100 because you don't have time to call everyone for three weeks to evaluate their skill.

You've also got only two hours to look through all 100 of those resumes today. You're spending about a minute and a half looking at each resume. How are you going to evaluate someone for a Java backend position who's last job was in C# and they list Java last in the list of languages they know?

>which pool of 50 am I most likely to find someone who knows and doesn't hate working in Java?

The one who has actual projects or professional experience in Java? I'm surprised this is such a sticking point. I list my skills last on the resume because it's the least relevant and it was mostly to try and satisfy ATS. But reality is stranger than theory, I suppose.

At least, that was my old approach. I found some advice I really liked and ultimately integrate a tech stack sub-bullet in every experience now. Seems to be a good balance of ATS and human(-skimming) readability.

If I were reviewing 100 resumes, I wouldn't use the language list. I'd use something with actual context, like work experience.

But more than that, why do you think someone who is terrible at java wouldn't put it first in the list when applying for a java oriented job? Assuming they were aware of this unwritten rule.

Okay, yeah, now I agree with you.

The last paragraph makes a great point: if the person has been out of Java the game for long, they will definitely be second to someone who's fresh out of a Java job.

And the reason is exactly as you say: limited time, excessive number of CVs. This completely changes the game.

Plumbing for new construction, plumbing for HVAC retrofit (even boilers and heat pumps might be further split), and emergency plumbing service tech (for leaks, water heater replacements, and blocked sewer lines) all seem different enough to me to make making clear what experience you had relevant in plumbing.

>I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.

Do you really think the best candidates are ones who are bothering to cold apply through hiring portals to begin with? The best interviewers, sure.

For people who are actively searching, 10 minutes for 100 applications is 15 hours of work. Reply rates can be as bad as 1 in 500. In this kind of market you want to get that application rate down to 2-3 minutes. There's no time nor point to tailoring towards dream jobs; oods are you dreams were crushed 200 applications ago.

There's no particular reason your time is more valuable. We're all just trying to survive in these tumultuous times.

> Reply rates can be as bad as 1 in 500.

I've done volunteer resume review and interview coaching in the past.

The only people getting response rates that low either had the most awful resumes you've ever seen, or they were applying for jobs completely out of their league.

Like the 23 year old applying for Staff Software Engineer jobs as the next step up from his junior position (which he was laid off from) with 6 typos in his resume and an e-mail address of ninjadude69@hotmail.com at the top of his resume.

>Unpopular opinion around these parts, but there's a high correlation between the best candidates and people who take the time to review the job posting and customize their resume before submitting.

There's also a high correlation between matching the job description perfectly and the resume being AI generated and/or dishonest. Doubly so if the requirements are overly specific or contain pure nonsense as some do (saw "Must have 5 years experience with Claude Code" recently). You can filter out people who blatantly don't match the job and those who obviously just copied the job description. Never seen much correlation between the quality of resumes in the middle (ok to great) and how well they do in interviews.

Not to mention at many places "requirements" are mere suggestions or a low-effort list of technologies taken from the resume of the person who quit. Everybody has their own filtering rules and hiring managers rarely agree with each other much less the HR people usually doing the first round of filtering. The true requirements come out only at the resume filtering or interview stage.

>I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.

The "best candidate" a lot of times doesn't mean the best able to do the job. It often means the ones who 1. makes the hiring manager feel good by being enthusiastic about their (statistically) average job for average pay and 2. minimizes their perceived risk of looking bad for their hiring choice.

>If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.

If you're not a FAANGMULA type place then sure. But also if your job posting lists something like "Python 3.14" or "7+ years Python" I know the hiring manager probably doesn't know the first thing about python. In that case I think it's fair for any decent programmer to lie because they will likely surpass the hiring managers knowledge by studying python a bit before the interview.

> There's also a high correlation between matching the job description perfectly and the resume being AI generated and/or dishonest.

If the resume is dishonest we find out in the phone screens or first interview rounds, and the candidate is tossed.

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