17 ms·
Responding to recruiter emails with GPT-3
- wodenokoto 4y agoKinda surprised author uses GPT-3 to generate JSON and then a template to go from JSON to the reply. Why not have GPT-3 generate the reply?
- obert 4y agoYou can do that too, starting from an intermediary json, to reduce the chance of incorrect final results
- bitshiftfaced 4y agoThis brings to mind Permutation City (1994), where there exists interactive junk emails. The protagonist uses a program that automatically responds to these emails in a virtual environment in order to determine which ones are spam.
- broth 4y agoI felt like this blog post ended quite abruptly. I was expecting for the author to show how GPT-3 was able to formulate a response back to the recruiter not just parse out the name and company of the recruiter.
- ajkjk 4y agoPerhaps this was the result of pointing GPT at the title "Responding to recruiter emails with GPT-3" trained on a corpus of tech blog posts.
- mbil 4y agoThanks for the feedback. I just updated the article. Basically I plug those extracted values into a templated response.
- babyshake 4y agoHave you had a chance to experiment with whether GPT-3 prompts can be used to dynamically construct the response? For example, "if the messages describes a frontend role, say I am not interested, and if it is a backend role say I am interested."
- mbil 4y agoI haven’t explored it any further yet, but that seems like a useful extension.
- babyshake 4y agoCan you prompt GPT-3 "as the person who received message {message}, respond to it." and it understands that it is addressing William from BillCheese (aka, "Hi William...")? Perhaps the best you may be able to do with the current model capabilities is something like "response to message {message} by thanking the sender and telling them you are not interested right now but will get in touch if that changes."
- shawabawa3 4y agoYes you can, you should create an account and try it out. A fun example I just did Respond to this email, pretend to be a pirate called Old Blue Bill who is very interesting finding out more about these job opportunities. "Good Afternoon, I have 4 brand new roles available, please see details below. I also have an Engineering Manager position becoming available in Leeds (tech is Java/Kotlin), so if you have Leadership/Management experience and want to help an exciting company build a new bank then get in touch as well (the company ae financially stable, part of a £1Bn organization and just received around £30M in funding). If interested please send me your up-to-date CV and we can set up a call to discuss." Good day to you, stranger. I be Old Blue Bill, the terror of the seven seas. I be interested in these job opportunities ye be havin'. I gots me a mighty fine CV what'll make ye sit up and take notice. Arr! Ye best be gettin' in touch with me soon, lest I take me wrath out on yer crew. Avast!
- rcfox 4y agoI was worried that that was the direction the article was going to take. My experience with GPT-3 is mostly from playing AI Dungeon, but it seems like it's very eager to go along with anything from the input. It's the ultimate "yes, and..." improv partner. I wouldn't be surprised if it just automatically agreed to every interview request.
- layer8 4y agoThat’s actually a good and safer automated use of GTP-3 though.
- nullc 4y ago"ASK HN: My GPT-3 spam responder got hired for a job at Infosys. Now what?"
- ivalm 4y agoWrite a programmer replacement bot with GPT-Codex.
- EGreg 4y agoWhy can’t GPT-3 do it
- ivalm 4y agoIt can, codex is better. I envision running a bot farm replacing 100s of negative impact programmers. This will be an improvement! Bonus point using gpt-3 to generate coherent standup slack messages.
- daniel-cussen 4y agoI see negative impact being when the boss wants a breakneck pace--marathons at sprint speeds--and won't accept that can't get 99.9 percentile servitude (in tons of ways desiring robotic programmers) at 49.9 percentile wages. If that, I've aced interviews and those shitty homeworks with original cutting-edge research judging which was beyond them, in some cases, and gotten 30 percentile offers. Mostly because I have a tortured man's resume, I got tortured, can't answer simple biographical questions like "where were you working April 2009." [EDIT: Not bitter about the torture, best thing that ever happened to me in a fucked-up roundabout way, in fact I wish I had the memories of the torment, it was a part of my life like any other. I do have many more memories of getting twisted and knee-locked and choked in Japanese Jujutsu the year I was tortured, I love that sport, couldn't get enough] The attitude was totally different before that, for the most part. Like teacher's pet, that kinda shit. Basically discriminating against veteran status. I didn't commit a crime or get arrested, and not even technically a victim because I didn't cave to the coercion, victis winning was won over. But not a lot I can do about (I don't know) In-Q-Tel limited edition Guantanamo roofies that violate the laws of physics like getting inside the Einstein's concept of an observer, inside the brain. Lived through a two-month autumn, saw the sun leap from solstice orbit to winter orbit, that in practice is superluminal, for me it was. Back to the vets, yeah that's what's up, they see a lot of backbone they are repulsed by that, can't steal any wages from a veteran he won't take one unit of shit on any scale, if he's a killer, like killed 500 guys (snipers say), he doesn't even have to tell his boss no doesn't even have to really do anything, not stealing candy from a baby anymore. The boss could give him shit if he had say killed 1000 men himself, perhaps then some small amount. But really they would have respect for one another, vets end up working for defense contractors who think it's good that they didn't take shit because then America doesn't take shit. Defense. We're about to go to war, too, those who forget the soldiers are destined to be forgotten. Not any day now, not for 2 months. But heroism will be considered good again. It's been a while. . You should only be able to claim you are hiring if you can pay the same percentile salary as the percentile programmer you desire. Otherwise false advertising. Like insulting even by options traders standards, they'll insult you back if you want to buy shares way below market if the intent is to lie in wait for a sucker. They'll like say "Fuck you" give a speech, for good reason, and not only that, they'll burn you to the person who put you two in touch. . Though I recognize I failed to get enough competition going for me simultaneously (due to conditioning under torture, before that I could and I can still) work the club. And there was a long, good economy where I couldn't bang out email after email, like couldn't put in the volume. Not sure how much to blame myself, if at all, given the brainwashing. [Oh fuck, I just flashed now on Sep 2 4:42 Chilean time, the concept of blaming myself also was conditioned.] Well fuck it then. I don't know what to know. Just be happy to be.
- hcazz 4y agoI'm sure some folks will see this as dishonest or unethical, but it feels more like the natural evolution of getting spammed by recruiters. If recruiters are going to endlessly spam me with their templates and automation, it only seems fair that my response is also templates and automation.
- RobRivera 4y agotinder already allows you to fabricate entire dialogue with preloaded responses last I checked. at this point I might as well generate mtiple dopplegangers seeded by various movie monologues and see what happens. I bet my 007 doppleganger is hawt
- soulofmischief 4y agoIf you email a hacker/programmer whose powers you have heard can aid you in your quest, you should be prepared to endure their intricate labyrinths or spells of invisibility. Their magick is only for those of pure intentions.
- drcongo 4y agoSir, may I interested you in my automated template spam reply system for dealing with automated template spam recruiters? https://github.com/drcongo/spammy-recruiters https://github.com/drcongo/spammy-recruiters
- Qub3d 4y agoInteresting. Is there a US variant out there, too? (This one looks promising: https://github.com/jceloria/recruiter-spam/blob/master/list.txt https://github.com/jceloria/recruiter-spam/blob/master/list....)
- sirsinsalot 4y agoSeeing as recruiters operate without ethics, this seems fair.
- potatosalad1 4y agoNow have it automatically negotiate a salary range high enough for you to consider interviewing.
- geoffeg 4y agoHow long before it negotiates a cut for itself?
- coffee_beqn 4y agoMake it do the interview loop for me and I’ll pay a few thousand for a license
- ivanche 4y agoNext step: your hologram to work instead of you :)
- WrtCdEvrydy 4y agoI did the opposite, I just tell them to schedule on my calendar... I'll sit through you salespitch for $100/hr (https://www.starblazer.pro/#/bk/80jKqZYdBdeBd2J3uTdKIoqVgpk2 https://www.starblazer.pro/#/bk/80jKqZYdBdeBd2J3uTdKIoqVgpk2?)
- 4y ago
- bastawhiz 4y agoI explicitly list on my LinkedIn that I'm not interested in "web3" but that doesn't stop the messages. This has me thinking of fun ways to waste a few minutes of these recruiters' time in return for wasting a few (many?) minutes of mine...
- Retr0id 4y agoIf you have "not interested in web3", then your profile comes up in keyword searches for web3.
- klntsky 4y ago"Not interested in СЯYPT0"
- bastawhiz 4y agoIt would naively seem to me that reading profiles is literally the bare minimum to do the job. If a recruiter can't do more than scrape LinkedIn for keyword matches and send spam, I can't think of a good reason why I should respect their time.
- sirspacey 4y agoHaving built tech recruiters, this is 95% of their prospecting process
- nicbou 4y agoI had a long discussion about with a recruiter, since my title is "Not looking for work" and my bio a longer version of "don't contact me". I still get contacted here and there, and I'm very rude when it happens. It's apparently my fault if their scripts only see "looking for work" and contact me. If I didn't want to be contacted by recruiters, I shouldn't say that I'm not looking for work. He said that he couldn't know that I didn't want to be contacted because he doesn't have time to read profiles. That was his defence to "this is why people don't like recruiters". Every additional message made me hate recruiters more. Others have justified it as "maybe your very explicit request not to be contacted is outdated, and you want to be contacted". Nope. Still self-employed.
- jasonhansel 4y agoSomeday, the recruiters will also start using GPT-3, and all recruitment conversations will just be transmissions between different GPT-3 instances, creating a massive hive mind of GPT-3s that brings about the singularity.
- keriati1 4y agoPretty sure this is happening already. I started to get some messages on linkedin that include some details from my descriptions, but it feels super unnatural, like a template was filled with some data mined content...
- gpgn 4y agoIn some of the ones I get the filled data is all uppercase so they are very easy to spot.
- geoduck14 4y agoWhat makes you think this isn't already happening?
- thrill 4y agoComputers will have better grammar.
- plorkyeran 4y agoI would expect GPT-3 to do a much better job of making me think they've actually looked at my profile. Most recruiter emails are very clearly the result of a keyword search plus mail merge to insert my name (and sometimes my current employer's name), while GPT-3 would presumably be used to write something more personalized.
- psyc 4y ago9 of 10 recruiter emails I get have 3 or 4 paragraphs leaving me none the wiser about the company, the product, the role, or why they thought I'd be interested. At most I get a vague idea of the sector. I hate to say it, but the only ones that aren't always rancid corpspeak are the ones I get from big tech. I expect GPT-3 to set a slightly higher bar. At least GPT-3 fools me once in a while. Recruiters never fool me into thinking they contact people with care.
- justusthane 4y agoThis makes a lot more sense than having GPT-3 actually write responses, which is what I thought this was going to be. Not nearly as much fun though! (But in seriousness, using GPT-3 for parsing to extract info is a neat use case I wasn’t aware of).
- IncRnd 4y agoHello <commentator> - Your comment has been selected to participate in our responsecheese testing of GPT-3. This comment has been specifically tailored to respond to you!
- EGreg 4y agoCan I generate a captain picard conversation vs Nigerian scammers using GPT-3?
- armchairhacker 4y agoHas anyone tried responding to phishing / scams with GPT-3? It seems like a much better use case, scammers are much more annoying and unethical. And you don't have to worry about GPT3 giving a weird response (which idk but the author doesn't seem to realize, machine learning even GPT is unreliable)
- shusaku 4y agoYou might have to worry about a sufficiently advanced GPT giving out your credit card information though!
- fgeiger 4y agoI made a habit of never replying to spam. You leak information about your email address being valid if you do. If you don't, the spammer never knows if the email was blackholed or delivered to an actual inbox.
- corytheboyd 4y agoI wanted to hate it so bad, but I think it's a harmless idea that maybe gives the author a 5% advantage in future job searches. Why not?
- dweekly 4y agoWhile the title doesn't match the article content, what I really like about this is a notion of semantic regex - learning feature extraction was not a use case for GPT-3 I had imagined, and now my mind is reeling considering other ways this could be leveraged.
- kesslykaes 4y agoI spent some time in web scraping, and building extractors that work reliably on websites is damn near impossible. GPT-3 automatically extracting out the right data from text is kinda crazy. Imagine scraping LinkedIn without dealing with selectors that change every other day...
- baryphonic 4y agoThis will be truly wild when most of the recruiters are GPT-3 bots as well.
- Justsignedup 4y agoAs one article taught me about over a year ago respond by sending a well formulated email requesting the salary and job offering. Sometimes it leads to you understanding the market. Sometimes it leads to negotiation for higher salary. Sometimes an amazing new job. So far this has never failed me. And is far better than ignoring. I only really ignore the crypto companies.
- r3trohack3r 4y agoI really like this advice! Do you have a link to the article? Would like to learn what you mean by "well formulated."
- iacvlvs 4y agohttps://index.medium.com/career-advice-nobody-gave-me-never-ignore-a-recruiter-4474eac9556 https://index.medium.com/career-advice-nobody-gave-me-never-...
- soneca 4y agoI wonder if it being so long is part of the filtering process. Only good recruiters will read the whole thing and bother to reply. I personally believe it is unnecessarily long, formal, and diplomatic. It does not fit who I am and, if I were to read it, I would have the impression of an annoying and insincere corporate speak. I believe I can achieve all the goals of being polite, respectful, considerate, and filtering for serious offers with a much, much shorter and informal response. Something like: Hi X, thanks for the contact. Company Y sounds interesting and I do think I might be a good fit for the role. I am not actively looking for a new position now, but i’d like to know more about the job description and compensation details. Thanks! This should all be sincere if course. If the company does not sound interesting (like all crypto for me), I only reply a respectful “no” ( ”Thank you for the contact, but I am not looking for a new job right now.” ). Similar when job is for roles that I have no experience whatsoever, which often happens. In this case I also mention that I am not a, e.g., Android engineer (I am a web frontend). Also, if there is no company or role mentioned, I give the first reply, but obviously removing the acknowledgment that I like the company/role and ask for details about it too.
- a1371 4y agoI am curious, what is the success rate with this? Do you get a valid JSON every time? Does it contain the right info every time?
- mbil 4y agoI tried the five most recent messages I received and it worked as expected for all of them. I imagine that I'll encounter some that don't work, and at that point I'll try adding more examples to make the model more robust.
- a1371 4y agoit's incredibly creative that you thought of this
- kordlessagain 4y agoYou should see it writing solr queries.
- orastor 4y agoIn your example you end up with "Hi ," instead of "Hi," if there is no name matched
- tobyhinloopen 4y agoOh no the horror
- ivanvanderbyl 4y agoBonus points if someone can apply this to answering and filtering spam calls, like an automated receptionist.
- jenaimarre 4y agoThanks for this. Moving forward I will reply with this (without trying to guess the values for the variables): Hi <recruiter name>, Thanks for reaching out! I’m not interested at this time, but I’ll keep <your company> in mind. It's low cost and effective.
- mcbuilder 4y agoReally smart use of GPT-3, if I read it write your prompt asks GPT-3 to use it's magic powers of attention to figure out it's the name and company name you're looking for, then you further ask the response to be in the form of something you can easily extract. The first part of your prompt is the example (Apple computer), and the second part is the real email you want to parse and you give room for the AI to dump it's answer. I really appreciate the smart ways people are coming up with using the NLP models.
- bradwood 4y agoI find my lowtech solution works best. Just don't reply.
- daniel-cussen 4y agoSourceress on the flip side. And they use the long responses to their long emails to train more. Eh. Recruiters have been doing this for years, stringing along applicants--ideally into turning down real offers from real people writing for real--with emotionally touching, thought-out...shit at random. To get to the point the applicant prematurely rejects all other offers and then--20 percentile salary offer, non-negotiable, "and then we'll see," and you know and I know you're homeless if you don't take it, but that never gets spoken out loud. Dude they look at all your financials, they build the equivalent of fraud detection to see how much they can lowball you, check your credit history (you knew that, they asked you for it), then they wanted all this endless information from other previous employers (but you never talk to their former employees, no boss's resume of references that worked for him to see how they really felt about it). So in response, first, declare you forfeit all stock options, unconditionally. Then, ask to talk to the people you'll be working with. Then, ultimatum offer, and if you end up on the street because of procedurally generated emotional commitment (which turns out is a liability in court, coming soon), hey, Daniel Cussen will still talk to you, I'll still listen to you, I'll give you when you beg, I'll vouch for you as a witness, I'll remember your name, I'm doing all those things where I live every day with all the awesome beggars--they have so many stories--that took the bait in some capacity. I'll treat you just like if it were the flip side, as good as I wish you treated me if I got evicted. And after that, accept that it's a job and subordination. And then do the job, it'll suck it's work, come on, most of the money still goes to people's salaries (this is in a transition and is shifting dramatically, money spent on training is absolutely exploding at the expense of salaries, to my and therefore your monetary benefit if you end up on the street, https://www.fgemm.com https://www.fgemm.com coming soon).
- CrociDB 4y agoI like the plot twist where the GPT-3 use is not to generate the answer, but to query data from the email.
- woutr_be 4y agoMy response to recruiters (especially on LinkedIn) is always the same; “Please send over all relevant details for the role you had in mind (JD, company and salary)”. This filters out about 90% of them, and especially those who’re just fishing for clients.
- hackernewds 4y agoFishing for what sort of clients?
- sirsinsalot 4y agoThey mean fishing for CVs. Many recruiters invent roles so that they can build a database of CVs.
- wildrhythms 4y ago...or they have a 1+ year long 'open position' so they always have an infinite pool of applicants.
- woutr_be 4y agoInvent roles, or straight up lie. The giveaway is usually that they want a call with you to discuss details, or can’t produce any job description.
- stakkur 4y agoIn fact, this is most recruiter inquiries.
- piinecone 4y agoI used to do the same thing but I got tired of doing that (and they didn’t always respond with the details, but often with another request). Now I just send them to https://polyfill.work https://polyfill.work. They have to enter pay, etc. and if it’s a fit for me I’ll hear about it. (Disclaimer: I made polyfill and it’s a work in progress but I’m looking for feedback on the developer onboarding part so let me have it if it sucks!). I don’t send them my polyfill profile page because then they’ll have my email and uuid and I want polyfill profiles to be pseudo anonymous.
- daniel-cussen 4y agoI recently turned all the predictive email, the "Nice to see you too! // Yeah it was fun. // See you!" robot shit gmail proposes. I don't want those proposals. The bias they introduce into my human (when it's a human) interaction is impossible to undo, I turned all all that shit off, if I want to write "Nice to see you! Yeah it was good. // See you!" I didn't even read off the screen what I wrote the first time around, I just literally closed my eyes and typed from memory, incorrectly but so be it. I rather actually push the buttons that I supposedly type, do the work I allegedly do, type every character I supposedly type when it's prose. It's not a waste but even if it were there are much worse things than absolute waste.
- nicbou 4y agoThat's a very good point. I keep it on because it corrects more subtle mistakes in languages I haven't fully mastered.
- daniel-cussen 4y agoYes--yes--that's a good use for it. But always know they are training wheels, in your dominant language (same idea as dominant hand), you must use no training wheels. Learn the language any way you can, take classes (for sure in person) but at least be native in one language, to the point nobody thinks you're an outsider.
- palata 4y ago> Assuming I get four such emails per week and that it takes two minutes to read and respond to each one, automating this would save me about seven hours of administrative work per year. Am I the only one thinking that it's obviously not how it works? Not even considering the time it took implementing that. I mean it's a fun project, but I don't see the need to justify it with "it will make me more productive". Fun is reason enough.
- nicbou 4y agoI rarely get recruiter emails anymore, but SEO outreach emails are exactly the same. I have a Gmail filter for them, and if something slips through, I block the sender. It takes a second and it ends the problem for good. I would suggest doing the same with recruiters. Bot messages don't deserve human courtesy.
- o_m 4y agoI don't get why you'll need AI for this. Couldn't you get the same result by using regex on the email from the sender?
- shrimpx 4y agoHi {recruiter_name or ""}, This should be Hi{" " + recruiter_name or ""},
- brainfish 4y agoThis would return the same result since `" "` (and thus `" " + recruiter_name`) is truthy. You could use a ternary or something, though.
- stavros 4y agoI was curious how GPT-3 would fare with a more elaborate response, so I pasted a random recruiter email and asked it to reply with more information, if the information wasn't in the email. I am quite astonished by its performance, and this is coming from the guy who made an entirely AI-generated podcast (https://deepdreams.stavros.io https://deepdreams.stavros.io) https://www.pastery.net/zdxyvy/ https://www.pastery.net/zdxyvy/
- EvanKnowles 4y agoUnrelated, your Stable Diffusion image compression article was amazing, thanks for that.
- stavros 4y agoHaha, thank you!
- justusthane 4y ago> asking for information about the job description, salary, and position, if they were not included in the above email Does this part actually work reliably? For example, if salary info is included in the initial message, will GPT-3 omit it from the response while still asking about job description and position?
- stavros 4y agoI don't know, I only tried it this once, but I'll try again and see.
- ACV001 4y agothis is like using a CPU to prop a window open - it does the job, but it is not the right tool
- agf96 4y agoExtracting NAME and ORG could not be done with a lightweight Named Entity Recognition model from HuggingFace?
- bilinguliar 4y agoTaking into account that some sort of automated tool also generates recruiter letters and follow-ups - we witnessed a fight of two computers without any value in it for anyone.
- christophilus 4y agoIt made me laugh, so I’d call that value.
- orbital-decay 4y agoIf a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
- eternalban 4y agoDepends on who you ask. Newton would say, "yes". Goethe would say "what do you mean by sound? What if there were two people in different locations? Would they hear the 'same exact' sound?"
- joshspankit 4y agoOnly with Universe Standard and above
- allisdust 4y agoOr rather we have witnessed two computers talking to each other and decided their bosses aren't a good fit at this time (saving the time for both sides while also not missing any potential matches).
- ascari 4y agoWhile it’s a nice concept I agree it’s probably not the best fit for the use case. I also don’t understand the point of recruitment spam. What’s the purpose of sending 5 follow up emails. I find it absolutely annoying and would never respond back to an unsolicited email. Surely had they enough applicants for an appealing job, they wouldn’t have chased that much.
- petesergeant 4y ago> What’s the purpose of sending 5 follow up emails because people often respond (positively) on the 4th - 5th sales email you send, even if they ignored the first, and anyone who's truly pissed off will have just marked it as spam already or blocked you. I understand it would be better if that wasn't true, but it is true, and that's why people send automated follow-ups.
- dsr_ 4y agoTo begin with, the average recruiter was hired in the last three months and will last three more months before looking for a new job. They have been equipped with a series of templates and told to customize them. The goal of the recruiter is to make money by acquiring a candidate, presenting them to a company, and having the company hire them. Note that the recruiter does not actually work for the hiring company -- they have no relationship with them whatsoever, yet. The recruiter's company is paying a minimal salary with an additional fee based on the salary of the candidates who get hired through this process. A particularly scummy recruiting company pays no salary at all, and considers the recruiters to be independent contractors. The recruiter's company has someone in the back office who is manually or automatically scraping Indeed, Dice, Monster, whatever in order to get job listings. At this point you can see that a recruiter is a speculative spammer.
- personjerry 4y agoI'm waiting for "Responding to HN comments with GPT-3"
- andai 4y agoDoes this violate OpenAI's terms of service? Or is it OK because you're the only user so it isn't a "production application"? They are quite clear that any AI produced text needs to be explicitly labeled so that nobody could mistake it for human written. (I think this is hilarious, but just letting you know so you don't get banned or something.)
- JasonFruit 4y ago> This solution worked well for the handful of emails I tried it on. I’m planning to run this on a cron to save myself some time and automatically maintain recruiter relationships. Maintain recruiter relationships?! You're sending a glorified autoreply that plugs in a couple values. That is not maintaining a relationship. Luckily, there's no relationship to maintain, because the recruiter probably just blasted out an automatically-generated message to a list of contacts in the first place. This sort of thing makes me sick. It's an abominable distortion of human interaction, and it makes our society worse.
- awillen 4y agoAbominable seems like a strong word for a couple of automated emails. I'd hate for you to see what email marketing software looks like...
- JasonFruit 4y agoI promise you I could come up with something appropriate.
- BigRedDog1669 4y agoThat jumped out at me too. Not even close to a 'relationship'.
- napoleonIV 4y agoI have a few Alfred snippets to respond to recruiter emails. I just copy the first name of the recruiter and that use the appropriate snippet.
- djohnston 4y agoI've only recently started playing with these models, it didn't occur to me you could ask it to parse content and return a structured representation. That's pretty dang cool.
- mbil 4y agoAfter having toyed with it for a couple more days, I noticed it sometimes returns malformed JSON with extra tokens. E.g. {"name": "foo", "company": "bar"}</code> That's the only weird response I've seen so far, so I just work around it with regex. But if I start seeing other problems with the completion I might try tuning the prompt. Maybe more explicitly telling it how to format the two pieces of data in the output. Got that idea from here: https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1559801520773898240 https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1559801520773898240