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Unemployed Man Uses AI to Apply for 5k Jobs, Gets 20 Interviews
- superchroma 3y agoI have applied for three jobs in my career of 11 years and got two of them. This is bafflingly ineffectual, comparatively.
- dopidopHN 3y agoYeah, for the first time I had to send more than 3 applications this year. I guess it’s time to bring me to the farm
- rightbyte 3y agoThat is survivorship bias though. Maybe you had like 5 opportunities and got three jobs. If they hadn't worked out, finding the 6th would be way harder. For those pigeons where there are no holes, it instead seems impossible.
- pjmlp 3y agoAs someone approaching 50, coding since the age of 10, started doing side gigs at the age of 14, such success rate is very uncommon.
- mcv 3y agoMy success rate was absolutely terrible during the dotcom crash. After that I've increasingly relied on intermediary recruiters to find me work. They're clearly much better at that than I am. So these days I get asked and I reject them.
- ipv4dhcp 3y agomaybe you aren't stretching far enough. if you apply for jobs you are absolutely qualified for, obviously you'll get them. it's probably worth some effort to get a ~30% more difficult job with 30% more pay for most people.
- throwaway167 3y agoI quite liked jobs that I was qualified for. But then I became too qualified and too experienced.
- the_only_law 3y agoI never had much problem with applications in the last, but in the last job search it was futile. I’m still just now getting rejections from jobs I applied to months ago which seem a perfect fit for my resume. I even applied to a place I worked a ~5 years ago, which I got via cold application. Apparently I’m not good enough anymore because I couldn’t get past the filters. I finally found a job through a referral. Oddly, it was working with tech I have basically no experience in and probably had the most awkward interview out of all the ones I ended up doing.
- wryoak 3y agoRecently I got an interview for a job after refusing to do the pre-interview PR test. They had received an avalanche of pull requests on that repo that looked suspiciously similar so my impudence made me the most human-sounding candidate.
- grix 3y agothat's an awful application to interview ratio, jeez
- thibaut_barrere 3y agobut a fairly good effort to interview ratio :-) (my main empathy will go at the recruiters, having to filter out massive amounts of auto-generated applicant files!)
- grix 3y agoI agree, but to some extend that the bed companies made, now they have to lay in it because it's an arms race, recruiters are also using AI to filter people, just look at the chat GPT hack for resumes
- thibaut_barrere 3y agoindeed I know (I had a longish term gig working on an "applicant survey SaaS app"). Measures and counter-measures :-)
- jacquesm 3y agoI never expected to see a sentence with 'recruiters' and 'empathy' that didn't include the words 'lack of'.
- thibaut_barrere 3y agoIt's a good point haha :-) Maybe caused by the fact I've done a fair bit of recruiting (although not at large companies) some years and sometimes drown a bit. I can relate somehow.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoI'd bet my hat that most of the recruiters never even saw a single resume that came from the AI, and that the vast, vast majority were immediately filtered by the ATS. Doesn't even have to be anything big, just that there aren't enough keywords, or that there were gaps between employment that were too large, etc. The ATS would then rank the applications and score them, and HR just looks at the top 15 or something and picks the top 5, whittles them down to 2-3. They're not spending 8 hours a day reading resumes.
- disposition2 3y agoIt’s a pretty grinding process. I’ve been fortunate in the past, staying with 2 companies over the span of 15+ years and I am now having to job hunt for the first time since 2005. I found a local contracting opportunity that sounded really interesting and something I could probably be a good fit for. It was a small company, 4 people, so I actually emailed the president directly with a well thought out introduction and explaining why I thought I would be a good fit for the position. Radio silence… So, even the old adage of ‘hit the bricks and knock on doors’ has gone the way of the dodo.
- jacquesm 3y agoEmail isn't knocking on doors.
- disposition2 3y agoThat is a fair rebuttal. I was legitimately considering going to their office but it being a small company, in the medical field, and uncertainties about how individuals might react with COVID still present…I opted for a personal email to the owner of the company. Maybe I should have opted for the ‘cold call’ approach and just went to their office but I erred on the side of caution/ decorum.
- pjc50 3y agoThis is the future. Every unemployed person will have an AI scanning all the job listings. They can send off 5k applications a day. Conversely, every open position will receive 100k applications, almost all of which will have fictional resumés and perfectly tailored cover letters. These will be fed into the company AI, which unavoidably has to make hiring decisions. The actual hire will be someone the hiring manager knows from college.
- lagrange77 3y ago:D exactly. AI will help one side to decrease the signal to noise ratio and the other side to increase it. The same for the 'content' industry.
- gumballindie 3y agoBut this use case shows that the rate of success is low when using ai. So if anything it would indicate that using ai for job applications is not a good idea. If i see ai spam in a job applicant’s email i am rejecting them instantly.
- jacquesm 3y agoThe rate of success is tremendously high when viewed as a return on time invested compared to the 'normal' method.
- benterix 3y agoI'm not sure about that, it probably depends on the position. In my case, If I send out 10 resumes, I get ignored by 3 potential employers, 3 will politely write back that "after careful review...", but 4 will invite me for the interview and at least one make an offer (usually more than one). So at least in my case, using "AI" (or: automatically generated resumes) is actually more of a risk than advantage.
- gumballindie 3y agoI mean how long does it take to press a button on job ads that you asses as matching your profile? Few seconds at most?
- mdrzn 3y agoSounds like a promotional article for the service he used, honestly.
- siva7 3y agoWhy even write cover letters anymore?
- mcv 3y agoTo show you care enough about this particular job to have your AI read up on it and write a custom cover letter for it.
- coolThingsFirst 3y agoIf you want to waste 3 extra hours per application.
- bilekas 3y agoIt's a low conversion rate, but given the return on effort is incredible. This is seems to be a good example of AI enriching/assisting with other processes.
- vouaobrasil 3y agoIt doesn't really assist because it will just become an arms race between AI applications and AI filtering, which some companies have already started using. Technology makes it easier to be more anonymous, superficial, and lazy on both sides of the equation. Each side will gain a small temporary advantage with every advance in AI and the end result will be that EVERYONE will be worse off than before. That's because the job application process will be worse, people will feel more isolated, and you'll still need to spend just as much time as before if not more learning all these arcane tools. Technology is truly becoming a disease. We've taken something good and used too much of it like sugar. Everything has a happy medium, and technology used with moderation could have been something good, but its use is being pushed to its logical conclusion through these prisoner's dilemma-type situations and is resulting in a degradation of society. The people that make AI make me sick.
- moring 3y agoAI only highlights how ridiculous the hiring process is. A program that generates likely word sequences determines whether or not you get the job? What is even the point of that? The company looking for employees would be better off looking for people that are actually good at the job they are supposed to do there. (Unless that job is generating likely word sequences -- then they should buy AI instead of hiring people). Without AI, such a process favors potential employees that are good at writing likely word sequences themselves, and not those that are good at actually dpoing the job.
- vouaobrasil 3y agoYou just pointed out how RIDICULOUS technology is in this aspect. The arms race started before AI -- if people had no computers to submit resumes, they might actually have to go in and TALK to someone...
- throw101123 3y ago[flagged]
- LoganDark 3y agoThe price (starting at $99) is a huge turn-off. I don't have that much money to spend at all; I don't have a job, for crying out loud. I'd rather sign a contract to give away the first $250 or so of my income. Hell, even make it $500. Just don't make me pre-pay for the chance to win a job - I cannot afford to gamble on this.
- tagyro 3y agoI found myself in a similar position (unemployed) after I left my cozy (but soul-sucking) corporate job last year and [disclosure: ] I built a somewhat similar tool but I decided against automating the application process. Instead of focusing on quantity - number of applications - I decided to focus on quality - better resumes that emphasise the candidates skills that align with the job ad. And instead of applying to all job ads, my service analyses a candidates resume and finds positions that closely match the candidate experience.
- Roark66 3y agoI find interesting that he only got 20 interviews after the ai sent 5k applications and same 20 interviews after applying manually few hundred times. I wonder what "few hundred" means? 200 or 900? I think I had a similar response rate when looking for work few months ago. I applied to ~40 jobs and I got 3 interviews.
- gngoo 3y agoI saw some YouTube video, where someone was applying to 500+ jobs per week with some automation in the same fashion. So this is probably already quite common. Makes the need for building ones own network even more important at this point, there's really no way to differentiate yourself from 10k people who apply to a job in the first 5 hours of its being posted, other than a internal reference.