10 ms·

Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload

46 points by chapulin 2y ago

datadrivenangel 2y ago
https://archive.is/I3WjA https://archive.is/I3WjA
- neonate 2y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20240505164924/https://www.wired.com/story/recruiters-ai-application-overload/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240505164924/https://www.wired...
datadrivenangel 2y ago
To summarize the article though: Online hiring continues to be overwhelmed by huge numbers of low quality applications, now with some extra AI tools that make it easier to lie about your experience. Same issue as before, now wrapped up in OpenAI API calls.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  you forgot the second part -- a rush by industry management to open the gates to low-skill people for lower pay, while specifically and exactly firing or replacing more experienced people who ask for higher compensation and employee rights (for example working parents or a slower pace over a long time)
- dang 2y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265635.
yieldcrv 2y ago
I think this is conflating some things, I’ve had interviews where AI use was encouraged. I’ve used a coderpad screenshare that had an LLM tab you could write with. so in this article, where they mention some of the respondents disclosed using AI, it doesnt say if that was a “good” or “bad” thing for that company its not accurate to assume, despite the article reinforcing a bias towards it being a problem
Simulacra 2y ago
Serves them right. Employers have been using AI and algorithms to weed out resumes/applications for years. To the point that the only way to get seen by an actual human is the game the system.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  Exactly, I came here looking for this comment. Many companies have been using AI tools for years to power recruiting. Now they're upset that candidates are using the same technology. The recruiters turned their profession into a tit for tat arms race.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  Hard agree. It’s infuriating that automation is continually added to human centric processes that it is ill-suited and anti-social to be used in, very much including most LLM applications, always in the name of more bloody cost-cutting that almost never leads to lower prices for consumers, just more yachts for the executive class.
- LikelyABurner 2y ago
  The thing that especially infuriates me is recruiters in this article turning around and trying to throw LinkedIn under the bus. No one likes the nightmare dystopia of a platform that is LinkedIn. The only reason most people I know have LinkedIn accounts in the first place is because HR types have outsourced so much of their job to LinkedIn that it's viewed as professional suicide to not have a LinkedIn profile with 100s of contacts in this industry. Recruiters don't like the GenAI and Easy Apply features on LinkedIn, it makes their jobs more difficult? Then stop making LinkedIn a mandatory account for tech workers. You have NO ONE to blame but yourselves.
  - Simulacra 2y ago
    It would be interesting if they just went back to paper resumes and applications. That takes effort, only a little bit, but it takes effort.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
neilv 2y ago
> That came after LinkedIn began rolling out a new set of generative AI tools for recruiters to source candidates in October. With the sourcing tool, recruiters can search a phrase like “I want to hire engineers in Texas,” and profiles of people that may meet those criteria appear, as do other specific skills that may be related to the role. They can also send messages written with generative AI and set automatic follow-up messages. What are better alternatives to LinkedIn, for people who want to get that rare serendipitous message from a recruiter? (Not just another company that wants to behave like LinkedIn when they can get away with it, but that wants to be and is a lot better.)
- Euphorbium 2y ago
  Go rockclimbing and meet cto’s there.
- xw38011 2y ago
  > What are better alternatives to LinkedIn, for people who want to get that rare serendipitous message from a recruiter? The only one I know of is to have a personal social network of people who know you and are directly familiar with your work. Every rare serendipitous message from a recruiter I've received resulted from a referral from someone I directly knew. But rare is probably the correct qualifier. I have 25 years experience, I've received four, followed up on two and only one resulted in me changing jobs. None came before I had 10 years of experience. YMMV
- joshstrange 2y ago
  Hacker News monthly threads for “Who wants to be hired” and “Who is hiring”. That’s how I got hired for my current job (2019) and that’s how I’m hiring currently.
  - ohthatsnotright 2y ago
    All I got from that was some spam and "defi" recruiting for whatever Ponzi scheme the cryptocoin community is hot on right now.
altdataseller 2y ago
This problem is exasperated by the fact that recruiters are often the ones getting laid off first in a downturn or cost effiency initiative. So there’s even less humans filtering through applications. Even though it’s an issue I really don’t see companies spending a ton of time and energy fixing it. As mentioned in the article, they could simply stop posting jobs on LinkedIn or rely only on inbound candidates. It’s not rocket science. Just like dating, if you get bombarded with peoole knocking on your door, simply stop putting yourself out there.
- kthejoker2 2y ago
  Exacerbated*
  - mathgeek 2y ago
    Both words are appropriate, as exasperated means “made worse or more intense”. They are synonyms.
    - ics 2y ago
      Exasperated, or exasperation, is a feeling experienced by a person. Exacerbation describes a change in quality of something (usually inanimate).
      - mathgeek 2y ago
        Correct, although IMHO it’s also fine to use exacerbation in this specific example (if you see the problem from a process standpoint instead of the frustration faced by job seekers and recruiters).
kthejoker2 2y ago
Fo any other professions have thse challenges? Our lack of basic professional certifications has just led to nonsense in every corner of the hiring and job seeking process.
- zarzavat 2y ago
  There are professional certifications they are just useless. The same goes for university degrees. The field moves too fast for certification to have any value. Perhaps if you do something very “enterprise” it might be useful.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    The uselessness of professional certifications isn't because things move too fast. The fundamentals don't really change. The certifications are useless because they're paper mills, driven by the same incentives as grade inflation. People get upset if they pay for the certification and then fail the test -- and those are the certification mill's customers, so that can't be allowed or people would get some other certification. Or worse, some other vendor's certification. So they make something easy enough for the 10th percentile to pass, or publish a study guide that effectively gives you the answers to the test, and then it isn't serving as a useful filtering mechanism. Meanwhile the strongest applicants rightfully see it as a waste of money because they can get in on their other qualifications or find a job through their networks, or use not having it as a reverse filter to eliminate excessively bureaucratic employers that use it as a prerequisite, causing anyone who requires it to be filtering out more of the best applicants than the worst ones.
    - zarzavat 2y ago
      The fundamentals change all the time. When I learned to code everybody was high on Java, you had to know your design patterns, craft beautiful inheritance hierarchies and all kinds of other things that we now laugh at as being very silly. But people were dead serious about it! This art is still young, we are still finding our feet and I don’t think certifications are beneficial until we do. What we need is more experimentation and free thinking not a general ossification.
mead5432 2y ago
My partner has been searching for an SDE job for 8 months and recently received an email requesting her to do a recruiter screen. She responded and got a call instantly where the “recruiter was a text-to-speech AI. Presumably the entire process was automated; I’m assuming if they’re using text-to-speech, the selection and initial email was all AI. It’s an arms race on both sides.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- the_snooze 2y ago
  It's the curse of scale. Automation allows there to be plenty of job postings and job applications, but it sidelines the human part of actually talking to someone. Those in the know will end up sidestepping this altogether and using their networks to get a direct line to a real hiring manager or applicant. I've done this myself where I talk to past collaborators and professors I know and ask "Do you have an intern/soon-to-graduate-student you recommend with skills X, Y, and Z?" This is admittedly unfair to outsiders, but if you talk to someone, there's a high reputational pressure that assures you're dealing with a real person who's likely a decent match for the job/applicant. This is valuable precisely because there's high friction and doesn't scale.
  - Danaemp 2y ago
    That’s why we’re building Touvlo.co (for hardware engineers) - human engineer interviewers, interviewing humans on real world applicable engineering skills, more fair to outsiders, standardized, scaleable!
  - mead5432 2y ago
    I generally agree that relying on a network and human referrals is the way to go but building an effective network is much harder than it used to be. Meetup groups and local conferences were a good source to make connections pre-pandemic but that has really withered in the last couple years. Past collaborators are also a great source but she is junior and doesn’t really have any she can leverage. My initial advice to her was do some real projects, document her work and insights in a blog and engage with others on social media but that’s mostly screaming into a void. My approach to hiring is to focus on competencies (what do I need them to accomplish) rather than skills (how many years of JS) but that doesn’t cut down on the number of applicants any, just makes initial eval a little easier. I was pondering the idea of leaning in more on AI to screen on competencies which might incentivize higher information density on resumes but the quality of that eval might not actually be any better and only increase the “black box”-ness of it all.
typeofhuman 2y ago
Please let this become a trend elsewhere as well.
yinser 2y ago
Is it possible to waste a recruiters time?
- chad_strategic 2y ago
  Out of pure frustration, I have written code to do this.
robertclaus 2y ago
My experience the last few months is that the saying "It's who you know, not what you know." is alive and well. For jobs where I met the hiring manager (referral, networking, etc.) I had 2 out of 3 applications lead to offers. For resumes submitted online I had 1 out of 50 even respond. Obviously there's some alignment - I know people working in the area I know best - but from what I've experienced the hiring teams at small companies are struggling almost as much as candidates to figure out this brave new world.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > For jobs where I met the hiring manager (referral, networking, etc.) I had 2 out of 3 applications lead to offers. For resumes submitted online I had 1 out of 50 even respond. I don't think this means what you think it means. In fact, I only see survivorship bias in your personal anecdote. Meeting the hiring manager usually takes place after resume filtering. This means that you received offers in processes where you weren't rejected at the very first stage. That's what's expected, isn't it? Also, it's quite plausible that those hiring processes where you received no feedback happened to be fake job postings where, even though a job ad is posted, there is no job offer at all.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I don't know. Every job since the one out of grad school--admittedly only a few (I tend to stay at jobs for a long time)--involved pinging someone I knew well (former co-worker/client/consultant who worked for us). HR or recruiter was never involved until later in the process so no HR filtering involved.
  - kgermino 2y ago
    I think the question is how are you meeting the hiring manager? If you submit a resume to a recruiter (or worse, online job posting) and get to the hiring manager you've absolutely gone through a bunch of formal screening steps. However if, as I believe GP is describing, you're able to connect with them through a side channel (such as a referral) you usually haven't gone through the formal screening so much as you've skipped it entirely. That obviously will dramatically increase your odds of success but it's not the same as getting through the resume scan and HR filter
euroderf 2y ago
> So far, over 3,000 people have applied to one open data science vacancy at a US health tech company this year. The top candidates are given a lengthy and difficult task assessment, which very few pass Obviously the company should select one large project, break it down (with the help of AI) into 1500 steps, and farm it out to candidates as "task assessments" that can be cross-checked and then folded together into an app.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
The interesting thing to me reading this is that it's basically saying how much recruiters and hiring managers dislike/are wary of this AI-infused job application process. On the flip side, I've heard tons of complaints on the other side from job seekers: not just that job hunting is hard in a down market, but that the reign of modern ATSes means that it's a constant "battle against the algorithm" to even get noticed, tons of fake or outdated job postings, and rarely even an acknowledgement about the state of the application. I mention this because this seems like an area where lots of people wanted to throw AI at the problem, but I have a tough time finding anyone, on either side, that thinks that automation and AI improves the process in any way.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dangus 2y ago
  You hit the nail on the head there. All these applicant aid products like AutoApplyAI are solving the problem that employers created. It’s been a huge burden for applicants to go through the process. Any tool I can use to automate my job application process is something I’m going to immediately be interested in. Plus, applicants need the job to survive, while the employers aren’t really on that same level of desperation.
Dah00n 2y ago
If they use recruiters, I'm out. They are part of the problem.
- mmcconnell1618 2y ago
  Do you differentiate between a full time recruiter employed by the hiring company and 3rd party recruiting firms? A recruiter on the payroll can be a useful first screen and usually has good knowledge about what the company is seeking.
  - knallfrosch 2y ago
    I have to say that recruiters are worthless to me because they don't have the authority to actually decide something. They know nothing about the role, they don't disclose their salary range, I don't trust them with mine either.. but hey, if it's a short call, it a hoop you have to jump through. At least the company recruiters never call you again.
noobermin 2y ago
To dang, is this a bug? This was posted 8 minutes ago with 8 points yet has 40+ comments
- erik_seaberg 2y ago
  Some of the comments were from 2-3 hours ago. I think someone bumped the story's time by resubmitting.
- dang 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265420 made the front page but chapulin was the first user to post the article and I wanted them to get the credit. Their original submission was too old to re-up (a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308) so I made a fresh copy of it and moved the comments. It does make the timestamp thing (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20timestamps%20re-up&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) even more confusing than usual. Sorry!
nnurmanov 2y ago
Attention is all you need. This is the success formula. You can get attention via referrals or some other hacks.
Aurornis 2y ago
I've participated in a coaching and resume review program for many years. Most college students always struggled to write resumes, but at least they were aware of their shortcomings and reached out for help. Something about ChatGPT has convinced a lot of them that they don't need help or even to put much effort into the process. They hate writing resumes, so they just dump some words into a ChatGPT prompt and copy-paste into a resumse. To the inexperienced, the ChatGPT structure feels like brilliant, polished content magically appearing on their screen. They aren't looking at the content, but rather the structure, which ChatGPT can formulaically provide. Then recruiters get their resumes and instantly recognize ChatGPT garbage, because it's their job to read resumes and they've become good at recognizing low signal to noise ratio ChatGPT output. One of our local college programs had a company reach out and ask to be removed from their referral pipeline because the majority of the resumes submitted by their students were clearly ChatGPT drivel. It was a real blow to the people who had been working hard to set up these relationships and give the students opportunities to apply for.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  The exact same dynamic used to happen with Word templates, and I'm sure there were something similar before it. Then entire idea of a resume is garbage, the thing is useless for filtering candidates, and everybody that actually succeeds at either side of the hiring game does it by not relying on resumes. Yet hiring professionals insist this is the way, worldwide.
- saxelsen 2y ago
  Honestly I hate the process of writing resumes, too, and having to tailor an application creatively to a specific job to even be able get an initial interview is draining and my time would be better suited. I am hoping for a world where more automation leads to better match making so that the right candidate can more quickly be found for the right role. If we are at a point where there are 3k applicants for a job because writing the application is easy, that might suck for recruiters having to filter those, but for the company hiring I'd imagine it's a benefit that there is a larger flow of candidates that they can choose from. Now the filtering just needs to get better.
esafak 2y ago
A new problem I'm facing on the hiring end is an influx of imposters from Asia. Everything they claim is a lie, from their name, citizenship, location, picture, to their job history. They even set up fake company sites. And of course they use LLMs to help them pass the interview. I assume it's so they can bilk gullible companies and perhaps do some corporate espionage. I don't know. I haven't encountered anyone try to deepfake their voice and appearance but I assume it's a question of time. Telltale signs: stilted English, poor internet connection, lack of LinkedIn connections, and an inability to drill down on their fake histories. One claimed to have contributed to an open source BI project while working at Facebook, so I pulled up its GitHub repo and said "Let's see your code". "It's on Gitlab!" he protested. No, it's not; I'm staring at it on GitHub. Another claimed to have worked as a front-end engineer at Netflix. Great, I have friends there. Which team? "The front-end team". I understood that you were a front-end engineer, but which team? Again: "The front-end team!" In that instant I recalled the scene in Coming to America where Eddie Murphy's character is asked about his education and he confidently replies that he's attended "The University of the United States". https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/4378beae-fdfb-4e6b-a7a9-667f365613bc https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/4378beae-fdfb-4e6b-a7a9-667f365...
- surfingdino 2y ago
  Last year I was reviewing about a dozen answers to the questions we were sending candidates to complete at home. In all cases those a*holes used ChatGPT to write answers and what did ChatGPT use? Original Python docs recombined with blog posts. I was able to verify this by copying passages from their answers and pasting them into Google. When I showed this to the hiring manager they had a serious conversation with the agency. It would have been hilarious if I did not know that some of the candidate were real people with good experience but too lazy to write simple code.
  - esafak 2y ago
    You can't assign homework any more. I was never into them anyway. One clumsy candidate accidentally revealed his cards by pasting the prompt he'd used in our chat window, like that paper whose introduction began "Certainly, here is a possible introduction to your topic." https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/1beaqya/obvious_chatgpt_prompt_reply_in_published_paper/ https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/1beaqya/obvious_chat... Another was unable to explain why his code was structured the way it was. I asked a multipart question that required refactoring, knowing that these tools are not good at that, or enforcing a consistent style. His initial code was a self-contained class and the refactor introduced a function outside of the class that also should have been a method. I asked him why he did that and, of course, he froze.
vundercind 2y ago
This has long seemed like the obvious solution, to me, for publications that saw an untenable spike in submissions for the same reason. Just make ‘em print and send a it in the mail. Instant reduction by 95+%, most of the best stuff still comes in.
- williamdclt 2y ago
  > most of the best stuff still comes in I don’t see why “the best stuff” would be more acceptant to printing than the rest. Actually I’d expect that the best candidates won’t bend over backwards to submit their application, they have choice
  - patrickmay 2y ago
    I suspect it's not the printing but the postage that adds the most friction.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    If you can provide much-faster decisions, that’s huge. You’d not turn off serious submissions that way. Many of these want to have an exclusive option at the story for months because their workload is so high. Cut that to even 60 days and you’d make writers very happy.
robbyiq999 2y ago
still waiting for the LLM driven 3d avatar robot voice during my 10th hr zoom interview "can you eve scale bro? Can you even AWS firehose kafka kubernetes bro? Good! now show me how the minimum subsequence of this array in Ologn"
dangus 2y ago
> …in one case when the person moved on to the next interview, they couldn’t answer questions about the task. “Not only have they wasted their time, but they wasted my time,” says the recruiter. “It’s really frustrating.” I’m on the prospective employee’s side here. If I had to do a complex task for every application I’d be driven mad. That’s a waste of the applicant’s time. Plus, the employee you should want to hire is the employee that can do tasks in the most creative low effort way. Why should I hire the employee who takes 8 hours to grind through a task when the employee who uses ChatGPT to bust it out in 1 hour gets the same correct output? Company recruiters have had the leg up on applicants for years with ATS systems. I’m glad the applicants have flipped the script and forced the recruiters to actually do work to find good candidates.
Shorel 2y ago
Recruiters are the problem =)
red-iron-pine 2y ago
Dead Internet Theory in a nutshell

46 points by chapulin 2y ago

datadrivenangel 2y ago

https://archive.is/I3WjA https://archive.is/I3WjA

neonate 2y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20240505164924/https://www.wired.com/story/recruiters-ai-application-overload/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240505164924/https://www.wired...

datadrivenangel 2y ago

To summarize the article though: Online hiring continues to be overwhelmed by huge numbers of low quality applications, now with some extra AI tools that make it easier to lie about your experience. Same issue as before, now wrapped up in OpenAI API calls.

mistrial9 2y ago
you forgot the second part -- a rush by industry management to open the gates to low-skill people for lower pay, while specifically and exactly firing or replacing more experienced people who ask for higher compensation and employee rights (for example working parents or a slower pace over a long time)
dang 2y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265635.

yieldcrv 2y ago

I think this is conflating some things, I’ve had interviews where AI use was encouraged. I’ve used a coderpad screenshare that had an LLM tab you could write with. so in this article, where they mention some of the respondents disclosed using AI, it doesnt say if that was a “good” or “bad” thing for that company its not accurate to assume, despite the article reinforcing a bias towards it being a problem

Simulacra 2y ago

Serves them right. Employers have been using AI and algorithms to weed out resumes/applications for years. To the point that the only way to get seen by an actual human is the game the system.

bastawhiz 2y ago
Exactly, I came here looking for this comment. Many companies have been using AI tools for years to power recruiting. Now they're upset that candidates are using the same technology. The recruiters turned their profession into a tit for tat arms race.
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
Hard agree. It’s infuriating that automation is continually added to human centric processes that it is ill-suited and anti-social to be used in, very much including most LLM applications, always in the name of more bloody cost-cutting that almost never leads to lower prices for consumers, just more yachts for the executive class.
LikelyABurner 2y ago
The thing that especially infuriates me is recruiters in this article turning around and trying to throw LinkedIn under the bus. No one likes the nightmare dystopia of a platform that is LinkedIn. The only reason most people I know have LinkedIn accounts in the first place is because HR types have outsourced so much of their job to LinkedIn that it's viewed as professional suicide to not have a LinkedIn profile with 100s of contacts in this industry. Recruiters don't like the GenAI and Easy Apply features on LinkedIn, it makes their jobs more difficult? Then stop making LinkedIn a mandatory account for tech workers. You have NO ONE to blame but yourselves.
- Simulacra 2y ago
  It would be interesting if they just went back to paper resumes and applications. That takes effort, only a little bit, but it takes effort.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

neilv 2y ago

> That came after LinkedIn began rolling out a new set of generative AI tools for recruiters to source candidates in October. With the sourcing tool, recruiters can search a phrase like “I want to hire engineers in Texas,” and profiles of people that may meet those criteria appear, as do other specific skills that may be related to the role. They can also send messages written with generative AI and set automatic follow-up messages. What are better alternatives to LinkedIn, for people who want to get that rare serendipitous message from a recruiter? (Not just another company that wants to behave like LinkedIn when they can get away with it, but that wants to be and is a lot better.)

Euphorbium 2y ago
Go rockclimbing and meet cto’s there.
xw38011 2y ago
> What are better alternatives to LinkedIn, for people who want to get that rare serendipitous message from a recruiter? The only one I know of is to have a personal social network of people who know you and are directly familiar with your work. Every rare serendipitous message from a recruiter I've received resulted from a referral from someone I directly knew. But rare is probably the correct qualifier. I have 25 years experience, I've received four, followed up on two and only one resulted in me changing jobs. None came before I had 10 years of experience. YMMV
joshstrange 2y ago
Hacker News monthly threads for “Who wants to be hired” and “Who is hiring”. That’s how I got hired for my current job (2019) and that’s how I’m hiring currently.
- ohthatsnotright 2y ago
  All I got from that was some spam and "defi" recruiting for whatever Ponzi scheme the cryptocoin community is hot on right now.

altdataseller 2y ago

This problem is exasperated by the fact that recruiters are often the ones getting laid off first in a downturn or cost effiency initiative. So there’s even less humans filtering through applications. Even though it’s an issue I really don’t see companies spending a ton of time and energy fixing it. As mentioned in the article, they could simply stop posting jobs on LinkedIn or rely only on inbound candidates. It’s not rocket science. Just like dating, if you get bombarded with peoole knocking on your door, simply stop putting yourself out there.

kthejoker2 2y ago
Exacerbated*
- mathgeek 2y ago
  Both words are appropriate, as exasperated means “made worse or more intense”. They are synonyms.
  - ics 2y ago
    Exasperated, or exasperation, is a feeling experienced by a person. Exacerbation describes a change in quality of something (usually inanimate).
    - mathgeek 2y ago
      Correct, although IMHO it’s also fine to use exacerbation in this specific example (if you see the problem from a process standpoint instead of the frustration faced by job seekers and recruiters).

kthejoker2 2y ago

Fo any other professions have thse challenges? Our lack of basic professional certifications has just led to nonsense in every corner of the hiring and job seeking process.

zarzavat 2y ago
There are professional certifications they are just useless. The same goes for university degrees. The field moves too fast for certification to have any value. Perhaps if you do something very “enterprise” it might be useful.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  The uselessness of professional certifications isn't because things move too fast. The fundamentals don't really change. The certifications are useless because they're paper mills, driven by the same incentives as grade inflation. People get upset if they pay for the certification and then fail the test -- and those are the certification mill's customers, so that can't be allowed or people would get some other certification. Or worse, some other vendor's certification. So they make something easy enough for the 10th percentile to pass, or publish a study guide that effectively gives you the answers to the test, and then it isn't serving as a useful filtering mechanism. Meanwhile the strongest applicants rightfully see it as a waste of money because they can get in on their other qualifications or find a job through their networks, or use not having it as a reverse filter to eliminate excessively bureaucratic employers that use it as a prerequisite, causing anyone who requires it to be filtering out more of the best applicants than the worst ones.
  - zarzavat 2y ago
    The fundamentals change all the time. When I learned to code everybody was high on Java, you had to know your design patterns, craft beautiful inheritance hierarchies and all kinds of other things that we now laugh at as being very silly. But people were dead serious about it! This art is still young, we are still finding our feet and I don’t think certifications are beneficial until we do. What we need is more experimentation and free thinking not a general ossification.

mead5432 2y ago

My partner has been searching for an SDE job for 8 months and recently received an email requesting her to do a recruiter screen. She responded and got a call instantly where the “recruiter was a text-to-speech AI. Presumably the entire process was automated; I’m assuming if they’re using text-to-speech, the selection and initial email was all AI. It’s an arms race on both sides.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
the_snooze 2y ago
It's the curse of scale. Automation allows there to be plenty of job postings and job applications, but it sidelines the human part of actually talking to someone. Those in the know will end up sidestepping this altogether and using their networks to get a direct line to a real hiring manager or applicant. I've done this myself where I talk to past collaborators and professors I know and ask "Do you have an intern/soon-to-graduate-student you recommend with skills X, Y, and Z?" This is admittedly unfair to outsiders, but if you talk to someone, there's a high reputational pressure that assures you're dealing with a real person who's likely a decent match for the job/applicant. This is valuable precisely because there's high friction and doesn't scale.
- Danaemp 2y ago
  That’s why we’re building Touvlo.co (for hardware engineers) - human engineer interviewers, interviewing humans on real world applicable engineering skills, more fair to outsiders, standardized, scaleable!
- mead5432 2y ago
  I generally agree that relying on a network and human referrals is the way to go but building an effective network is much harder than it used to be. Meetup groups and local conferences were a good source to make connections pre-pandemic but that has really withered in the last couple years. Past collaborators are also a great source but she is junior and doesn’t really have any she can leverage. My initial advice to her was do some real projects, document her work and insights in a blog and engage with others on social media but that’s mostly screaming into a void. My approach to hiring is to focus on competencies (what do I need them to accomplish) rather than skills (how many years of JS) but that doesn’t cut down on the number of applicants any, just makes initial eval a little easier. I was pondering the idea of leaning in more on AI to screen on competencies which might incentivize higher information density on resumes but the quality of that eval might not actually be any better and only increase the “black box”-ness of it all.

typeofhuman 2y ago

Please let this become a trend elsewhere as well.

yinser 2y ago

Is it possible to waste a recruiters time?

chad_strategic 2y ago
Out of pure frustration, I have written code to do this.

robertclaus 2y ago

My experience the last few months is that the saying "It's who you know, not what you know." is alive and well. For jobs where I met the hiring manager (referral, networking, etc.) I had 2 out of 3 applications lead to offers. For resumes submitted online I had 1 out of 50 even respond. Obviously there's some alignment - I know people working in the area I know best - but from what I've experienced the hiring teams at small companies are struggling almost as much as candidates to figure out this brave new world.

chipdart 2y ago
> For jobs where I met the hiring manager (referral, networking, etc.) I had 2 out of 3 applications lead to offers. For resumes submitted online I had 1 out of 50 even respond. I don't think this means what you think it means. In fact, I only see survivorship bias in your personal anecdote. Meeting the hiring manager usually takes place after resume filtering. This means that you received offers in processes where you weren't rejected at the very first stage. That's what's expected, isn't it? Also, it's quite plausible that those hiring processes where you received no feedback happened to be fake job postings where, even though a job ad is posted, there is no job offer at all.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I don't know. Every job since the one out of grad school--admittedly only a few (I tend to stay at jobs for a long time)--involved pinging someone I knew well (former co-worker/client/consultant who worked for us). HR or recruiter was never involved until later in the process so no HR filtering involved.
- kgermino 2y ago
  I think the question is how are you meeting the hiring manager? If you submit a resume to a recruiter (or worse, online job posting) and get to the hiring manager you've absolutely gone through a bunch of formal screening steps. However if, as I believe GP is describing, you're able to connect with them through a side channel (such as a referral) you usually haven't gone through the formal screening so much as you've skipped it entirely. That obviously will dramatically increase your odds of success but it's not the same as getting through the resume scan and HR filter

euroderf 2y ago

> So far, over 3,000 people have applied to one open data science vacancy at a US health tech company this year. The top candidates are given a lengthy and difficult task assessment, which very few pass Obviously the company should select one large project, break it down (with the help of AI) into 1500 steps, and farm it out to candidates as "task assessments" that can be cross-checked and then folded together into an app.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

The interesting thing to me reading this is that it's basically saying how much recruiters and hiring managers dislike/are wary of this AI-infused job application process. On the flip side, I've heard tons of complaints on the other side from job seekers: not just that job hunting is hard in a down market, but that the reign of modern ATSes means that it's a constant "battle against the algorithm" to even get noticed, tons of fake or outdated job postings, and rarely even an acknowledgement about the state of the application. I mention this because this seems like an area where lots of people wanted to throw AI at the problem, but I have a tough time finding anyone, on either side, that thinks that automation and AI improves the process in any way.

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dangus 2y ago
You hit the nail on the head there. All these applicant aid products like AutoApplyAI are solving the problem that employers created. It’s been a huge burden for applicants to go through the process. Any tool I can use to automate my job application process is something I’m going to immediately be interested in. Plus, applicants need the job to survive, while the employers aren’t really on that same level of desperation.

Dah00n 2y ago

If they use recruiters, I'm out. They are part of the problem.

mmcconnell1618 2y ago
Do you differentiate between a full time recruiter employed by the hiring company and 3rd party recruiting firms? A recruiter on the payroll can be a useful first screen and usually has good knowledge about what the company is seeking.
- knallfrosch 2y ago
  I have to say that recruiters are worthless to me because they don't have the authority to actually decide something. They know nothing about the role, they don't disclose their salary range, I don't trust them with mine either.. but hey, if it's a short call, it a hoop you have to jump through. At least the company recruiters never call you again.

noobermin 2y ago

To dang, is this a bug? This was posted 8 minutes ago with 8 points yet has 40+ comments

erik_seaberg 2y ago
Some of the comments were from 2-3 hours ago. I think someone bumped the story's time by resubmitting.
dang 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265420 made the front page but chapulin was the first user to post the article and I wanted them to get the credit. Their original submission was too old to re-up (a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308) so I made a fresh copy of it and moved the comments. It does make the timestamp thing (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20timestamps%20re-up&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) even more confusing than usual. Sorry!

nnurmanov 2y ago

Attention is all you need. This is the success formula. You can get attention via referrals or some other hacks.

Aurornis 2y ago

I've participated in a coaching and resume review program for many years. Most college students always struggled to write resumes, but at least they were aware of their shortcomings and reached out for help. Something about ChatGPT has convinced a lot of them that they don't need help or even to put much effort into the process. They hate writing resumes, so they just dump some words into a ChatGPT prompt and copy-paste into a resumse. To the inexperienced, the ChatGPT structure feels like brilliant, polished content magically appearing on their screen. They aren't looking at the content, but rather the structure, which ChatGPT can formulaically provide. Then recruiters get their resumes and instantly recognize ChatGPT garbage, because it's their job to read resumes and they've become good at recognizing low signal to noise ratio ChatGPT output. One of our local college programs had a company reach out and ask to be removed from their referral pipeline because the majority of the resumes submitted by their students were clearly ChatGPT drivel. It was a real blow to the people who had been working hard to set up these relationships and give the students opportunities to apply for.

marcosdumay 2y ago
The exact same dynamic used to happen with Word templates, and I'm sure there were something similar before it. Then entire idea of a resume is garbage, the thing is useless for filtering candidates, and everybody that actually succeeds at either side of the hiring game does it by not relying on resumes. Yet hiring professionals insist this is the way, worldwide.
saxelsen 2y ago
Honestly I hate the process of writing resumes, too, and having to tailor an application creatively to a specific job to even be able get an initial interview is draining and my time would be better suited. I am hoping for a world where more automation leads to better match making so that the right candidate can more quickly be found for the right role. If we are at a point where there are 3k applicants for a job because writing the application is easy, that might suck for recruiters having to filter those, but for the company hiring I'd imagine it's a benefit that there is a larger flow of candidates that they can choose from. Now the filtering just needs to get better.

esafak 2y ago

A new problem I'm facing on the hiring end is an influx of imposters from Asia. Everything they claim is a lie, from their name, citizenship, location, picture, to their job history. They even set up fake company sites. And of course they use LLMs to help them pass the interview. I assume it's so they can bilk gullible companies and perhaps do some corporate espionage. I don't know. I haven't encountered anyone try to deepfake their voice and appearance but I assume it's a question of time. Telltale signs: stilted English, poor internet connection, lack of LinkedIn connections, and an inability to drill down on their fake histories. One claimed to have contributed to an open source BI project while working at Facebook, so I pulled up its GitHub repo and said "Let's see your code". "It's on Gitlab!" he protested. No, it's not; I'm staring at it on GitHub. Another claimed to have worked as a front-end engineer at Netflix. Great, I have friends there. Which team? "The front-end team". I understood that you were a front-end engineer, but which team? Again: "The front-end team!" In that instant I recalled the scene in Coming to America where Eddie Murphy's character is asked about his education and he confidently replies that he's attended "The University of the United States". https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/4378beae-fdfb-4e6b-a7a9-667f365613bc https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/4378beae-fdfb-4e6b-a7a9-667f365...

surfingdino 2y ago
Last year I was reviewing about a dozen answers to the questions we were sending candidates to complete at home. In all cases those a*holes used ChatGPT to write answers and what did ChatGPT use? Original Python docs recombined with blog posts. I was able to verify this by copying passages from their answers and pasting them into Google. When I showed this to the hiring manager they had a serious conversation with the agency. It would have been hilarious if I did not know that some of the candidate were real people with good experience but too lazy to write simple code.
- esafak 2y ago
  You can't assign homework any more. I was never into them anyway. One clumsy candidate accidentally revealed his cards by pasting the prompt he'd used in our chat window, like that paper whose introduction began "Certainly, here is a possible introduction to your topic." https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/1beaqya/obvious_chatgpt_prompt_reply_in_published_paper/ https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/1beaqya/obvious_chat... Another was unable to explain why his code was structured the way it was. I asked a multipart question that required refactoring, knowing that these tools are not good at that, or enforcing a consistent style. His initial code was a self-contained class and the refactor introduced a function outside of the class that also should have been a method. I asked him why he did that and, of course, he froze.

vundercind 2y ago

This has long seemed like the obvious solution, to me, for publications that saw an untenable spike in submissions for the same reason. Just make ‘em print and send a it in the mail. Instant reduction by 95+%, most of the best stuff still comes in.

williamdclt 2y ago
> most of the best stuff still comes in I don’t see why “the best stuff” would be more acceptant to printing than the rest. Actually I’d expect that the best candidates won’t bend over backwards to submit their application, they have choice
- patrickmay 2y ago
  I suspect it's not the printing but the postage that adds the most friction.
- vundercind 2y ago
  If you can provide much-faster decisions, that’s huge. You’d not turn off serious submissions that way. Many of these want to have an exclusive option at the story for months because their workload is so high. Cut that to even 60 days and you’d make writers very happy.

robbyiq999 2y ago

still waiting for the LLM driven 3d avatar robot voice during my 10th hr zoom interview "can you eve scale bro? Can you even AWS firehose kafka kubernetes bro? Good! now show me how the minimum subsequence of this array in Ologn"

dangus 2y ago

> …in one case when the person moved on to the next interview, they couldn’t answer questions about the task. “Not only have they wasted their time, but they wasted my time,” says the recruiter. “It’s really frustrating.” I’m on the prospective employee’s side here. If I had to do a complex task for every application I’d be driven mad. That’s a waste of the applicant’s time. Plus, the employee you should want to hire is the employee that can do tasks in the most creative low effort way. Why should I hire the employee who takes 8 hours to grind through a task when the employee who uses ChatGPT to bust it out in 1 hour gets the same correct output? Company recruiters have had the leg up on applicants for years with ATS systems. I’m glad the applicants have flipped the script and forced the recruiters to actually do work to find good candidates.

Shorel 2y ago

Recruiters are the problem =)

red-iron-pine 2y ago

Dead Internet Theory in a nutshell