3 ms·

How do employers fix being blasted with resumes from unqualified morons?

__turbobrew__ 2y ago
A lot use recruiters to reach out to talent, that is how I got my current job. I applied directly and got ghosted but a month later a 3rd party recruiter reached out to me and I got the same job I applied for. Lots of other jobs have funnels through referrals and networks, people can make recommendations of past colleagues. The only way to stop people from blasting resumes is to make it cost them something, for example charge $5 — which goes to charity — to apply for the job.
- Viliam1234 2y ago
  For coding interviews, the company could make an application form that gives you three simple coding exercises, the submitted code is automatically tested, and when the tests pass you are asked to upload your CV. When you come to the company, you get two more coding exercises of the same difficulty, if you pass at least one of them, you can talk to a human. (This last step is to turn away the candidates who asked someone else to do the exercises for them.)
- stego-tech 2y ago
  > The only way to stop people from blasting resumes is to make it cost them something, for example charge $5 — which goes to charity — to apply for the job. That's just more short-termism. It ignores the desperation of the masses for the Middle Class lifestyle they've been promised, in favor of yet-another-hurdle to be jumped over for a chance at a job they need to survive. All you'll end up doing is encouraging further fraud with such a proposal. So what can we try instead? Well for starters, we can focus on reducing the need to seek external applicants in the first place. While labor mobility is critical to a healthy workforce, it's also worth noting that most workers would rather have stability over mobility, all else being equal. People want to work to live, not live to work - and having a reliable job, with a reliable wage that keeps pace with inflation, that enables them to buy a home and pay the bills and maybe take a vacation every year, will keep them from seeking other opportunities elsewhere, thus reducing the overall applicant pool for new positions. Workers are surprisingly fine with their excess value going to Capital, provided they're not having to decide between paying for insulin or rent this month because they haven't had a raise in three years. In addition to decreasing applicant pools by improving job stability and longevity, we can also stop placing arbitrary requirements irrelevant to the position at hand. This sounds counter-intuitive - if you remove the degree requirement from a role, you'll have more applicants - but the reality is that oftentimes workers will pass up roles not requiring a degree because they'll perceive it as being more "junior". This isn't a great idea for every role or business, obviously, and YMMV, but it can be a different way of thinning the herd. Then there's the tried, the true, the oft-reliable: > A lot use recruiters to reach out to talent, that is how I got my current job. Look, in case my comment history doesn't make this glaringly obvious, I'm not great at the whole social networking thing. Recruiters connect highly-effective introverts like myself, with employers who don't want to rely solely on word-of-mouth referrals (especially in an era where said referrals are openly traded or sold on forums like Blind). All of my big career moves came through external recruiters, of whom I'm profoundly grateful to for opportunities I wouldn't have had otherwise. While I'm generally against outsourcing as a practice, the fact is that a good recruiting firm will save your teams time they can use on meaningful work, and only present candidates to you they feel will meet your needs. Whether or not the employer will trust the recruiter is a topic for another day (I've lost count of the number of times my recruiter, myself, and the customer's PoC all thought I was perfect, but a Director somewhere didn't want to trust outsiders), but it's still arguably one of the better investments a company can make in talent acquisition.
  - eastbound 2y ago
    > > A lot use recruiters to reach out to talent, that is how I got my current job. As an employer, I’m flummoxed that a recruiter with a human fibre is required. It means instead of paying higher salary, 20% goes to the pocket of the intermediary the first year.
  - __turbobrew__ 2y ago
    > All you'll end up doing is encouraging further fraud with such a proposal How do you plan to defraud the banking system when you need to pay $5 to send in your application? The issue is that it takes almost zero effort to apply for a job so there needs to be proof of work on the applicants side. The easiest proof of work in through our banking system because there is massive amounts of effort to prevent fraud and ensure interoperability. Alternatively that proof of work could be that you need to physically drop off your resume like in the pre-internet days. The same need to go for the company side, they need to have skin in the game too when interviewing a candidate. This is why I am against automated tests which are used at places like Amazon.
    - Kon-Peki 2y ago
      So if an employer posts a ghost job, does that become wire fraud? And if the employer posts a real job but the candidate doesn’t get a response, or is immediately rejected, will the employer get accused of wire fraud? Sounds like a nightmare for employers.
  - dahart 2y ago
    > It ignores the desperation of the masses for the Middle Class lifestyle they’ve been promised Oh are we talking about minimum wage jobs, labor & the proletariat now? I thought we were talking about software engineering, where the average salary is very comfortably in the 6 figure range in the US. If you’d rather be a plumber or a teacher, go for it, I hear the interviews are shorter. ;) Why would charging a small fee for applications encourage fraud? I don’t see the logic. The problem you complained about is the low-effort spam applications, like LinkedIn’s 1-click apply-all button. If that was no longer free, it would certainly reduce the spam and make applicants think more strategically about their budgets. Companies already use recruiters. Recruiters are expensive and many provide low quality leads, partly because of the way recruiting is incentivized, and partly because good software engineers don’t have to move around that much.
stego-tech 2y ago
Recruiters are the tried-and-true method of thinning the herd effectively. A good recruiter relationship might cost your company some money, but it's likely to be an order of magnitude less than the cost of ATS systems and AI resume scanners. Recruiters have always been the best path forward, as they serve as valuable "social grease" between high quality applicants who aren't extroverted enough for the network game, and employers who need help digging through reams of documents. That said, I suppose I should amend my conclusion: no single employer can fix this either, as this problem is the collective result of businesses forcing shorter cycles of tenure in general; short-termism, in other words. Your company can make it easier on yourselves by retaining a great recruiting firm or retaining good hires for longer, but you'll still be inundated with a glut of paperwork until and unless other firms do the same thing in large enough quantities to affect real change. If everyone is struggling to keep their heads above water, those dwindling few manning the lifeboats are undoubtedly going to get swarmed.
- eastbound 2y ago
  > Recruiters are the tried-and-true method of thinning the herd effectively. A good recruiter relationship might cost your company some money I know the price: Instead of an ad on LinkedIn (100€ per recruit in 2019), we now pay recruiters 20% of the yearly salary. In France the “salaire brut” is 60k€ → We pay 12k€ before an employee starts working, excluding the time WE spend in interviews. That’s a 12.000% increase over a simple ad. > no single employer can fix this either Yes, thank you for diagnosing the problem! For me, it’s due to LinkedIn. They know perfectly well that bulk-apply-in-1-click is hell. They could fix it in one day.
xethos 2y ago
Employers used to promote internally, train and up-skill their people, and strive to keep them around for longer than the two to five year stint that seems to be the average in tech Hiring low-level employees requires less vetting. Upskilling for more senior roles within your own company means you get to skip things like cultural fit (because they presumably already are), work history (it's in the employers own records), and references (that would be the coworkers and managers they already have). Pay enough to keep the ones worth keeping (and increase it with time, to match inflation at minimum), upskill employees, and promote from within, and this problem should pretty well fix itself

A lot use recruiters to reach out to talent, that is how I got my current job. I applied directly and got ghosted but a month later a 3rd party recruiter reached out to me and I got the same job I applied for. Lots of other jobs have funnels through referrals and networks, people can make recommendations of past colleagues. The only way to stop people from blasting resumes is to make it cost them something, for example charge $5 — which goes to charity — to apply for the job.

Viliam1234 2y ago
For coding interviews, the company could make an application form that gives you three simple coding exercises, the submitted code is automatically tested, and when the tests pass you are asked to upload your CV. When you come to the company, you get two more coding exercises of the same difficulty, if you pass at least one of them, you can talk to a human. (This last step is to turn away the candidates who asked someone else to do the exercises for them.)
stego-tech 2y ago
> The only way to stop people from blasting resumes is to make it cost them something, for example charge $5 — which goes to charity — to apply for the job. That's just more short-termism. It ignores the desperation of the masses for the Middle Class lifestyle they've been promised, in favor of yet-another-hurdle to be jumped over for a chance at a job they need to survive. All you'll end up doing is encouraging further fraud with such a proposal. So what can we try instead? Well for starters, we can focus on reducing the need to seek external applicants in the first place. While labor mobility is critical to a healthy workforce, it's also worth noting that most workers would rather have stability over mobility, all else being equal. People want to work to live, not live to work - and having a reliable job, with a reliable wage that keeps pace with inflation, that enables them to buy a home and pay the bills and maybe take a vacation every year, will keep them from seeking other opportunities elsewhere, thus reducing the overall applicant pool for new positions. Workers are surprisingly fine with their excess value going to Capital, provided they're not having to decide between paying for insulin or rent this month because they haven't had a raise in three years. In addition to decreasing applicant pools by improving job stability and longevity, we can also stop placing arbitrary requirements irrelevant to the position at hand. This sounds counter-intuitive - if you remove the degree requirement from a role, you'll have more applicants - but the reality is that oftentimes workers will pass up roles not requiring a degree because they'll perceive it as being more "junior". This isn't a great idea for every role or business, obviously, and YMMV, but it can be a different way of thinning the herd. Then there's the tried, the true, the oft-reliable: > A lot use recruiters to reach out to talent, that is how I got my current job. Look, in case my comment history doesn't make this glaringly obvious, I'm not great at the whole social networking thing. Recruiters connect highly-effective introverts like myself, with employers who don't want to rely solely on word-of-mouth referrals (especially in an era where said referrals are openly traded or sold on forums like Blind). All of my big career moves came through external recruiters, of whom I'm profoundly grateful to for opportunities I wouldn't have had otherwise. While I'm generally against outsourcing as a practice, the fact is that a good recruiting firm will save your teams time they can use on meaningful work, and only present candidates to you they feel will meet your needs. Whether or not the employer will trust the recruiter is a topic for another day (I've lost count of the number of times my recruiter, myself, and the customer's PoC all thought I was perfect, but a Director somewhere didn't want to trust outsiders), but it's still arguably one of the better investments a company can make in talent acquisition.
- eastbound 2y ago
  > > A lot use recruiters to reach out to talent, that is how I got my current job. As an employer, I’m flummoxed that a recruiter with a human fibre is required. It means instead of paying higher salary, 20% goes to the pocket of the intermediary the first year.
- __turbobrew__ 2y ago
  > All you'll end up doing is encouraging further fraud with such a proposal How do you plan to defraud the banking system when you need to pay $5 to send in your application? The issue is that it takes almost zero effort to apply for a job so there needs to be proof of work on the applicants side. The easiest proof of work in through our banking system because there is massive amounts of effort to prevent fraud and ensure interoperability. Alternatively that proof of work could be that you need to physically drop off your resume like in the pre-internet days. The same need to go for the company side, they need to have skin in the game too when interviewing a candidate. This is why I am against automated tests which are used at places like Amazon.
  - Kon-Peki 2y ago
    So if an employer posts a ghost job, does that become wire fraud? And if the employer posts a real job but the candidate doesn’t get a response, or is immediately rejected, will the employer get accused of wire fraud? Sounds like a nightmare for employers.
- dahart 2y ago
  > It ignores the desperation of the masses for the Middle Class lifestyle they’ve been promised Oh are we talking about minimum wage jobs, labor & the proletariat now? I thought we were talking about software engineering, where the average salary is very comfortably in the 6 figure range in the US. If you’d rather be a plumber or a teacher, go for it, I hear the interviews are shorter. ;) Why would charging a small fee for applications encourage fraud? I don’t see the logic. The problem you complained about is the low-effort spam applications, like LinkedIn’s 1-click apply-all button. If that was no longer free, it would certainly reduce the spam and make applicants think more strategically about their budgets. Companies already use recruiters. Recruiters are expensive and many provide low quality leads, partly because of the way recruiting is incentivized, and partly because good software engineers don’t have to move around that much.

stego-tech 2y ago

Recruiters are the tried-and-true method of thinning the herd effectively. A good recruiter relationship might cost your company some money, but it's likely to be an order of magnitude less than the cost of ATS systems and AI resume scanners. Recruiters have always been the best path forward, as they serve as valuable "social grease" between high quality applicants who aren't extroverted enough for the network game, and employers who need help digging through reams of documents. That said, I suppose I should amend my conclusion: no single employer can fix this either, as this problem is the collective result of businesses forcing shorter cycles of tenure in general; short-termism, in other words. Your company can make it easier on yourselves by retaining a great recruiting firm or retaining good hires for longer, but you'll still be inundated with a glut of paperwork until and unless other firms do the same thing in large enough quantities to affect real change. If everyone is struggling to keep their heads above water, those dwindling few manning the lifeboats are undoubtedly going to get swarmed.

eastbound 2y ago
> Recruiters are the tried-and-true method of thinning the herd effectively. A good recruiter relationship might cost your company some money I know the price: Instead of an ad on LinkedIn (100€ per recruit in 2019), we now pay recruiters 20% of the yearly salary. In France the “salaire brut” is 60k€ → We pay 12k€ before an employee starts working, excluding the time WE spend in interviews. That’s a 12.000% increase over a simple ad. > no single employer can fix this either Yes, thank you for diagnosing the problem! For me, it’s due to LinkedIn. They know perfectly well that bulk-apply-in-1-click is hell. They could fix it in one day.

xethos 2y ago

Employers used to promote internally, train and up-skill their people, and strive to keep them around for longer than the two to five year stint that seems to be the average in tech Hiring low-level employees requires less vetting. Upskilling for more senior roles within your own company means you get to skip things like cultural fit (because they presumably already are), work history (it's in the employers own records), and references (that would be the coworkers and managers they already have). Pay enough to keep the ones worth keeping (and increase it with time, to match inflation at minimum), upskill employees, and promote from within, and this problem should pretty well fix itself