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Nice. But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want. Flooded with auto submitted Resumes. I posted a job recently and got 100+ resumes in 2 days and 9
by codegeek 2y ago
Nice. But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want. Flooded with auto submitted Resumes. I posted a job recently and got 100+ resumes in 2 days and 99% were not even remotely close to being a good fit. I struggled to sort through so many Resumes to find someone worth interviewing.
The problem is that with so much noise, good candidates may get ignored or rejected by mistake. And the cycle continues.
I get that the market is bad right now and there are lot of people looking for jobs but auto submissions and flooding job sites wont work. Not for the ones that matter anyway.
- zachthewf 2y agoWere you able to find good candidates from your post eventually?
- codegeek 2y agoNot yet. It has been a week and I have 500+ resumes sitting in the inbox. Not fun.
- dazed_confused 2y agoGood luck! Sounds terrible
- ArlenBales 2y agoJust curious, do you use LLMs in your reviewing process? e.g. Summarization, prioritization, etc.
- codegeek 2y agoThinking about it. Might build my own tool.
- cbsmith 2y agoThat's okay. You can just use a bunch of LLMs to filter through to the few resumes you would have gotten before people used LLMs to find jobs... ;-)
- zwnow 2y agoPlay stupid games, win stupid prizes. You are the reason people go for these kinda solutions. Hiring process is complete bs.
- imnotjames 2y agoWhat do you suggest?
- petesergeant 2y agoAdd a tiny captcha-like task that takes a real candidate who read the job ad 20 seconds to do, but won’t get done by spray and pray candidates.
- feznyng 2y agoBunch of services that can do captchas now. It’d maybe lessen the load on employers but then job seeking becomes pay to play. The candidate who can afford one of those services + automation beats out those who can’t. It’s already an arms race of sorts.
- narnarpapadaddy 2y agoIf one is not currently employed as an engineer? Frankly, seriously consider a career change. The ladder has been pulled up for entry-level positions due to AI, interest-rates, etc. This will come back and bite us as an industry, but it’ll be 10 years from now and most people can’t wait that long. I can’t speak for everyone, but 3000+ applicants for a single opening is typical at my org. The odds of any given individual getting in are essentially zero. Referrals get priority over everyone else, even candidates that are on-paper better qualified. It sucks for everyone involved, especially for job hunters. But from the hiring side, truthfully, there’s no end in sight.
- zwnow 2y agoOooooor work in Europe. Plenty of work here. I still get 1 job offer per 1 application.
- RobotToaster 2y agoHave you tried using AI to screen the AI generated applications?
- programjames 2y agoThe issue is, if you're looking for only one hire out of a thousand applicants, you need a 99.9% accurate AI. HR isn't that good, so it'll be mildly difficult to train an AI to be that good.
- nsxwolf 2y agoWhat’s our alternative? It doesn’t seem to be “carefully consider and apply to a handful of highly relevant postings”. I don’t see the downsides for candidates to play the numbers game.
- Traubenfuchs 2y agoHiring and placement agencies that do prescreenings and provide CVs in standardized formats to employers and them getting paid according to how much salary the hire will get. win-win-win situation for every party, they got me my last two jobs in Vienna
- codegeek 2y agoYes but now you need these agencies to prescreen for you which is a very expensive and time consuming process. Also, I have used some before and not all agencies are worth the time or money. Most of them are glorified Keyword scanners.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoWe only ever used body shops when we were really desperate.
- throwaway2037 2y agoI work in an industry where this practice is universal. That said, why don't more of these companies complaining on this thread try that model? I know the reason: Cost. Instead of wasted hours of their staff's time, they are faced with a realistically large bill that most managers would like to deny. For me, head hunters find me on LinkedIn.
- Traubenfuchs 2y agoWell, those companies can‘t have it that bad if they rather wade through 1000‘s of fake/ai/mismatched CVs and other slop themselves. The costs will diffuse through a mix of incompetent inhouse HR and already overworked seniors and leads that now need to waste time on hiring.
- pmarreck 2y agoMeanwhile, I am flooded with recruiter "opportunities" that are nowhere near my capabilities. There's noise all around happening. Maybe the problem is that spamming people is free.
- _blk 2y agoAbsolutely. I mean I remember 20y ago when someone's solution to spam was paying a small fee. Not what you want, but it's gotta be somewhere there. There has to be a cost to it, but it probably shouldn't be directly monetary. Submission delay might work.
- drillsteps5 2y agoRequiring applicants to pay a fee will mean that the positions that I have to apply for that either do not exist, or are opened "just in case", or are market research, or the COA positions to push internal candidates, or any one of countless similar positions, will require me to pay out of pocket. Not exactly fair from my perspective.
- Etheryte 2y agoAgreed, while paying to reduce spam may work in other contexts, in this setting the incentives don't align. Imagine if Linkedin got paid every time you applied for a listing, the pile of ghost jobs would be practically infinite.
- nickff 2y agoSome of the listing services actually do charge employers per applicant, unless they are rejected within a certain amount of time (usually 48 or 72 hrs).
- Etheryte 2y agoThe critical distinction here is that the employer pays, not the applicant. This direction works, that's roughly how all job boards work if you squint, but if it was the applicant paying, the incentives would be opposing.
- cherryteastain 2y agoThis situation is basically equivalent to the prisoner dilemma and requires jobseekers to spray and pray
- imnotjames 2y agoI've run into the same thing. We don't even have the job posted publicly anywhere and we get >100 submissions per day. Many are duplicates. I've found some that with some minor research turn out to be foreign organized crime. A large number of them had the exact same cover letter with changes in the names and past jobs. Not only is it difficult to find candidates that actually fit the job role, it's hard to go through any that are even real people. I've told many friends of mine to use connections and not online job postings because it's basically impossible right now with the automated resume submission companies. And then the candidate management tools such as lever told me that no, every one of those candidates that applied were real people -- even when I provided proof that at least 40 of them were linked to a single organized crime group out of China.
- narnarpapadaddy 2y agoThis is my experience as well. The candidate management tools (even the AI-powered ones) I’ve tried have been next to worthless.
- cute_boi 2y agoIt seems that many processes, from interviews to real work, are increasingly manipulated. I've noticed a pattern with candidates employed by certain consulting companies, especially in Texas and New Jersey. These companies often recruit low-cost labor from India, craft fake resumes, and submit them to platforms like LinkedIn. During interviews, candidates use tools like HDMI dual-screen setups, ChatGPT, Otter AI, or Fathom AI to cheat and secure jobs. These consulting firms even fabricate green card verifications and other documents, enabling them to crack most interviews unless the candidate is exceptionally unskilled. Once hired, these companies often delegate the actual work to individuals in India, paying them as little as $500 while profiting $4,000–$5,000 per month from the arrangement. We uncovered this issue when we began conducting on-site interviews. While these candidates can handle medium-level LeetCode problems during virtual evaluations, they struggle with basic tasks, like implementing a LinkedList or solving simple LeetCode problems, in person. Alarmingly, these consulting companies are becoming more sophisticated over time. This raises a critical question: how can genuinely experienced candidates compete in such a landscape?
- trentnix 2y ago"Please don't flood us with auto-resumes" ... "Click here to submit to having your resume processed by a bot that will do all the filtering for us" This might not be you and your company, but it seems to be most of them.
- codegeek 2y agoAgreed. Both sides are bad. Most of these "bots" are useless and do a terrible job. I have seen that side as well. Many years ago, I was applying at IBM (don't ask) for a role and the recruiter told me that the online portal will reject me anyway. But not to worry because he knows what buttons to click to get me the interview because I was a really good fit.
- sensanaty 2y ago> IBM (don't ask) Lol I dipped out of further consideration once they sent me what the interview process was gonna be like. Like 6 rounds, whiteboard coding, leetcode crap, "behavioral" interviews, a talk with some pencil pushers and some extra stuff. I don't know how desperate you have to be to put up with that.
- welder 2y agoWhat do you think of https://wonderful.dev https://wonderful.dev? You get notifications when candidates are interested in your jobs, then you can choose to reach out to the ones you want to apply.
- thedougd 2y agoI'm at a point where I'm almost willing to ignore the first few days of applicants. They're all spray and pray junk. A week or two in and the applicant quality is significantly better.
- codegeek 2y agoReally good point. But the issue is that some job sites (indeed for example) wants you to pay to play. If you reduce the sponsorship or daily cost, the resume count also goes down. But regardless, I have seen the same. 1st few days are nightmare. I am 1 week into the job posting and have 500+ resumes. This after I have rejected at least 100 already. Madness.
- programjames 2y agoAh, now I know to do my spray and pray on week-old job listings ;)
- Plasmoid 2y agoThe current advice meta is that you want to apply asap since "many" companies ignore the stragglers.
- voidr 2y agoHiring agents have been spamming potential job seekers for years with garbage and then came up with the abomination known as ATS, which makes it very difficult to argue that job seekers should not use automation. Either the market needs to come up with a good solution that encourages good behavior from both sides or the governments can step in and start regulating.
- robocat 2y ago> both sides or the governments can step in and start regulating How could regulations help? Both sides already have good incentives to match positions to candidates; yet we are collectively failing.
- Plasmoid 2y agoOnly sort of. Lots of employees are only looking for any job and the adverse selection nature of hiring makes the typical job seeker pool look worse than average. On the company side, only some people in the organization are strongly aligned with hiring. The vast majority are indifferent or even somewhat negative as new hires mean more work.
- Root_Denied 2y agoMore than that, the incentives are inversely aligned - companies want to hire a "good match" for as little as possible, and applicants want to be hired at the maximum possible rate.
- voisin 2y agoI haven’t hired in years but I am surprised there aren’t AI agents that can intelligently rate the compatibility of resumes to your job posting
- bostik 2y agoThere are recruiting agencies who have tried this method: "Use AI to match the most relevant candidates to the job spec you gave us." Spoiler alert, it doesn't work. The result is a mountain of overfitted garbage, with keyword spamming like there was no tomorrow. And they all find the same unqualified candidates. If you're a recruiter, you're supposed to find the qualified, non-trivial to surface candidates. And yes, unfortunately that means it's a lot of hard work. (The top-notch agency recruiters value their personally built candidate networks for a good reason.)
- the_snooze 2y agoAs a hiring manager, I've chosen to opt out of this system altogether. Instead of public postings, I just poll my network and post job announcements in private channels in my professional community. Much higher signal-to-noise ratio.
- ghaff 2y agoYeah, a lot of people here hate this but the few jobs I've gotten in the past 25 years or so were always directly through people I knew. The resume was pretty much pro forma. But, yeah, if you don't have a network you're in a more difficult position.
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago>But, yeah, if you don't have a network you're in a more difficult position. The lesson people should take from this is you need to cultivate your network through your career. Sadly it seems most people would rather complain about how broken the system is.
- nsxwolf 2y agoI wish I knew how to find one of these channels. My real human professional network has slowly evaporated over the last decade.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoAdvice from an old guy that went through this after moving to a new area and loosing my phat California income eventually. If you aren't working, pickup consulting gigs. They will probably suck and be high stress low reward, but it will help you build connections locally. Look for ones that don't just need a body but that really need help so you are in a position where your work is visible. Heck once I got in most of the 'come in and clean up our mess' jobs wanted to hire me to manage their teams/projects. Not ideal but it paid well and I have a pretty limited pool of bog standard dev work (or worse, internal IT dev) where I live anyways.
- DavidDodda 2y agoI am with you on that. applying for jobs indiscriminately is bad. but right now llms have got to a point where they are pretty good at pattern matching job requirements with skills in my resume. it's smart enough to not apply for php heavy projects/jobs when given a MERN stack developer resume. I saw this as a marketing kind of problem, your conversion is based both on number and quality of your leads.
- vunderba 2y agoWith automated hiring spam and our industry's tenuous grasp of basic integrity with actual HN posts proudly boasting of their apps to help you cheat during interviews using LLMs, several of my friends who assist in hiring at their companies have already returned to "on site" interviews to cut down on the proverbial chaff. The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are being performed at shared workspaces. That's the world we live in now.
- Der_Einzige 2y agoThinking that "in person" will stop or prevent cheating is laughable. For god-sakes, the chess world is freaking out over an ANAL BEADS cheating scandal! https://kotaku.com/chess-champion-anal-bead-magnus-carlsen-hans-niemann-1849542639 https://kotaku.com/chess-champion-anal-bead-magnus-carlsen-h... https://github.com/RonSijm/ButtFish https://github.com/RonSijm/ButtFish A candidate who wants that job will figure out some way to have ChatGPT help them in a way you can't detect, even if it also has an impact on their ass health.
- dustyventure 2y agoIf you are dumb enough not to hire someone who is able to integrate ChatGPT from analbeads into a conversation while looking natural then that is on you.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoAs long as the interviewee also reports to work with their anal AI interface, what's the problem ?
- godelski 2y agoYou're right, you can't ever stop cheating. That's not the point. The point is to make it harder & more expensive. To make it not worth it. Your comment is like "why use AES256? People can still brute force it." Sure... good luck
- nsxwolf 2y agoI’d be absolutely fine going in person to interview for a remote job if I thought I had any reasonable chance of success with your process. We are talking about where I’m going to be working for at least the next few years. That’s kind of a big deal.
- neofrommatrix 2y agoWhat I find most infuriating is that people just don’t care, even when faced with enough evidence that their strategy of mass applying even when they are not a good fit is failing. It just makes it harder for everybody else as you said.
- plagiarist 2y agoThis is the human condition. "If everyone would just," but everyone will not just. All of civilization is full of these tragedies of the commons.
- uncomplexity_ 2y agoit's number's game anyway on who gets the initial interviews hate the game playa ;)
- ghaff 2y agoIt all ends up being a nasty feedback loop. (Especially) junior people in a somewhat tough market for tech end up spamming resumes so companies respond with pretty crappy algorithmic filters which basically somewhat randomly toss most of the resumes into the bit bucket. Rinse and repeat. But per downthread comment, applicants don't care if their actions make things worse for the market as a whole. And it's not clear if they should as a one-turn game. (As someone else remarked, Prisoner's Dilemma and all that.)
- programjames 2y agoThere's actually a solution around this: name and shame! Just like bad companies get called out on GlassDoor, companies should create a reputation system for prospective employees (e.g. a professional credit score). This already exists for potential tenants, so I don't really understand why it doesn't exist for potential employees given they occur at about the same frequency and have a similar amount of money trading hands.
- ghaff 2y agoApplicants have long sprayed and prayed even when it involved sending physical letters. Some of the current systems have decreased the effort per company applied-to but, for entry-level employees, it was rarely a carefully-targeted thing for new professionals. It was always a numbers game to some degree although admittedly the scale and tools involved have changed.
- programjames 2y agoThe smaller scale in the past made it so managers either knew (at least by reputation) the person submitting the resume, or it was not too expensive to find out. Nowadays, jobs are getting 100x as many applications, most of which are far lower in quality. University admissions has followed a similar trend, going from 5–10 being "spray and pray" twenty years ago to 20–30 applications nowadays. However, it didn't increase as much because (1) each application costs money, and (2) most universities expect a cover letter. It still costs quite a bit to filter the applicants, but the fee helps pay for that.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoMaybe not your company, but it seems hiring companies brought this upon themselves with immediate AI rejects of qualified candidates, ghost jobs, ghosting candidates after interview, etc, etc. If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to land a single interview, then can you blame someone for automating it? I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already found a job!
- deepsquirrelnet 2y agoFor sure, I’d hire this guy. He’s solved a challenge with a technical solution. He’s proving his qualifications by punching back at a system that could be made much less painful than it is with automation. Now it’s ATS’s turn to fix its own mess or someone else will. Start creating private benchmarks. Select from problems that LLMs can’t easily answer and use those for screening. Complaining that the genie won’t go back into the bottle isn’t a productive use of time.
- xingped 2y ago100%, this is a natural reaction to the situation companies have created. When you get a rejection response mere minutes after submission that claims "after careful consideration..." then of course I'm not going to spend any more time than that applying to any jobs anymore. Prove a human actually took the time to review my resume and I'll actually apply to your company like a human.
- maccard 2y agoIf I get 500 applications to a role and spend 1 minute writing each person a personalised no sorry, that’s 20% of my week just writing rejection emails (never mind actually reviewing the resume). I’ve hired for 3 companies for engineers from entry level to staff level, and for non technical candidates for other departments. Applicant tracking systems like greenhouse send me an email for every application that comes through, you get the resume and cover letter attached. There’s a reject candidate button where you choose why, and it auto fills in the template for you with the reason you selected (and the email was pre written). Don’t mistake an automated email for assuming your resume wasn’t looked at.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago'We can use automation tools to just throw away your resume, but heaven forbid the average person does' isn't a take average people care about. I look forward to the day the average person has the same level of access to agents to counter all this. Oh, Wall Street Journal you want to make it difficult to unsubscribe? You want me to call, waste time on the phone, etc. OK, I'll just have my AI agent call and take up your calling agents time, increasing your costs. ... my AI agent goes through phone tree... finally connected to agent... WSJ Support Person:'Hello, Wall Street Journal support' My AI Agent: 'please hold as I connect with my human' hold music plays... My AI Agent: 'sorry, we are taking longer to connect than normal, please hold while you are connected' hold music plays...
- sensanaty 2y agoI've had situations where a reapplication to the same spot (with the same resume/details) I got auto-rejected from would yield an acceptance. I blame all the ASTs and companies that fail to give any feedback whatsoever other than a generic "We went another way". If you can't give people the 5 minutes of effort of looking over their resume, why do you expect them to respect your time instead?
- highcountess 2y agoI am sure it’s tough for you, but imagine being someone looking for work when you probably don’t even realize the massive amounts of noise on the employee side. I get friends asking me for input on whether I think that a job listing may be a fraudulent or scammy listing, and that’s from the top job board sites. People have zero trust in the system because the corporations have created this toxic hell of commoditized humans where you are now all the sudden competing with the whole rest of the world in this poss as t-American transitional hell we are currently in. There have been posts here on HN about people applying to 500 jobs in 8 months and not even getting so much as a human reply, let alone a job. There are other posts proving that companies are posting false job openings to give the impression of growth to Wall Street or also just to argue that more immigration is needed. You may complain about it, but just be happy you haven’t been replaced by AI application reviewers, because that is coming. I suggest you start thinking about pairing down expenses and increasing savings. No, seriously. Worst case, you have more savings.
- Aurornis 2y agoPublic job board listings have always been flooded with low-effort spam applicants, but AI tools have supercharged the problem. The saddest part to me is watching the AI and social media malaise infect young mentees. I’ve been doing volunteer mentoring for years. Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max. It’s sad to see smart, motivated young people get their opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit and TikTok, which teach them that trying is lame and the only way to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a job, lie your way through interviews, and “quiet quit” by testing the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok swoop in to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies and CEOs, not their own decisions. The recent tech recession was a huge wake up call for a lot of these people. The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug malaise to being very humbled when they got laid off due to their own low performance. It’s depressing for me and other mentors who have been trying to warn that workplace behavior has consequences for years, but the weird tech market of 2021 and 2022 led a lot of young people to think the worst thing that could happen to them was that they’d get fired and get a new job next week with a 20% raise. The new version of this malaise is believing that AI will take their jobs anyway so the game is to use LLMs to bluff your way through applications, through interviews, and then use LLMs to coast as long as possible at their jobs until the next one. The problem is so bad that one company withdrew from partnering in our internal job board, citing rampant LLM-generated applications and obvious LLM cheating in interviews. The other side of this is that anyone who makes any effort to be genuine and learn (rather than rely on LLMs for communication and coding) is automatically in the top 25% or so. I don’t know how this ends. My sense is that the job market is continuing to bifurcate into jobs that people take seriously on one end and jobs where everyone just does performative LLM ping-pong as long as they can get away with it.
- saagarjha 2y ago> The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug malaise to being very humbled when they got laid off due to their own low performance. I saw people doing great get laid off all the same. Not really how things should work, should it?
- linkjuice4all 2y ago
- carlosjobim 2y ago> But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want. Job seekers do not care and should not care what you want. They want the job, you are paid to find the best candidate. Just arriving at a situation where you get flooded with hundreds of resumes, means that you or your organisation has failed with what you were trying to do. You should have had hand picked candidates ready in the pipeline when it came time to hire. You are a hiring manager after all.
- _Algernon_ 2y ago>But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want. This is just a natural response to the automatic screening methods that have been used by the hiring side for years. Finally the sides have more equal power again in this arms race started by the hiring side. Of course the consequence is that everyone loses and is worse off than if this arms race never started, but you (not you personally, hiring managers in general) should have thought about that before screening automatically. This is on you.
- throwawayq3423 2y agoExactly. I've referred many ex-colleagues to a specific position, their CV was perfect but an automated system rejected them so that was that. I can't even as a human being go talk to the director because the applicant status was "rejected" so their hands were tied too. It's absurd, and only getting worse.
- anarticle 2y agoToo bad, fix hiring. A five interview cycle that takes nearly two weeks which keeps me from applying to other companies who are shitting up job listings with fake or ghost listings is reducing the SNR of hiring dramatically. The solution is likely some kind of highly curated list you have to pay to be on, for both sides to increase signal and get rid of scammers. Many friends of mine have gone down the line of replying to recruiters only to be met with “contract to hire <20% of market rate and you must move to Nowhere, MN” when clearly your profile says what metro you are attached to. Things are gonna be worse longer I think. Leaning hard on my network.
- itronitron 2y agoMost (not all) position descriptions for software engineers include requirements for experience with particular tools, applications, or 'frameworks'. Would you hire a statistician that didn't have 'n' years of MS Excel experience, or had never used Pandas? If I were a statistician with 20 years experience, would I even apply to positions listing those as requirements? It's an interesting problem, as giving information on the position requirements clues applicants into the game they need to play and also runs the risk of turning some otherwise qualified people away.
- la64710 2y agoWhat exactly you can do as a HM to make the life of a job seeker easy? I dare say nothing except to just make the quality of response better. Even after six rounds of interviews candidates who are not selected get not a single honest useful feedback and is treated like human scrap with a soulless rejection. Beleive me as a job applicant I have zero sympathy for the corporates that hire me and I will use every thing at my disposal including AI to be more efficient in any way I deem fit. The job is just a business transaction to me and I don’t care about your high and mighty lecture as a HM. GTFO.
- ajmurmann 2y agoI also wonder how many applications are from people who just send applications to hit the minimum needed to receive unemployment but don't actually want the specific job.