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As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become. We had 1200 app

by jofer 1y ago

As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become. We had 1200 applications for an extremely niche role. A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. Another huge portion were just unqualified. The irony is that there actually _are_ a ton of exceptionally qualified candidates right now due to the various layoffs at government labs. We actually _do_ want folks with an academic research background. I am quite certain that the applicant pool contained a lot of those folks and others that we really wanted to interview. However, in practice, we couldn't find folks we didn't already know because various keyword-focused searches and AI filtering tend to filter out the most qualified candidates. We got a ton of spam applications, so we couldn't manually filter. The filtering HR does doesn't help. All of the various attempts to meaningfully review the full candidate pool in the time we had just failed. (Edit: "Just failed" is a bit unfair. There was a lot of effort put in and some good folks found that way, but certainly not every resume was actually reviewed.) What finally happened is that we mostly interviewed the candidates we knew about through other channels. E.g. folks who had applied before and e-mailed one of us they were applying again. Former co-workers from other companies. Folks we knew through professional networks. That was a great pool of applicants, but I am certain we missed a ton of exceptional folks whose applications no actual person even saw. The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism. If you don't already know someone working at the company, your resume will probably never be seen. I really feel hiring is in a much worse state than it was about 5 years ago. I don't know how to fix it. We're just back to what it was 20+ years ago. It's 100% who you know.

rubidium 1y ago
It’s pretty much always who you know… at least to get a showing. It’s rare in history to find counter examples. And in a LLM fueled world it’s going to be more important. Companies can improve by ensuring they don’t hire _because_ of whom someone knows. It should only ever let you get in the room to interview. So practical advice of what to do: be human. Get to know people. Care. Your time to do this is not when you’re looking for a job, but when you’re in a job.
- Retric 1y ago
  Vetted resumes seem like a real solution here, the issue is incentives. One possibility for a free and impartial services would be via government funding. Unemployment insurance is paying out a few hundred per week per person, cutting that time down even a little could pay for a decent background check. That doesn’t get you a job specific resume but it should be good enough for an initial screening for most jobs.
- ivape 1y ago
  I've never gotten a job from someone I know. I've heard it my whole life but I've always went in solo to a number of jobs big and small. In fact, I personally find it kind of not respectable in some weird way (leaning on others for something I naively still hold onto as a merit-based system. People that break this value break what makes the system good), but I'm obviously biased from having always gone into an interview knowing only myself and what I know.
- endemic 1y ago
  This is my anecdotal experience too. There's a (non-sequential) human thread that connects all my work experience. Ironically the exception was my very first development job, which was a blind application.
b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
Would you have found it reasonable for interested candidates to have reached out directly instead of just submitting a resume to the ATS? With the AI spam etc. it feels like the usefulness of these automated systems is quickly diminishing. Hiring feels broken right now.
- atoav 1y ago
  What does "reaching out directly" mean?
  - jppope 1y ago
    this means finding a way to directly reach out to the hiring manager. like sending an email, asking a colleague for an introduction, sending a linkedin message, etc
  - marc_abonce 1y ago
    I assume that they mean sending either a direct Linkedin message or an email to the recruiter or hiring manager. When I was recently unemployed I started doing that after months of getting ignored by most companies and, in my experience, the only difference is that I got far more acks ("Hi! Sure, I'll take a look at your resume and reach out!") but I got a similar rate of applications-to-interview compared to applying through the official platforms.
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    At this point, probably forming a line on the door of the hiring manager.
- ThrowawayR2 1y ago
  > "Would you have found it reasonable for interested candidates to have reached out directly..." If that worked, someone would automate a way to bulk spam that too.
- staticautomatic 1y ago
  In theory, sure, but in reality, please god no. 99% of LinkedIn messages you get as a hiring manager are “Hi I applied to your role”, “Hi I applied to your role and I’d be a great fit when can we talk?”, “Hi I’m really interested in learning about your work can we meet for coffee?”, or “Hi I’d be a great fit for your role because <insert enormous AI-written cover letter>.”
jppope 1y ago
> The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism Just want to comment on this, because I think think favoring unknown candidates is a mistake we make too often, and in fact the "normal" process is a disaster on both sides for this reason. Nepotism or Cronyism is granting resources, patronage, jobs to someone you know instead of a qualified candidate. In many industries this is how they function because qualifications and skill provide little to no differentiation (Think knowing Microsoft word and having a comms degree with no work experience). In high skill industries where experience is hard fought... people know the who the "people" are because they stick out like sore thumbs. If your hiring process at work is throw up a job on indeed and see what resumes come through, your company likely isn't worth working at anyway because the best candidates aren't randos. Think of it this way if you were putting together the Manhattan project again would you recruit the people with a stellar reputation in physics, engineering, manufacturing, etc OR would you throw up a job on a job board or your corporate site and see what comes back? The difference is active vs passive, good reputation vs no reputation (or a bad reputation). Not trying to make a big semantic argument... I just want to say that things like reputation and network matter... and thats not really "nepotism"
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  > I just want to say that things like reputation and network matter... and thats not really "nepotism" I strongly agree with this, and I'm glad you put it so clearly. If you've been in your industry say 10 years or more, you should have built a reputation by that point that makes people say "I want to work with that person again, or I'd recommend that person to a friend who has a job opening". (Important thing to clarify, though, I'm not denigrating anyone who has been out of work a long time. I've seen many categories of jobs in the tech industry where there are simply a lot fewer jobs to go around - it's musical chairs and a lot of chairs got taken away all at once). I would put in an important caveat, though, and that's for people who are early in their careers. The hiring process really is truly shitty for people just entering the workforce and for people with only one or two jobs under their belt.
  - em-bee 1y ago
    building that reputation is harder than it sounds. you don't always work in positions where you have contact to other people that could build up your reputation. i was a contractor for a small company for 10 years. i had little contact with the employees in that company, only working with the boss. the boss was nice but he had no useful contacts into the industry. the employees that i did have contact with were to low in the hierarchy that they could provide meaningful connections even after they changed jobs. how am i supposed to build up a reputation with that?
jonkho 1y ago
Use hiring brokers. The good ones will vet the candidates and verify them. Job seekers should also consider seeking representation from top tier brokers.
- harimau777 1y ago
  Any suggestion on good brokers?
  - Avicebron 1y ago
    Iceberg Slim?
hansvm 1y ago
I must be missing something. 1200 real applications are hard to sort through. 1200 mostly fake applications are much easier. Hiring is a high-leverage activity, and it's absolutely worth spending a couple hours going through those by hand.
- saulpw 1y ago
  For 1200 applications, a couple hours translates to less than 10 seconds per application. In the age of LLMs, why do you think you'd be able to discern whether an application was fake in 10 seconds? Remember, it's not "obviously fake", it's "designed to con you" fake.
  - jofer 1y ago
    ^ This. Exactly. Low value comment on my part, but as the OP in this case, I feel the need to say that this is the exact issue. The "smell test" takes longer than you think and often involves an actual interview.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    How about 50 per hour? That's just 24 hours of work and a reasonable first look at one minute for each application. Very little time to spend for an important company decision which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
    - Balgair 1y ago
      That's a half week of work without breaks at one resume per minute-ish. I agree that it is a very important decision, but that's also unreasonable for a manager to set time aside to look through. You've just set the other projects that you're already behind on (that's why you need to hire in the first place) back another half week or so. It's like a reverse rocket equation here. You need time to make more time, so you take time, but that time needs time, so ... The cost isn't really borne by the hiring manager though, it's just their budget (that they argued for) that they need to spend down. The decision makers really don't care that much about the numbers, just that they don't go over.
prawn 1y ago
I haven't applied for a job since the 1990s so I'd be out of the loop, but what are the faked resumes trying to achieve? Just get in a role and get paid before being found out? Are they trying to find brief or lazy interviewing processes? Do they only target remote positions?
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  When the requirements of every single job are impossible, people will lie. Several people have been recommending candidates to lie for IT-related jobs for a long time now, and honestly, I think the vast majority of positions have such a crazy set of requirements that they only get the lairs.
  - bell-cot 1y ago
    Amusing Idea: Advertise three vaguely-similar positions, only one of them real. Specify impossible-for-honest-humans requirements for the fake two. Then discard all applicants for the real position who also claimed to be qualified for a fake one.
    - sfink 1y ago
      Strict honesty here has always been a losing proposition. The "requirements" section of a job posting has almost never been accurate. It's more of an image they're painting. An honest applicant is one who reads the whole description to understand as best they can what the company is looking for, and sort of holistically matches their own expertise against that picture. If the job posting lists requirements A-F and you have A, B, D, E, and F, then you'd do both yourself and the company a disservice by disqualifying yourself. Put it in your cover letter if you can't handle the discrepancy. I'm not going to address either the morality or advisability of being "dishonest" by this standard. I've just seen too many people sell themselves short, when in fact they are exactly what the company is looking for, it's just that the recruiter wasn't able to spell that out in the job description. And it's not necessarily because they were stupid either; if they only put the true minimum necessary criteria into a job post, then (1) they'll get flooded with underqualified candidates who don't even come close to what they need, and (2) they may very well miss out on good candidates because the job looks lame. Source: I've been on both ends. As a candidate, I mentioned during the interview that I actually had no experience in the required technology X but I had related experience. The interviewer just laughed; it was obvious to both of us that it didn't matter. As someone offering a job (not the hiring manager but sort of), I talked to a couple of people who were hired into other roles in the company and asked why they didn't apply for our position, they seemed perfect for it (to me). Several of them pointed to some specific line item under the requirements that disqualified them. Sometimes it was an item that we'd removed later because we weren't getting enough people in, even though strictly speaking it was part of the job. We would sometimes push the recruiter to add "experience with X, or willing to learn X", but they would push back and honestly I'm not sure I know better than them. They were the ones who had to be the front line filtering through the noise resumes, after all.
eclipticplane 1y ago
The number of fake resumes is insane. During reviews I ended up passing a number of fake profiles through because their CVs looked real. None of them showed up to the initial screening call. There are now AI CVs mimicking real people, so the CVs point to real Linkedin profiles, Github profiles. Not sure what their end game is unless it's to continually test CV creation or find woefully inept companies that will hire them with limited vetting.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  > Not sure what their end game is unless it's to continually test CV creation or find woefully inept companies that will hire them with limited vetting. I wonder about (and didn't immediately find) case-studies that lay out the strategy of Resume Of Total Lies Dude, their expected payout before they get fired, etc.
- alimahmoudhu 1y ago
  > I ended up passing a number of fake profiles through because their CVs looked real. None of them showed up to the initial screening call. That's just crazy. Probably those were for collecting data to analyze what makes a CV pass. Mass apply everywhere, combine the results, and analyze the results manually or using LLMs. Selling these data can be profitable
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    It's also possible that they got a job elsewhere, and didn't follow up.
    - alimahmoudhu 1y ago
      Yeah, That would be more reasonable :)
BobbyTables2 1y ago
Been a couple of years since I last was an interviewer, but I’m always amazed at people who blatantly exaggerate in-depth experience while seeking a highly technical position. Job Requirements: Senior Staff, Deep technical work in X, Y, Z Resume: 10 years as tech lead in X, Y, Z Reality: Once walked near someone with experience in X, Y, Z and heard them sneeze loudly. Can spell X correctly. Why do they even bother?
- ok_dad 1y ago
  Usually you really don’t need that much experience. There are only a few percent of jobs will need very specialized folks, regardless of that description.
- lovich 1y ago
  > Why do they even bother? Because the job requirements on the position are likely to be real as the applicants accomplishments on their resume. At every company I’ve done hiring at my job descriptions for positions on my team were edited by my boss or hr and read like what was 1-2 levels above the nominal title of the position or had shit like the well worn joke of asking for X years of experience in technology that hadn’t existed for that long. The entire hiring market for tech at least has devolved into almost 100% noise over the last few years
about3fitty 1y ago
I wonder if we are back to “who you know” because of a couple of factors: 1. The risk of a bad hire is great, and this de-risks that 2. It facilitates more natural and spontaneous conversations, which for better or worse short-circuits a well crafted and pre-planned anti-bias interview process which can be too rigid for both parties to explore detail
ivape 1y ago
[flagged]
- mionhe 1y ago
  Hiring doesn't work like that. It's not like you glance at resumes then hire someone because what the paper says matches your job description. You spend a lot of time, if you're doing it right. Some resumes have everything you want, but aren't honest. Some resumes don't have everything, but they're pretty close, and worth the conversation. Some people seem perfect on paper but once you talk with them you realize (for whatever reason) that they don't fit. Even just a few applicants can take many hours of work before you can pick the one that fits best what you're looking for. If you're a team of 5, handling 1,200 resumes, how much money are you expected to invest in this process? Does everyone take a week off billable work so you can find someone? Can you afford that? With only a team of 5, probably not. We all want to feel like we're being treated well, but scolding someone because they were overwhelmed by the massive amount of adversarial spam they received for their job posting is a failure to put yourself in their shoes. Let's all be better people, here.
  - ivape 1y ago
    You and I both know the truth is in between both of our responses. It was worth discussing.
abathur 1y ago
This is probably crazy talk, but I have been wondering how requiring people to slap a stamp on an envelope and mail in a résumé would go.
- obruchez 1y ago
  The only time I had to hire somebody, the university I was working for in Switzerland made it mandatory for the candidates to send their application via mail, not email. That was back in 2014. I found this odd at the time, but I'm pretty sure it made my job way easier (less applications to review, motivated/serious candidates, etc.).
- __turbobrew__ 1y ago
  I don’t think it is crazy and I have suggested beforehand there needs to be some sort of proof of work on the candidate side to prevent resume spam. I think your idea is very elegant as everyone has access to the mail system, an actual stamp is pretty cheap, but it is just enough hassle to mail an application that it will filter out some of the spam. The other suggestion I have had is that candidates need to hand in the resume in person, but I guess you could accept resumes from both mail and in person drop offs.
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    > The other suggestion I have had is that candidates need to hand in the resume in person This might be a bigger lift than asking for a take-home project; if I'm expected to drop off a resume in Manhattan that's a minimum of a two hour trip for me. I'd rather spend two hours banging together a CRUD app to show that I can actually write code.
    - BetaDeltaAlpha 1y ago
      I read this as applying to in-office roles, If I were willing to commute, then it's a good chance to exercise the lift required.
  - lelanthran 1y ago
tarsinge 1y ago
On the hiring side too, and I really don’t understand the fake resume with AI trend. How can they possibly think they’ll pass the interview? Because when I’m hiring I find it very easy to spot someone lying when questioning to go into the details of past experiences. Maybe they are betting on a broken process? Maybe you can pass (dumb) HR filters with lies, but not real interviewers, at least from what I do and have seen.
- user1999919 1y ago
  > Because when I’m hiring I find it very easy to spot someone lying when questioning to go into the details of past experiences ain't nobody gonna get past the interview sheriff
- dentemple 1y ago
  It's because they're using AI for the interviews, too.
phendrenad2 1y ago
This was the problem recruiters were invented to fix, but somehow recruiters have moved on to fixing every problem BUT this one.
user1999919 1y ago
> clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. Then why would have unrealistic expectations in the ad?
eleveriven 1y ago
The fact that even well-meaning hiring managers can't see great candidates because of filtering overload says a lot about how dysfunctional the current system is
- apwell23 1y ago
  My previous job ( somewhat well known brand) got > 500 resumes within hours for a mid level position. My manager decided to close that job posting and found someone internally
cheema33 1y ago
> As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become. Same here. I have been hiring and it is a shit show. We advertise one position and get inundated with resumes. Many of these resume are complete fabrications, so we cannot rely on them at all. So we implemented a filter by asking candidates to do a small project. Candidates do not have to hand-code it. We encourage candidates to just use AI for the simple project. Only about 10% actually do the required work that typically takes 15-20 minutes to complete with AI assistance. Some get offended that we even dared ask them to take the assessment test and start using profanity to let their displeasure be known. Quite strange.
- apwell23 1y ago
  like captcha for resume
  - autoexec 1y ago
    You'd think that many sites would already be using a captcha before accepting an application
- Bolwin 1y ago
  When you're applying to hundreds of positions, 99% if which will auto reject you, it can be quite annoying if you're asked to do extra work before you've gotten any further in the process
monkeyelite 1y ago
Your use of nepotism is actually reputation.
ludicrousdispla 1y ago
>> clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic Can you elaborate on why you consider a close match to the job description to be unrealistic?
Rakshith 1y ago
[dead]
2ICofafireteam 1y ago
>A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. In government work programs in British Columbia, we were taught to address every point or requirement in a job listing that we could. Is this tactic clearly distinguishable from clearly faked?
jjav 1y ago
Going through this right now. I hired someone about 8 months ago and the process was still pretty normal. But for the role I opened last week, we are getting a ton of AI-written resumes that are just a rewrite of the job description. When I look many of these people up in linkedin, they often have jobs listed but completely empty descriptions of each job. I guess this is so they can have AI generate a rewrite of their resume based solely on the job description for every role they apply. This used to be too labor intensive to do, but now with AI it's easy to churn out a hundred of those a day. (The more careless ones leave their actual job description on linkedin and submit a resume with a wildly different version, which just happens to be a rewrite of our job description. At least those are easy to filter out.) While I don't like this, I'm finding that I need to find the person on linkedin, it must not be a recently created account and it must have a reasonably detailed description of what they did in each company and it must reasonably closely match the resume.
trod1234 1y ago
The problem today is AI makes everything worse. Its jamming communications channels, and what you get once those channels are saturated is the equivalent effect that you see in cellular networks culminating in RNA interference. No binding sites, no matches. Additionally, if competent people can't find work within 2 short years, they will leave that sector forever and retrain. They may have been rockstars, but that doesn't matter. No work, no food, bad investment. When you have coordinated layoffs across sectors you have a short period of time to scoop up the competent people. Its not immediately clear, but it seems like you either skipped over the part of filtering properly (and didn't do it?), or just jumped to this other strategy when what worked before no longer works. Instead of trying to wrangle the data, why didn't you put a physical barrier at the very beginning. A simple validation, this is your CV, you are this person, and you have a valid DL with that name, and then you whittle down from there.

by jofer 1y ago

rubidium 1y ago

It’s pretty much always who you know… at least to get a showing. It’s rare in history to find counter examples. And in a LLM fueled world it’s going to be more important. Companies can improve by ensuring they don’t hire _because_ of whom someone knows. It should only ever let you get in the room to interview. So practical advice of what to do: be human. Get to know people. Care. Your time to do this is not when you’re looking for a job, but when you’re in a job.

Retric 1y ago
Vetted resumes seem like a real solution here, the issue is incentives. One possibility for a free and impartial services would be via government funding. Unemployment insurance is paying out a few hundred per week per person, cutting that time down even a little could pay for a decent background check. That doesn’t get you a job specific resume but it should be good enough for an initial screening for most jobs.
ivape 1y ago
I've never gotten a job from someone I know. I've heard it my whole life but I've always went in solo to a number of jobs big and small. In fact, I personally find it kind of not respectable in some weird way (leaning on others for something I naively still hold onto as a merit-based system. People that break this value break what makes the system good), but I'm obviously biased from having always gone into an interview knowing only myself and what I know.
endemic 1y ago
This is my anecdotal experience too. There's a (non-sequential) human thread that connects all my work experience. Ironically the exception was my very first development job, which was a blind application.

b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago

Would you have found it reasonable for interested candidates to have reached out directly instead of just submitting a resume to the ATS? With the AI spam etc. it feels like the usefulness of these automated systems is quickly diminishing. Hiring feels broken right now.

atoav 1y ago
What does "reaching out directly" mean?
- jppope 1y ago
  this means finding a way to directly reach out to the hiring manager. like sending an email, asking a colleague for an introduction, sending a linkedin message, etc
- marc_abonce 1y ago
  I assume that they mean sending either a direct Linkedin message or an email to the recruiter or hiring manager. When I was recently unemployed I started doing that after months of getting ignored by most companies and, in my experience, the only difference is that I got far more acks ("Hi! Sure, I'll take a look at your resume and reach out!") but I got a similar rate of applications-to-interview compared to applying through the official platforms.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  At this point, probably forming a line on the door of the hiring manager.
ThrowawayR2 1y ago
> "Would you have found it reasonable for interested candidates to have reached out directly..." If that worked, someone would automate a way to bulk spam that too.
staticautomatic 1y ago
In theory, sure, but in reality, please god no. 99% of LinkedIn messages you get as a hiring manager are “Hi I applied to your role”, “Hi I applied to your role and I’d be a great fit when can we talk?”, “Hi I’m really interested in learning about your work can we meet for coffee?”, or “Hi I’d be a great fit for your role because <insert enormous AI-written cover letter>.”

jppope 1y ago

> The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism Just want to comment on this, because I think think favoring unknown candidates is a mistake we make too often, and in fact the "normal" process is a disaster on both sides for this reason. Nepotism or Cronyism is granting resources, patronage, jobs to someone you know instead of a qualified candidate. In many industries this is how they function because qualifications and skill provide little to no differentiation (Think knowing Microsoft word and having a comms degree with no work experience). In high skill industries where experience is hard fought... people know the who the "people" are because they stick out like sore thumbs. If your hiring process at work is throw up a job on indeed and see what resumes come through, your company likely isn't worth working at anyway because the best candidates aren't randos. Think of it this way if you were putting together the Manhattan project again would you recruit the people with a stellar reputation in physics, engineering, manufacturing, etc OR would you throw up a job on a job board or your corporate site and see what comes back? The difference is active vs passive, good reputation vs no reputation (or a bad reputation). Not trying to make a big semantic argument... I just want to say that things like reputation and network matter... and thats not really "nepotism"

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
> I just want to say that things like reputation and network matter... and thats not really "nepotism" I strongly agree with this, and I'm glad you put it so clearly. If you've been in your industry say 10 years or more, you should have built a reputation by that point that makes people say "I want to work with that person again, or I'd recommend that person to a friend who has a job opening". (Important thing to clarify, though, I'm not denigrating anyone who has been out of work a long time. I've seen many categories of jobs in the tech industry where there are simply a lot fewer jobs to go around - it's musical chairs and a lot of chairs got taken away all at once). I would put in an important caveat, though, and that's for people who are early in their careers. The hiring process really is truly shitty for people just entering the workforce and for people with only one or two jobs under their belt.
- em-bee 1y ago
  building that reputation is harder than it sounds. you don't always work in positions where you have contact to other people that could build up your reputation. i was a contractor for a small company for 10 years. i had little contact with the employees in that company, only working with the boss. the boss was nice but he had no useful contacts into the industry. the employees that i did have contact with were to low in the hierarchy that they could provide meaningful connections even after they changed jobs. how am i supposed to build up a reputation with that?

jonkho 1y ago

Use hiring brokers. The good ones will vet the candidates and verify them. Job seekers should also consider seeking representation from top tier brokers.

harimau777 1y ago
Any suggestion on good brokers?
- Avicebron 1y ago
  Iceberg Slim?

hansvm 1y ago

I must be missing something. 1200 real applications are hard to sort through. 1200 mostly fake applications are much easier. Hiring is a high-leverage activity, and it's absolutely worth spending a couple hours going through those by hand.

saulpw 1y ago
For 1200 applications, a couple hours translates to less than 10 seconds per application. In the age of LLMs, why do you think you'd be able to discern whether an application was fake in 10 seconds? Remember, it's not "obviously fake", it's "designed to con you" fake.
- jofer 1y ago
  ^ This. Exactly. Low value comment on my part, but as the OP in this case, I feel the need to say that this is the exact issue. The "smell test" takes longer than you think and often involves an actual interview.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  How about 50 per hour? That's just 24 hours of work and a reasonable first look at one minute for each application. Very little time to spend for an important company decision which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
  - Balgair 1y ago
    That's a half week of work without breaks at one resume per minute-ish. I agree that it is a very important decision, but that's also unreasonable for a manager to set time aside to look through. You've just set the other projects that you're already behind on (that's why you need to hire in the first place) back another half week or so. It's like a reverse rocket equation here. You need time to make more time, so you take time, but that time needs time, so ... The cost isn't really borne by the hiring manager though, it's just their budget (that they argued for) that they need to spend down. The decision makers really don't care that much about the numbers, just that they don't go over.

prawn 1y ago

I haven't applied for a job since the 1990s so I'd be out of the loop, but what are the faked resumes trying to achieve? Just get in a role and get paid before being found out? Are they trying to find brief or lazy interviewing processes? Do they only target remote positions?

marcosdumay 1y ago
When the requirements of every single job are impossible, people will lie. Several people have been recommending candidates to lie for IT-related jobs for a long time now, and honestly, I think the vast majority of positions have such a crazy set of requirements that they only get the lairs.
- bell-cot 1y ago
  Amusing Idea: Advertise three vaguely-similar positions, only one of them real. Specify impossible-for-honest-humans requirements for the fake two. Then discard all applicants for the real position who also claimed to be qualified for a fake one.
  - sfink 1y ago
    Strict honesty here has always been a losing proposition. The "requirements" section of a job posting has almost never been accurate. It's more of an image they're painting. An honest applicant is one who reads the whole description to understand as best they can what the company is looking for, and sort of holistically matches their own expertise against that picture. If the job posting lists requirements A-F and you have A, B, D, E, and F, then you'd do both yourself and the company a disservice by disqualifying yourself. Put it in your cover letter if you can't handle the discrepancy. I'm not going to address either the morality or advisability of being "dishonest" by this standard. I've just seen too many people sell themselves short, when in fact they are exactly what the company is looking for, it's just that the recruiter wasn't able to spell that out in the job description. And it's not necessarily because they were stupid either; if they only put the true minimum necessary criteria into a job post, then (1) they'll get flooded with underqualified candidates who don't even come close to what they need, and (2) they may very well miss out on good candidates because the job looks lame. Source: I've been on both ends. As a candidate, I mentioned during the interview that I actually had no experience in the required technology X but I had related experience. The interviewer just laughed; it was obvious to both of us that it didn't matter. As someone offering a job (not the hiring manager but sort of), I talked to a couple of people who were hired into other roles in the company and asked why they didn't apply for our position, they seemed perfect for it (to me). Several of them pointed to some specific line item under the requirements that disqualified them. Sometimes it was an item that we'd removed later because we weren't getting enough people in, even though strictly speaking it was part of the job. We would sometimes push the recruiter to add "experience with X, or willing to learn X", but they would push back and honestly I'm not sure I know better than them. They were the ones who had to be the front line filtering through the noise resumes, after all.

eclipticplane 1y ago

The number of fake resumes is insane. During reviews I ended up passing a number of fake profiles through because their CVs looked real. None of them showed up to the initial screening call. There are now AI CVs mimicking real people, so the CVs point to real Linkedin profiles, Github profiles. Not sure what their end game is unless it's to continually test CV creation or find woefully inept companies that will hire them with limited vetting.

Terr_ 1y ago
> Not sure what their end game is unless it's to continually test CV creation or find woefully inept companies that will hire them with limited vetting. I wonder about (and didn't immediately find) case-studies that lay out the strategy of Resume Of Total Lies Dude, their expected payout before they get fired, etc.
alimahmoudhu 1y ago
> I ended up passing a number of fake profiles through because their CVs looked real. None of them showed up to the initial screening call. That's just crazy. Probably those were for collecting data to analyze what makes a CV pass. Mass apply everywhere, combine the results, and analyze the results manually or using LLMs. Selling these data can be profitable
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  It's also possible that they got a job elsewhere, and didn't follow up.
  - alimahmoudhu 1y ago
    Yeah, That would be more reasonable :)

BobbyTables2 1y ago

Been a couple of years since I last was an interviewer, but I’m always amazed at people who blatantly exaggerate in-depth experience while seeking a highly technical position. Job Requirements: Senior Staff, Deep technical work in X, Y, Z Resume: 10 years as tech lead in X, Y, Z Reality: Once walked near someone with experience in X, Y, Z and heard them sneeze loudly. Can spell X correctly. Why do they even bother?

ok_dad 1y ago
Usually you really don’t need that much experience. There are only a few percent of jobs will need very specialized folks, regardless of that description.
lovich 1y ago
> Why do they even bother? Because the job requirements on the position are likely to be real as the applicants accomplishments on their resume. At every company I’ve done hiring at my job descriptions for positions on my team were edited by my boss or hr and read like what was 1-2 levels above the nominal title of the position or had shit like the well worn joke of asking for X years of experience in technology that hadn’t existed for that long. The entire hiring market for tech at least has devolved into almost 100% noise over the last few years

about3fitty 1y ago

I wonder if we are back to “who you know” because of a couple of factors: 1. The risk of a bad hire is great, and this de-risks that 2. It facilitates more natural and spontaneous conversations, which for better or worse short-circuits a well crafted and pre-planned anti-bias interview process which can be too rigid for both parties to explore detail

ivape 1y ago

[flagged]

mionhe 1y ago
Hiring doesn't work like that. It's not like you glance at resumes then hire someone because what the paper says matches your job description. You spend a lot of time, if you're doing it right. Some resumes have everything you want, but aren't honest. Some resumes don't have everything, but they're pretty close, and worth the conversation. Some people seem perfect on paper but once you talk with them you realize (for whatever reason) that they don't fit. Even just a few applicants can take many hours of work before you can pick the one that fits best what you're looking for. If you're a team of 5, handling 1,200 resumes, how much money are you expected to invest in this process? Does everyone take a week off billable work so you can find someone? Can you afford that? With only a team of 5, probably not. We all want to feel like we're being treated well, but scolding someone because they were overwhelmed by the massive amount of adversarial spam they received for their job posting is a failure to put yourself in their shoes. Let's all be better people, here.
- ivape 1y ago
  You and I both know the truth is in between both of our responses. It was worth discussing.

abathur 1y ago

This is probably crazy talk, but I have been wondering how requiring people to slap a stamp on an envelope and mail in a résumé would go.

obruchez 1y ago
The only time I had to hire somebody, the university I was working for in Switzerland made it mandatory for the candidates to send their application via mail, not email. That was back in 2014. I found this odd at the time, but I'm pretty sure it made my job way easier (less applications to review, motivated/serious candidates, etc.).
__turbobrew__ 1y ago
I don’t think it is crazy and I have suggested beforehand there needs to be some sort of proof of work on the candidate side to prevent resume spam. I think your idea is very elegant as everyone has access to the mail system, an actual stamp is pretty cheap, but it is just enough hassle to mail an application that it will filter out some of the spam. The other suggestion I have had is that candidates need to hand in the resume in person, but I guess you could accept resumes from both mail and in person drop offs.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  > The other suggestion I have had is that candidates need to hand in the resume in person This might be a bigger lift than asking for a take-home project; if I'm expected to drop off a resume in Manhattan that's a minimum of a two hour trip for me. I'd rather spend two hours banging together a CRUD app to show that I can actually write code.
  - BetaDeltaAlpha 1y ago
    I read this as applying to in-office roles, If I were willing to commute, then it's a good chance to exercise the lift required.
- lelanthran 1y ago

tarsinge 1y ago

On the hiring side too, and I really don’t understand the fake resume with AI trend. How can they possibly think they’ll pass the interview? Because when I’m hiring I find it very easy to spot someone lying when questioning to go into the details of past experiences. Maybe they are betting on a broken process? Maybe you can pass (dumb) HR filters with lies, but not real interviewers, at least from what I do and have seen.

user1999919 1y ago
> Because when I’m hiring I find it very easy to spot someone lying when questioning to go into the details of past experiences ain't nobody gonna get past the interview sheriff
dentemple 1y ago
It's because they're using AI for the interviews, too.

phendrenad2 1y ago

This was the problem recruiters were invented to fix, but somehow recruiters have moved on to fixing every problem BUT this one.

user1999919 1y ago

> clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. Then why would have unrealistic expectations in the ad?

eleveriven 1y ago

The fact that even well-meaning hiring managers can't see great candidates because of filtering overload says a lot about how dysfunctional the current system is

apwell23 1y ago
My previous job ( somewhat well known brand) got > 500 resumes within hours for a mid level position. My manager decided to close that job posting and found someone internally

cheema33 1y ago

> As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become. Same here. I have been hiring and it is a shit show. We advertise one position and get inundated with resumes. Many of these resume are complete fabrications, so we cannot rely on them at all. So we implemented a filter by asking candidates to do a small project. Candidates do not have to hand-code it. We encourage candidates to just use AI for the simple project. Only about 10% actually do the required work that typically takes 15-20 minutes to complete with AI assistance. Some get offended that we even dared ask them to take the assessment test and start using profanity to let their displeasure be known. Quite strange.

apwell23 1y ago
like captcha for resume
- autoexec 1y ago
  You'd think that many sites would already be using a captcha before accepting an application
Bolwin 1y ago
When you're applying to hundreds of positions, 99% if which will auto reject you, it can be quite annoying if you're asked to do extra work before you've gotten any further in the process

monkeyelite 1y ago

Your use of nepotism is actually reputation.

ludicrousdispla 1y ago

>> clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic Can you elaborate on why you consider a close match to the job description to be unrealistic?

Rakshith 1y ago

[dead]

2ICofafireteam 1y ago

>A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. In government work programs in British Columbia, we were taught to address every point or requirement in a job listing that we could. Is this tactic clearly distinguishable from clearly faked?

jjav 1y ago

Going through this right now. I hired someone about 8 months ago and the process was still pretty normal. But for the role I opened last week, we are getting a ton of AI-written resumes that are just a rewrite of the job description. When I look many of these people up in linkedin, they often have jobs listed but completely empty descriptions of each job. I guess this is so they can have AI generate a rewrite of their resume based solely on the job description for every role they apply. This used to be too labor intensive to do, but now with AI it's easy to churn out a hundred of those a day. (The more careless ones leave their actual job description on linkedin and submit a resume with a wildly different version, which just happens to be a rewrite of our job description. At least those are easy to filter out.) While I don't like this, I'm finding that I need to find the person on linkedin, it must not be a recently created account and it must have a reasonably detailed description of what they did in each company and it must reasonably closely match the resume.

trod1234 1y ago

The problem today is AI makes everything worse. Its jamming communications channels, and what you get once those channels are saturated is the equivalent effect that you see in cellular networks culminating in RNA interference. No binding sites, no matches. Additionally, if competent people can't find work within 2 short years, they will leave that sector forever and retrain. They may have been rockstars, but that doesn't matter. No work, no food, bad investment. When you have coordinated layoffs across sectors you have a short period of time to scoop up the competent people. Its not immediately clear, but it seems like you either skipped over the part of filtering properly (and didn't do it?), or just jumped to this other strategy when what worked before no longer works. Instead of trying to wrangle the data, why didn't you put a physical barrier at the very beginning. A simple validation, this is your CV, you are this person, and you have a valid DL with that name, and then you whittle down from there.