8 ms·

The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

113 points by ChrisArchitect 5mo ago

buffer_overlord 5mo ago
Hiring was broken long before ai
- ghaff 5mo ago
  Much of it has been based on networking for a good 20+ years. Yes, there was a certain if you have a pulse era in tech at at a lot of companies--leet code notwithstanding though that was an issue--that has largely passed and a lot of people are reacting to tech hiring becoming a more normal multi-month process.
  - buffer_overlord 5mo ago
    I told the last recruiter who had a six week interview process “I’m not waiting that long when I can literally clone your product in a weekend for $50
    - ghaff 5mo ago
      That's nice. But a lot of people looking for professional jobs may take a year+ to find a position.
      - buffer_overlord 5mo ago
        Been 3 years for me so far
- metalspot 5mo ago
  AI and remote interviewing have definitely exacerbated the problems that existed before though. Leetcode was always weak, but now that it is easy to cheat on it is a negative selector, because the cheaters do best. Leetcode was originally supposed to be done in-person on a whiteboard to assess a candidate's collaborative problem solving skills, but with remote interviewing it has evolved into writing passing code with minimal or no feedback. The real problem is that engineering departments are now filled with leetcode grinders and cheaters, who all live in permanent fear of being replaced by AI, and so any candidate who doesn't fit that paradigm is a threat that must be eliminated at all costs.
  - nobodywillobsrv 5mo ago
    Yes. People are gatekeeping. They are not interviewing with the aim of having an interesting conversation. They are trying to block hiring.
    - buffer_overlord 5mo ago
      I agree they don’t want someone good who will be competing with them and they don’t want someone junior who will require more hand holding
- maximinus_thrax 5mo ago
  There's a spectrum of 'broken' and AI made it worse
- cryo32 5mo ago
  Yes they just automated the broken now.
ungreased0675 5mo ago
Good hiring almost certainly has to be a significant competitive advantage. It makes me wonder why so many otherwise successful companies let HR bungle the hiring process.
- stackskipton 5mo ago
  Because like a lot of things, metric of "What does recruiting cost us?" is very easy number to quantify so companies will attempt to reduce it. "What does bad recruiting cost us?" is very hard number to quantify because it's just sand that gets thrown into so many gears, but cost of that sand is across a ton of departments and so measuring for it is very difficult.
  - dasil003 5mo ago
    Huh? Hiring being broken has nothing to do with cost, it's a filtering problem. Even when there's no HR or bean counter in sight it's still hard. There's fundamentally limited signal you can extract from interviews, so there's very loose correlation to on-the-job performance. Saying it's a cost-cutting problem would just encourage more and longer interviews, which could actually work against you because high performers tend to have more options and will not jump through infinite hoops.
    - maccard 5mo ago
      > High performers tend to have more options and will not jump through infinite hoops. Biases are a strange thing. “High performers” aren’t one homogenous group; take a staff engineer at a FAANG and plop them in a role at a startup or vice versa and you’ll find very quickly that high performers are a product of environment (IME). The people you need to ship something at a big company will sink your startup, and the people who will lead a startup to unicorn levels of success will flounder in frustration in a big corp. Finding high performers is really hard, as you said it’s a filtering problem, and it’s very much based on vibes and feelings. Leetcode, take home tests, on site tests, discussions about projects all filter for specific things - some or many of which aren’t related to the job at hand. If we removed the “risk of leaving current job element” the only way to do it would be to give someone a 3 month trial and see if they’re a fit. Honestly you probably know in your gut by week 2 if it’s going to work or not.
jerlendds 5mo ago
https://archive.ph/Pfl79 https://archive.ph/Pfl79
josefrichter 5mo ago
It wasn't broken before?
Aurornis 5mo ago
> “There is a growing gap between the candidate’s written persona and their live presence. I’ll see a cover letter that is poetic and a résumé that is flawlessly structured, but then the person on the video call struggles to explain their own bullet points. This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”. I can remember a few interviews where I asked candidates about something I read on their resume (which I study before every call) and they corrected me to explain that they did something different. Then I held up their resume and pointed to their exact words and they turned bright red while they tried to come up with a new explanation. That was rare, though. You could catch a lot of little cases of stretching the truth, but it wasn’t common to feel like you were reading a resume that didn’t match the candidate. What has changed in the age of AI is that more people are feeling more brazen about letting the AI speak for them. These situations are happening more frequently. You get the feeling that people are less shy about trying to cheat and manipulate because it feels like the AI is doing the cheating and writing the words, so it’s done at arm’s length. I spend some time helping with resume reviews occasionally. It’s getting sad to see in the general discussion of the group when people go from elated that they got an interview for their dream job to embarrassed when the interviewers saw right through their AI written resume and ended the hiring cycle. I wonder if we’re seeing a peak in AI resume junk while everyone tries it out, but before it becomes common knowledge that an AI junk resume is a way to shoot yourself in the foot when applying to companies you actually want to work for.
- binary132 5mo ago
  The bigger issue is the screening filters are flooded now (and also largely AI “enhanced”) so getting real signal through the noise is becoming basically impossible.
  - sivalus 5mo ago
    I think we'll just end up going back to referrals. It might generate more nepotism, but at least the company will feel like it's doing a better job and not cause it to overly focus on hiring to the detriment of its current employees.
watwut 5mo ago
The premise of "flawless prose in cover letter and resume used to show work-quality of candidate rather their ability fine tune prose on resume" is dubious.
fzeroracer 5mo ago
I'm thinking back to a recent interview I had. It was one of those online coding tests; after spending about an hour and a half on it I sent it back to the recruiter and they came back to me saying I didn't pass because I 'only' got an 80% despite passing all criteria in the worst working environment possible. This was a no-AI test too so I unfortunately respected the criteria. So many interviews still demand absolute perfection so they just optimize for people that are dishonest and get away with it.
- btrettel 5mo ago
  I had a similar experience before [1]. I fully agree that too many interview tests select for dishonest people. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35496976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35496976
jeffrallen 5mo ago
I'm recruiting for apprentices right now. By definition, they have almost nothing to put on their CVs, and thus their CVs are more or less identical, or rather all of them have almost zero signal. We took a chance on a flash recruiting session our canton organized. 35 interviews in 2 hr 15 mins. Crazy. But excellent signal, because if you are looking for it, and give the candidate a hint to show it ("tell me a story about how you solved a computer problem for your self/friend/family/club"), you can find the candidates with a spark. And I would not have detected it from their CVs or cover letter alone. More human connection. Less machines. There, I fixed it for you.
nobodywillobsrv 5mo ago
Interviews, all of them, should be working on problem with and agent and a human interviewer. Just had a "guess the teachers password" moment at some interview as a senior and the interviewer didn't understand my answer and didn't ask questions. The problem is incentives. A lot of people probably need to be fired who are gate keeping by blocking hiring. All interviews should be bilateral win win recommendation chats. They should not end because one person didn't understand the other or someone who was not yet interested in the job did g remember some weird detail of something. Our memories are getting worse with AI and augmentation. We need to judge marginal add and make recommendations.
Ozzie-D 5mo ago
[flagged]
ElProlactin 5mo ago
> Google, McKinsey, and other companies have responded by reintroducing in-person interviews for some candidates, a meaningful step backward in efficiency (due to travel time and costs) that signals how seriously they are treating this problem. Maybe the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" at all costs has broken the world? I remember when I applied for my first job. I got dressed up and my mom drove me to the interview because I didn't have a driver's license or car at the time. It wasn't "efficient" for me and I suppose it wasn't "efficient" for the company but much to my surprise, I got an offer and that was my first "tech job"...before tech jobs were cool. It's very strange that the authors talk about how "making a bad hire is terribly expensive" but then call out "travel time and costs". Well, if B < A for each role filled, is it really so bad? And yeah, I get that huge companies like Google and Facebook hire from around the world and not everyone is located in close proximity to Mountain View and Palo Alto, but that speaks more to the oligopolistic world we're living in than anything else. If a small number of companies weren't distorting the labor markets, this might matter less.
- tracerbulletx 5mo ago
  In the not too distant past (like 10 years ago) flying people to a final in person round was standard practice.
  - DonsDiscountGas 5mo ago
    Standard and expensive (in terms of time and money) for both the company and the applicant
    - wiseowise 5mo ago
      Well, maybe some things should be expensive.
    - ElProlactin 5mo ago
      If the cost of hiring the wrong person is huge, the cost (in terms of time and money) of conducting on-site interviews is almost certainly lower. Also, in terms of the costs to the applicants, this touches on the oligopolistic nature of so many industries today, which has resulted in high concentrations of the most desirable jobs in places with the highest costs of living. Basically, unless you already have a FAANG job or are independently wealthy, it's not easy to up and move to Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc. and job hunt.
dweinus 5mo ago
> "The conversational interview, long considered the ultimate, unhackable test of a candidate’s authenticity" Lol. I'm not sure this person has ever given an interview before
paulbgd 5mo ago
As an engineer working on my company’s top of funnel it’s tough. Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call. Async technical challenges are obviously gamed but you’d be surprised at how few people both cheat + take longer than 3m to submit the solution
- clates 5mo ago
  > Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call. Funny because I do the same; I don't commit to doing any work/assessments before at least an honest interview round. Businesses have to understand that _they_ are the ones who have to solve for the filtering problem. Most great candidates that you are hoping to snipe are already in a stable job and do not _have_ to jump through hoops to get past a filter.
  - ralferoo 5mo ago
    I have done programming assessments, but I've probably only done 3 in the last 20 years, and those I strictly limited to 1 hour and told the recruiters that I wouldn't spend any longer than that. I've also flat out refused to proceed with least 5 jobs when recruiters have contacted me, tried to tempt me with a job and then sent through a 3 hour coding test. I've got better things to do with my free time than toy programming puzzles.
  - paulbgd 5mo ago
    We’ll skip it based off other signals (referrals notably) of course, but if we offered an interview to every candidate based off their resume we’d never get around to interviewing the good candidates. I don’t like the idea of a technical challenge at the start, but as someone who was discovered way back via skills and not a fancy resume I want to continue offering others the same chance as me.
- jgafni 5mo ago
  Are you picking a problem candidates can easily cheat on? Could Claude produce the answer in 30 seconds? If so, what's the test actually measuring? The setups I've seen produce the strongest signal aren't the ones where the candidate can't see the answer that AI produces easily. They're the ones where there is no single answer. Architecture decisions. How you would investigate an outage. How you would tradeoff one constraint against another. The candidate can spend an hour with Claude on it beforehand and it doesn't matter, because the test isn't "did you get the answer," it's "can you talk through the reasoning" and "can I trust your judgement." Hearing someone explain their thinking on an open problem is a much harder thing to fake. Even if they used an assistant to structure their initial pass, the live unpacking reveals where the thinking is theirs and where it isn't.
Simulacra 5mo ago
I have very little sympathy for companies grappling with this. They use AI to reject applicants within seconds, and make people jump through so many hoops (not to mention ghost jobs) that it's almost a humiliation ritual.
- maccard 5mo ago
  Nobody is using AI to auto reject candidates. ATS’s are “scoring” candidates but I don’t know of any that are sending rejections on application. As a hiring manager, all the applications come to my inbox (even if it’s 300 in a day), and I’m definitely guilty of screening during non-working hours when I get a notification.
cocoto 5mo ago
I'm responsible for hiring junior C++ developers in a small company (first role). Let met tell you that almost all candidates are stating "medium" level in C++ in their resume but don't even know how to work with pointers or references, they don't even have the level of someone studying the language for half a day. And I don't even think it's related to AI. Whatever the reason, it's very easy to assert a candidate competency with a 30 minutes to an hour interview in person.
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago
  Lying on resumes is very common, so is lying on job postings. It's a really weird arms race where no one is getting what they want. I will say that I'm not surprised by this at all. I think a ton of people have been convinced that basically all languages are more or less the same, so they are confident putting languages they barely know on their resumes. "I know python and Java, how hard can C++ be?". This isn't a new problem, or even a "coding bootcamp problem" I studied computer science at a small university in 2006, several of my friends went to a much larger university and studied Software Engineering They didn't learn pointers back then either. They learned Uncle Bob Java and that was basically it.
- klibertp 5mo ago
  When I first tried to get a job, I listed three categories of skills: the ones I'm very confident in, the ones I have some experience with, and the niche ones I only dabbled in. The overwhelming advice, from everyone around me, was to never-ever admit that I'm not perfect at something. I found it perplexing, but after a decade or so, I started having to read resumes, and, indeed, I found almost nobody ever admitting they're not an absolute wizard at everything they put on their resumes. Before starting work at a company, I had this naive idea that HR and candidates are there to help each other, and that approaching it with honesty and goodwill is how it should work. Needless to say, it doesn't work that way at all - on both ends. I'm honestly frightened that I will maybe have to go through the hiring process again at some point, especially since my career turned adult and now my "years of experience" are a dead weight of "you're just old"... The whole process is so antagonistic, so brutal and stressful, that I can see myself going full YOLO and just spamming AI-slop resumes until I get an interview, in which - I want to believe - I'll be able to actually say something about myself and, hopefully, convince the interviewer that I can do the job. I know that would have made the whole situation a bit worse (and I'm sorry if I end up resorting to strategies like that), but the emotional burden of dealing with the "hiring process" before an actual face-to-face talk is so great I don't think I could bear it for long. > Whatever the reason, it's very easy to assert a candidate competency with a 30 minutes to an hour interview in person. It's not always that easy. Yes; there's a fraction of programmers who cannot code, and yes, it's usually possible to tell them apart with a FizzBuzz-style question. However, the vast majority will have some skill, and testing the limits of that skill (again, assuming we can't just expect the candidate to ever say "no, I'm weak in this-or-that area") in a limited time of an interview is hard at least on two counts: misunderstandings/communication problems instead of skill problems, and the need to wrap the obviously confrontational (instead of cooperative; it would be the latter if we could be honest with each other, but that's a pipe dream) process into something that doesn't look confrontational on the surface. It's indeed a "hiring theatre", and you need pretty solid acting skills and some psychology to pull it off as an interviewer. Of course, very few interviewers have the required combination of knowledge and skill; in effect, over the past year, I was able to form an opinion (good or bad, but at least an informed one) about the candidate's skills maybe half the time. In the other 50% of cases, I just couldn't pry any info about the actual skills from a candidate. It's like they're saying: "hire me if you want to see my cards" - and honestly, I can't even blame them too much! We're not exactly perfectly honest from our side, either, in the end... Basically, I dread the possibility of being subjected to what has become the prevailing model of hiring in tech; I don't think I have it in me to either game the system or get good at using it, so the only thing I can count on is just dumb luck: that, at the exact time I will need it, some company will show up and either come to me directly, or will have both the process and people staffing it compatible with me by chance. If not that, I don't see myself ever getting hired again.
thrill 5mo ago
Hiring has always been broken.
- 12_throw_away 5mo ago
  Dunno, the old school "we'll get you started in the mailroom, and you can work your way up by gaining knowledge about the organization while demonstrating competence and professionalism" sounds like a pretty solid hiring strategy. Although tbf I kind of doubt if this was ever really the case - probably this is imagined nostalgia for idealized bygone times. And given that this is a strategy that requires, y'know, long-term investment and planning, it's not like it's going to start happening anytime in the near future
  - itronitron 5mo ago
    The old school strategy was to hire a student as a summer intern and if it's recognized as a good fit by the end of the summer then ask them to apply after graduating. The second step (for people past that stage) is to trust but verify the work experience they list on their resumes. The difficulty these days is that companies want candidates to be a perfect match for the company's current tech stack.
skeledrew 5mo ago
None of that stuff done during hiring should matter as long as the one hired can satisfactorily perform their duties, regardless of their actual knowledge/skills and the tools they use. Break firing as well so it's easy to get rid of those who underperform. Problem solved.
mrmarket 5mo ago
hard to be sympathetic here when the candidate experience has been such a mess in tech for years now. i appreciate that remotely and efficiently judging future success based on a resume is now basically a wash, that sucks. but no one seemed to treat it like an emergency that perfectly qualified candidates have been getting filtered out after tripping various invisible wires for years (due to ATS systems but also not having word-for-word experience across the board, or not having big enough logos on your resume, which in turn makes it harder to get bigger logos in the future, etc.) and that's to say nothing of the rampant ghost postings, which someone else mentioned here, which STILL happens all the time. it's cruelty.
ericol 5mo ago
What is means is that now hiring is symmetrically broken. Hiring has always been broken. May be not completely at the FAANG level, but below that, and more importantly across the globe it's seriously broken, and there's a high variance when it comes to hiring consultants quality. The widespread use of AI vy applicants is very likely surfacing how comfortable consultants were doing the bare minimum when hiring. Source: I've been working for 10+ years for a company that has an ATS for mostly European clients. I know for a fact how crappy work around hiring is. P.S.: the article focuses mostly on one direction of hiring. The opposite direction is also suffering from this (briefly explained in the article about AI fueled hiring bias). In my opinion, that is an even greater problem.
late2part 5mo ago
Here's how you fix hiring... Have them demonstrate competency. It's really easy to screen out people when you say "Hey - login to this VM and show me how to import raw data into postgres and run a report." Or do whatever you're going to do. My favorite story is from a particular sean who had a candidate that said they'd been using VM for 20 years, and when he went into a document the candidate hit j 200 times to go line 200.
- prepend 5mo ago
  Comically I only know about 10 commands in vim and I’ve been using it for 30+ years. Qwxdypa$0 will get you pretty far in life. I don’t use it as an IDE, I use it 5-10/year to read or edit a random file. I probably wouldn’t remember “g” or whatever the goto command is. And hitting j 200 times isn’t the end of the world.
dude250711 5mo ago
> "For the C-suite, this is no longer just an HR headache, it is a critical strategic risk." I have seen this phrase structure before.
dlcarrier 5mo ago
HR/legal departments broke hiring. AI is just revealing how broken it is.
neilv 5mo ago
> When the earliest filters in your hiring process stop working, your organization begins to systematically select for candidates who are best at performing the hiring process, rather than those best equipped to do the job. Isn't "performing the hiring process" theatre what Big Tech hiring has been demanding for ~20 years? And gifted to most smaller companies? (Because people already knew Google frat-hazing student style interviews, from their own interview prep, to try to get into a FAANG, so they mimicked that when they went elsewhere?)
- titanomachy 5mo ago
  I thought Google interviews were kind of fun, back in the days when they were done in-person. Most of my interviewers were engaged and helpful, and seemed genuinely excited when I got on the right track. They would get up and write on the whiteboard with me. The experience really made me want to work there, because I’d never encountered coworkers like that before. I didn’t get hired the first time but went back for a redo as soon as I was allowed. Online interviews are a lot less fun, but still seemed more or less fine until the recent cheating epidemic.
  - lokar 5mo ago
    I had fun on both sides of that process. As both a candidate and interviewer I prefer the in person whiteboard because it makes it more clear this is about ideas, not exact syntax.
cleandreams 5mo ago
I was walking through a startup neighborhood in San Francisco the other day and I encountered several telephone poles which were posted with advertisements for software engineering jobs. These were not generic or scam advertisements. This was a particular startup, looking for software engineers. What is old is new again.
neilv 5mo ago
> The era of the standard behavioral interview (“Tell me about a time…”) is over; those answers are easily scripted by live-assist tools. Instead, organizations should introduce dynamic friction: sudden constraints, changes in project scope, or prompts that require candidates to defend a counterintuitive tradeoff. Isn't this already easily faked with an ordinary general-purpose consumer $20/month AI tool? > Cultivate a culture of intellectual honesty over polished perfection. This is one good idea I saw in the advertorial. Or, better yet, start with honesty at all. But you have to understand and believe in it, or it will immediately be twisted into yet another gamed performative bit of interview theatre, like most other aspects that emerge from big-corporate mentality of herding worker drones. (Perhaps the authors, coming from Meta and Microsoft, appreciate that reality.)
adamtaylor_13 5mo ago
Are there any battle-tested strategies for hiring that are generally known to be good, but aren't often used because it's hard or doesn't scale? Asking because my business is growing and we've gotten lucky with our hires so far, but I'd like to add my discipline to hiring well.
- Bjartr 5mo ago
  Apprenticeship? Actually spend time working with them on real work. It's both hard and doesn't scale.
  - vkou 5mo ago
    The problem is that you have 100 applicants and one apprentice slot.
    - maccard 5mo ago
      You don’t have 100 candidates though - you likely have 90 applicants that just fail to meet the basic criteria. I hire for games and every single job posting we make for programmers we get about 10% of applicants who have literally never programmed before, even for lead level roles .
      - vkou 5mo ago
        Well, these days you'll have 1000 candidates, you drop the 900 that fail to meet the basic criteria, and you're left with 100 that you can't immediately tell are frauds.
        maccard 5mo ago
        I’ve been hiring for remote game programmer jobs. We got 300 applicants in 6 weeks for the last one.
- alexpotato 5mo ago
  Recommendation from a trusted 3rd party. Bill Gurley has a great line about this: "I use LinkedIn like this: If Person A reaches out to me and there is a Person B that is a common connection between A and myself, I want to be able to call Person B and have 100% confidence in their evaluation. That's the bar I set to connect with someone on LinkedIn." From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmYekD6-PZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmYekD6-PZ8
peab 5mo ago
Anecdotally At the moment, about half of our inbound applicants are fake profiles
- itronitron 5mo ago
  How do you make the determination that an applicant is fake?
vanuatu 5mo ago
as someone who has done 100+ first round interviews for SWE, including new grad zero signal: resume & cover letter. applicants will mass-apply with ai-tuned resumes that happen to perfectly match our listing medium signal: top 15 school / top N internship experience / built something with paying users highest signal: personal referrals
- tayo42 5mo ago
  Refferal make sense, but all of mine ended with rejections. Clearly I'm not a moron since I'm getting reffered by ex coworkers and still ill even get an automated rejection...
- kajman 5mo ago
  > zero signal: resume & cover letter. applicants will mass-apply with ai-tuned resumes that happen to perfectly match our listing How often do you interview candidates with bad or mediocre resumes, though? My impression is that a perfectly tuned (and almost certainly dishonest) resume is just table stakes now.
  - vanuatu 5mo ago
    not very often which is why its zero signal in rare occasions it might go the other way around, like someone who has so much experience they dont need a pretty resume because their work speaks for itself New grads are the biggest offenders of the resume slop
- jgafni 5mo ago
  Could you be overlooking great candidates who didn't go to top school or have a personal referral, yet have the skills and would be great to work with? I've worked with many engineers who fit that category. Both of those signals reflect prior selection by someone else. Admissions committees, your network's hiring choices. Those signals also correlate with class, geography, and network access. I'm not saying that referrals and schools don't predict. They do. But no referrals and no top school doesn't necessarily mean a candidate isn't a fit. The more AI advances, the greater the need for a new signal.
tedggh 5mo ago
“…live video interviews are now easily gamed by real-time assistance tools.” I am not too sure about that. Possible, yes. Easily? only if the interviewer sucks at interviewing. If are “gamed” during live interviews, you probably should not be interviewing.
- j-bos 5mo ago
  Most interviewers at big cos do in fact, suck. Very by the book, do you know this or that pattern/tool by name. Can you write this or that under time pressure with none of your tool stack.
- gojibary 5mo ago
  Sure, and? Generally, someone has to be an interviewer. People dedicated to it are expensive and tend to become useless, results are also not properly measurable so whether one improves at it has nothing to do with whether one thinks one is improving at it.
apwheele 5mo ago
An AI written article writing about AI resumes and AI interviewers -- https://www.pangram.com/history/38790b9f-dda1-4ea9-9b6c-385833f550ac?ucc=CKC3ULfhaaL https://www.pangram.com/history/38790b9f-dda1-4ea9-9b6c-3858....
recursivedoubts 5mo ago
To modify the old russian saying: "we pretend to have expertise and they pretend to be interested in hiring us"
cloche 5mo ago
I don't understand why tech companies are so reluctant to go back to in-person interviews. This used to be the norm before COVID and it would solve most of these issues. It's also ironic that the authors are from Microsoft/Amazon and Meta which have very structured interviews that tend to be about just hitting the right keywords during the interview itself. None of these places even really care about what you've done previously, for better or worse.
- bartread 5mo ago
  > I don't understand why tech companies are so reluctant to go back to in-person interviews. Tech companies probably aren’t that reluctant, but I’d bet a lot of job applicants are.
  - ghaff 5mo ago
    I do understand there are job applicants who don't want to travel and/or don't want to do an in-person interview. But <shrug>. I also do think that (mostly) post-COVID I mostly want to meet with a candidate in person.
    - bartread 5mo ago
      I think the point is that people have different preferences: those didn’t matter before COVID but they do matter now. There are at least a couple of trade offs here. 1. Companies compete for applicants, and applicants - even good applicants - will often prefer companies with less arduous hiring processes except where they specifically want to work at that company. 2. Filtering out applicants who don’t want, or for whom it will be impractical, to attend in person interviews will meaning losing out on good applicants, but also reduces the applicant pool (e.g., to a geographic region). I could see a world where we’re slowly forced in this direction though simply because I can see that even the kind of dynamic reasoning interview recommended in TFA will become gameable by AI before too much more time passes.
      - ghaff 5mo ago
IshKebab 5mo ago
Pretty much all of their suggestions sound like things that should already be being done (and mostly are in my experience). I was asked a "tell me about a time" question for a job interview recently and it really took me by surprised because nobody asks those questions in tech anymore! They literally asked me what my strengths and weaknesses are. Wtf. I didn't get that job but it was a blessing in disguise - I got a MUCH better job a few months later.
titanomachy 5mo ago
Just ask them to break into a server, their AI tool will refuse to help and you’ll get an honest representation of their abilities.
not_the_fda 5mo ago
Tech hiring has been broken for decades. AI just makes it so obvious how broken it is.
AaronAPU 5mo ago
I wonder how much talent is out there who, like me, simply isn’t interested in debasing themselves to go through the interview process so just nopes out of employment. It’s all such an absurd joke at this point.
- Valodim 5mo ago
  In my experience, networking also helps sidestep a lot of that stuff.
- esaym 5mo ago
  Me right now
- colesantiago 5mo ago
  There is are loads. They do not apply on the job application as they know of the AI screener will just filter them out. It is no wonder why HR and businesses cry "Hiring is hard" and in reality, the talented people are: + Making their own startups / businesses. + Joined a much more attractive company and they don't bother go through the process. + Networks their way through other people. + They are fed up of the interview process and they check out of the job market altogether. Also lastly, these people do not want to talk to HR, it wastes their time and creates friction.
exabrial 5mo ago
My favorite "funnel" so far was applying for certain company in Colorado. It twas I think 10:45p in the evening, and I got a reply about 15mins later indicating that I was invited for an "interview". Scratching my head, I mean who was up working at this time, I looked into it... It wasn't an interview, even though they insisted it was. It was a completely automated skill assessment "interview" with an AI. Or put better... it's a CAPTCHA that takes roughly 60mins to complete. If you just happen to pass their CAPTCHA, you might get to then talk to a real person. I laughed and of course did not continue. This is the biggest honkin piece of baloney I've seen yet. It puts 100% of the burden on the candidates, so the HR department at the company can go back to trimming their hangnails or whatever they do.
- lovich 5mo ago
  I recently took a “one way interview”(I’ve had multiple recruiters use that term) where I had to be on camera, and talk to a machine that interpreted responses completely incorrectly causing me to have to try and negotiate with a fucking clanker that when I said I could work in the US I actually meant I could work in the US. 2 days later they replied back that I hadn’t had a long enough tenure in my career and couldn’t trust me enough to hire. I don’t know what companies plans are because they are creating an environment where even the people they do end up hiring are going to resent them from day one based on the dehumanizing treatment they are applying to the interview process.
  - jghn 5mo ago
    A policy I started to adhere to a while back was never take a job somewhere that doesn't invest at least as much time & energy into interviewing you than you are with them. If they expect me to put in a bunch of effort and they're putting in 0, that's a hard no.
    - lovich 5mo ago
      I wish I could live that way, but I am still trying to get a job as an Engineering Manager again since I genuinely enjoyed the work the same way I enjoy playing excel sheet simulators like EU IV, but the position has been annihilated or halved in a lot of firms. I have taken the time to try and drop back down to just an IC engineer again but have been explicitly told that I either, was trusted to be able to do the job since I became a manager, or that they didn't trust that I would stay around since I had already reach manager level. Most companies seem to be applying the heuristics of the pre 2022 era for software to prospective employees, while still demanding the benefits of this new era. Hell I see a ton of people in this post talking about how referrals are the only way to get real signal, and I had two different Principal Engineers respectively at Riot and a financial firm too niche to name without outing myself refer me and not even get a phone screen. With said friends who referred me getting a brick wall from their HR department when trying to follow up. The hiring system for tech is fundamentally broken atm, but companies are the ones with only leverage.
trhway 5mo ago
[dead]
shirleypatrick 5mo ago
[dead]
daft_pink 5mo ago
If I were looking for a job right now. I would scrape all the LinkedIn profiles at the target company to understand what skills they valued and tailor my resume with ai based on those profiles and the initial job posting and my skills. I think you just have to go a step or two above what most other candidates are doing. In my experience, that works really really well.
zombot 5mo ago
> your organization begins to systematically select for candidates who are best at performing the hiring process, rather than those best equipped to do the job. I submit that this is nothing new. There just may be one more way to fulfill that criterion. But I don't see how the outcome would be worse than before.
codethief 5mo ago
To everyone saying that this has always been a problem: The issue is the scale of the problem. Deleting the occasional spam email by hand is not a big deal but once you're getting flooded with spam emails, you better have a good spam filter in place. In the same vein, the early hiring funnel discussed in TFA did work in many if not most cases or otherwise people wouldn't have used it. This no longer seems to be the case.
runamuck 5mo ago
I asked Candidates (who claimed to work at site) to describe the parking at their office, Garage or Flat? Some of them couldn't answer that question. If they did answer, I would ask the name and purpose of the organization (accounting, HR, tech etc.) they supported and screened some more that way. I got some people who mentioned an Acronym (the project they supported "for years") and asked them to define it, and they couldn't. A lot of fraud in the candidate pool.
- thomascgalvin 5mo ago
  > I got some people who mentioned an Acronym (the project they supported "for years") and asked them to define it, and they couldn't. That could be a valid test, but I do a lot of government contracting, and that industry is absolutely rife with acronyms nobody knows the expansion of, as well as names that were chosen because somebody thought they were cool but aren't acronyms, but everyone else assumes are acronyms, so they get the capslock treatment.
- ralferoo 5mo ago
  Haha, I get what you're saying but I've worked on several projects for many years where nobody knew what several key acronyms meant. We could guess what they might mean, but nobody actively working on the project knew what the original programmers thought they meant. One example was a file extension called .phtm - the best I could guess it meant (and how I thought of it) was "parsed HTML", but that's kind of stupid because every HTML file is parsed. Maybe it meant "proto HTML" because not all of HTML was supported. Maybe it meant "Phil's HTML" or "perhaps HTML". Nobody had any idea. There wasn't an obvious P that related in any way to the business needs or function of the file format. As a programmer, do you need to know what XML, SOAP or REST mean to be able to use them? Not really. And to give another example, back in the days when I also did sysadmin work and had to deal with both IDE drives and SCSI drives, I wouldn't have remembered what the initials meant, nor would I probably know what the e in NVMe is if I hadn't just googled it even though I've used them for years.
pukarkhanal 5mo ago
I have built something similar, its in a really early phase but we have cracked candidate user acquisition, checkout at ResumeAI(cvai.dev)
CoderCouple28 4mo ago
[flagged]
insaneisnotfree 4mo ago
[flagged]
insaneisnotfree 4mo ago
[flagged]

113 points by ChrisArchitect 5mo ago

buffer_overlord 5mo ago

Hiring was broken long before ai

ghaff 5mo ago
Much of it has been based on networking for a good 20+ years. Yes, there was a certain if you have a pulse era in tech at at a lot of companies--leet code notwithstanding though that was an issue--that has largely passed and a lot of people are reacting to tech hiring becoming a more normal multi-month process.
- buffer_overlord 5mo ago
  I told the last recruiter who had a six week interview process “I’m not waiting that long when I can literally clone your product in a weekend for $50
  - ghaff 5mo ago
    That's nice. But a lot of people looking for professional jobs may take a year+ to find a position.
    - buffer_overlord 5mo ago
      Been 3 years for me so far
metalspot 5mo ago
AI and remote interviewing have definitely exacerbated the problems that existed before though. Leetcode was always weak, but now that it is easy to cheat on it is a negative selector, because the cheaters do best. Leetcode was originally supposed to be done in-person on a whiteboard to assess a candidate's collaborative problem solving skills, but with remote interviewing it has evolved into writing passing code with minimal or no feedback. The real problem is that engineering departments are now filled with leetcode grinders and cheaters, who all live in permanent fear of being replaced by AI, and so any candidate who doesn't fit that paradigm is a threat that must be eliminated at all costs.
- nobodywillobsrv 5mo ago
  Yes. People are gatekeeping. They are not interviewing with the aim of having an interesting conversation. They are trying to block hiring.
  - buffer_overlord 5mo ago
    I agree they don’t want someone good who will be competing with them and they don’t want someone junior who will require more hand holding
maximinus_thrax 5mo ago
There's a spectrum of 'broken' and AI made it worse
cryo32 5mo ago
Yes they just automated the broken now.

ungreased0675 5mo ago

Good hiring almost certainly has to be a significant competitive advantage. It makes me wonder why so many otherwise successful companies let HR bungle the hiring process.

stackskipton 5mo ago
Because like a lot of things, metric of "What does recruiting cost us?" is very easy number to quantify so companies will attempt to reduce it. "What does bad recruiting cost us?" is very hard number to quantify because it's just sand that gets thrown into so many gears, but cost of that sand is across a ton of departments and so measuring for it is very difficult.
- dasil003 5mo ago
  Huh? Hiring being broken has nothing to do with cost, it's a filtering problem. Even when there's no HR or bean counter in sight it's still hard. There's fundamentally limited signal you can extract from interviews, so there's very loose correlation to on-the-job performance. Saying it's a cost-cutting problem would just encourage more and longer interviews, which could actually work against you because high performers tend to have more options and will not jump through infinite hoops.
  - maccard 5mo ago
    > High performers tend to have more options and will not jump through infinite hoops. Biases are a strange thing. “High performers” aren’t one homogenous group; take a staff engineer at a FAANG and plop them in a role at a startup or vice versa and you’ll find very quickly that high performers are a product of environment (IME). The people you need to ship something at a big company will sink your startup, and the people who will lead a startup to unicorn levels of success will flounder in frustration in a big corp. Finding high performers is really hard, as you said it’s a filtering problem, and it’s very much based on vibes and feelings. Leetcode, take home tests, on site tests, discussions about projects all filter for specific things - some or many of which aren’t related to the job at hand. If we removed the “risk of leaving current job element” the only way to do it would be to give someone a 3 month trial and see if they’re a fit. Honestly you probably know in your gut by week 2 if it’s going to work or not.

jerlendds 5mo ago

https://archive.ph/Pfl79 https://archive.ph/Pfl79

josefrichter 5mo ago

It wasn't broken before?

Aurornis 5mo ago

> “There is a growing gap between the candidate’s written persona and their live presence. I’ll see a cover letter that is poetic and a résumé that is flawlessly structured, but then the person on the video call struggles to explain their own bullet points. This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”. I can remember a few interviews where I asked candidates about something I read on their resume (which I study before every call) and they corrected me to explain that they did something different. Then I held up their resume and pointed to their exact words and they turned bright red while they tried to come up with a new explanation. That was rare, though. You could catch a lot of little cases of stretching the truth, but it wasn’t common to feel like you were reading a resume that didn’t match the candidate. What has changed in the age of AI is that more people are feeling more brazen about letting the AI speak for them. These situations are happening more frequently. You get the feeling that people are less shy about trying to cheat and manipulate because it feels like the AI is doing the cheating and writing the words, so it’s done at arm’s length. I spend some time helping with resume reviews occasionally. It’s getting sad to see in the general discussion of the group when people go from elated that they got an interview for their dream job to embarrassed when the interviewers saw right through their AI written resume and ended the hiring cycle. I wonder if we’re seeing a peak in AI resume junk while everyone tries it out, but before it becomes common knowledge that an AI junk resume is a way to shoot yourself in the foot when applying to companies you actually want to work for.

binary132 5mo ago
The bigger issue is the screening filters are flooded now (and also largely AI “enhanced”) so getting real signal through the noise is becoming basically impossible.
- sivalus 5mo ago
  I think we'll just end up going back to referrals. It might generate more nepotism, but at least the company will feel like it's doing a better job and not cause it to overly focus on hiring to the detriment of its current employees.

watwut 5mo ago

The premise of "flawless prose in cover letter and resume used to show work-quality of candidate rather their ability fine tune prose on resume" is dubious.

fzeroracer 5mo ago

I'm thinking back to a recent interview I had. It was one of those online coding tests; after spending about an hour and a half on it I sent it back to the recruiter and they came back to me saying I didn't pass because I 'only' got an 80% despite passing all criteria in the worst working environment possible. This was a no-AI test too so I unfortunately respected the criteria. So many interviews still demand absolute perfection so they just optimize for people that are dishonest and get away with it.

btrettel 5mo ago
I had a similar experience before [1]. I fully agree that too many interview tests select for dishonest people. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35496976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35496976

jeffrallen 5mo ago

I'm recruiting for apprentices right now. By definition, they have almost nothing to put on their CVs, and thus their CVs are more or less identical, or rather all of them have almost zero signal. We took a chance on a flash recruiting session our canton organized. 35 interviews in 2 hr 15 mins. Crazy. But excellent signal, because if you are looking for it, and give the candidate a hint to show it ("tell me a story about how you solved a computer problem for your self/friend/family/club"), you can find the candidates with a spark. And I would not have detected it from their CVs or cover letter alone. More human connection. Less machines. There, I fixed it for you.

nobodywillobsrv 5mo ago

Interviews, all of them, should be working on problem with and agent and a human interviewer. Just had a "guess the teachers password" moment at some interview as a senior and the interviewer didn't understand my answer and didn't ask questions. The problem is incentives. A lot of people probably need to be fired who are gate keeping by blocking hiring. All interviews should be bilateral win win recommendation chats. They should not end because one person didn't understand the other or someone who was not yet interested in the job did g remember some weird detail of something. Our memories are getting worse with AI and augmentation. We need to judge marginal add and make recommendations.

Ozzie-D 5mo ago

[flagged]

ElProlactin 5mo ago

> Google, McKinsey, and other companies have responded by reintroducing in-person interviews for some candidates, a meaningful step backward in efficiency (due to travel time and costs) that signals how seriously they are treating this problem. Maybe the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" at all costs has broken the world? I remember when I applied for my first job. I got dressed up and my mom drove me to the interview because I didn't have a driver's license or car at the time. It wasn't "efficient" for me and I suppose it wasn't "efficient" for the company but much to my surprise, I got an offer and that was my first "tech job"...before tech jobs were cool. It's very strange that the authors talk about how "making a bad hire is terribly expensive" but then call out "travel time and costs". Well, if B < A for each role filled, is it really so bad? And yeah, I get that huge companies like Google and Facebook hire from around the world and not everyone is located in close proximity to Mountain View and Palo Alto, but that speaks more to the oligopolistic world we're living in than anything else. If a small number of companies weren't distorting the labor markets, this might matter less.

tracerbulletx 5mo ago
In the not too distant past (like 10 years ago) flying people to a final in person round was standard practice.
- DonsDiscountGas 5mo ago
  Standard and expensive (in terms of time and money) for both the company and the applicant
  - wiseowise 5mo ago
    Well, maybe some things should be expensive.
  - ElProlactin 5mo ago
    If the cost of hiring the wrong person is huge, the cost (in terms of time and money) of conducting on-site interviews is almost certainly lower. Also, in terms of the costs to the applicants, this touches on the oligopolistic nature of so many industries today, which has resulted in high concentrations of the most desirable jobs in places with the highest costs of living. Basically, unless you already have a FAANG job or are independently wealthy, it's not easy to up and move to Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc. and job hunt.

dweinus 5mo ago

> "The conversational interview, long considered the ultimate, unhackable test of a candidate’s authenticity" Lol. I'm not sure this person has ever given an interview before

paulbgd 5mo ago

As an engineer working on my company’s top of funnel it’s tough. Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call. Async technical challenges are obviously gamed but you’d be surprised at how few people both cheat + take longer than 3m to submit the solution

clates 5mo ago
> Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call. Funny because I do the same; I don't commit to doing any work/assessments before at least an honest interview round. Businesses have to understand that _they_ are the ones who have to solve for the filtering problem. Most great candidates that you are hoping to snipe are already in a stable job and do not _have_ to jump through hoops to get past a filter.
- ralferoo 5mo ago
  I have done programming assessments, but I've probably only done 3 in the last 20 years, and those I strictly limited to 1 hour and told the recruiters that I wouldn't spend any longer than that. I've also flat out refused to proceed with least 5 jobs when recruiters have contacted me, tried to tempt me with a job and then sent through a 3 hour coding test. I've got better things to do with my free time than toy programming puzzles.
- paulbgd 5mo ago
  We’ll skip it based off other signals (referrals notably) of course, but if we offered an interview to every candidate based off their resume we’d never get around to interviewing the good candidates. I don’t like the idea of a technical challenge at the start, but as someone who was discovered way back via skills and not a fancy resume I want to continue offering others the same chance as me.
jgafni 5mo ago
Are you picking a problem candidates can easily cheat on? Could Claude produce the answer in 30 seconds? If so, what's the test actually measuring? The setups I've seen produce the strongest signal aren't the ones where the candidate can't see the answer that AI produces easily. They're the ones where there is no single answer. Architecture decisions. How you would investigate an outage. How you would tradeoff one constraint against another. The candidate can spend an hour with Claude on it beforehand and it doesn't matter, because the test isn't "did you get the answer," it's "can you talk through the reasoning" and "can I trust your judgement." Hearing someone explain their thinking on an open problem is a much harder thing to fake. Even if they used an assistant to structure their initial pass, the live unpacking reveals where the thinking is theirs and where it isn't.

Simulacra 5mo ago

I have very little sympathy for companies grappling with this. They use AI to reject applicants within seconds, and make people jump through so many hoops (not to mention ghost jobs) that it's almost a humiliation ritual.

maccard 5mo ago
Nobody is using AI to auto reject candidates. ATS’s are “scoring” candidates but I don’t know of any that are sending rejections on application. As a hiring manager, all the applications come to my inbox (even if it’s 300 in a day), and I’m definitely guilty of screening during non-working hours when I get a notification.

cocoto 5mo ago

I'm responsible for hiring junior C++ developers in a small company (first role). Let met tell you that almost all candidates are stating "medium" level in C++ in their resume but don't even know how to work with pointers or references, they don't even have the level of someone studying the language for half a day. And I don't even think it's related to AI. Whatever the reason, it's very easy to assert a candidate competency with a 30 minutes to an hour interview in person.

bluefirebrand 5mo ago
Lying on resumes is very common, so is lying on job postings. It's a really weird arms race where no one is getting what they want. I will say that I'm not surprised by this at all. I think a ton of people have been convinced that basically all languages are more or less the same, so they are confident putting languages they barely know on their resumes. "I know python and Java, how hard can C++ be?". This isn't a new problem, or even a "coding bootcamp problem" I studied computer science at a small university in 2006, several of my friends went to a much larger university and studied Software Engineering They didn't learn pointers back then either. They learned Uncle Bob Java and that was basically it.
klibertp 5mo ago
When I first tried to get a job, I listed three categories of skills: the ones I'm very confident in, the ones I have some experience with, and the niche ones I only dabbled in. The overwhelming advice, from everyone around me, was to never-ever admit that I'm not perfect at something. I found it perplexing, but after a decade or so, I started having to read resumes, and, indeed, I found almost nobody ever admitting they're not an absolute wizard at everything they put on their resumes. Before starting work at a company, I had this naive idea that HR and candidates are there to help each other, and that approaching it with honesty and goodwill is how it should work. Needless to say, it doesn't work that way at all - on both ends. I'm honestly frightened that I will maybe have to go through the hiring process again at some point, especially since my career turned adult and now my "years of experience" are a dead weight of "you're just old"... The whole process is so antagonistic, so brutal and stressful, that I can see myself going full YOLO and just spamming AI-slop resumes until I get an interview, in which - I want to believe - I'll be able to actually say something about myself and, hopefully, convince the interviewer that I can do the job. I know that would have made the whole situation a bit worse (and I'm sorry if I end up resorting to strategies like that), but the emotional burden of dealing with the "hiring process" before an actual face-to-face talk is so great I don't think I could bear it for long. > Whatever the reason, it's very easy to assert a candidate competency with a 30 minutes to an hour interview in person. It's not always that easy. Yes; there's a fraction of programmers who cannot code, and yes, it's usually possible to tell them apart with a FizzBuzz-style question. However, the vast majority will have some skill, and testing the limits of that skill (again, assuming we can't just expect the candidate to ever say "no, I'm weak in this-or-that area") in a limited time of an interview is hard at least on two counts: misunderstandings/communication problems instead of skill problems, and the need to wrap the obviously confrontational (instead of cooperative; it would be the latter if we could be honest with each other, but that's a pipe dream) process into something that doesn't look confrontational on the surface. It's indeed a "hiring theatre", and you need pretty solid acting skills and some psychology to pull it off as an interviewer. Of course, very few interviewers have the required combination of knowledge and skill; in effect, over the past year, I was able to form an opinion (good or bad, but at least an informed one) about the candidate's skills maybe half the time. In the other 50% of cases, I just couldn't pry any info about the actual skills from a candidate. It's like they're saying: "hire me if you want to see my cards" - and honestly, I can't even blame them too much! We're not exactly perfectly honest from our side, either, in the end... Basically, I dread the possibility of being subjected to what has become the prevailing model of hiring in tech; I don't think I have it in me to either game the system or get good at using it, so the only thing I can count on is just dumb luck: that, at the exact time I will need it, some company will show up and either come to me directly, or will have both the process and people staffing it compatible with me by chance. If not that, I don't see myself ever getting hired again.

thrill 5mo ago

Hiring has always been broken.

12_throw_away 5mo ago
Dunno, the old school "we'll get you started in the mailroom, and you can work your way up by gaining knowledge about the organization while demonstrating competence and professionalism" sounds like a pretty solid hiring strategy. Although tbf I kind of doubt if this was ever really the case - probably this is imagined nostalgia for idealized bygone times. And given that this is a strategy that requires, y'know, long-term investment and planning, it's not like it's going to start happening anytime in the near future
- itronitron 5mo ago
  The old school strategy was to hire a student as a summer intern and if it's recognized as a good fit by the end of the summer then ask them to apply after graduating. The second step (for people past that stage) is to trust but verify the work experience they list on their resumes. The difficulty these days is that companies want candidates to be a perfect match for the company's current tech stack.

skeledrew 5mo ago

None of that stuff done during hiring should matter as long as the one hired can satisfactorily perform their duties, regardless of their actual knowledge/skills and the tools they use. Break firing as well so it's easy to get rid of those who underperform. Problem solved.

mrmarket 5mo ago

hard to be sympathetic here when the candidate experience has been such a mess in tech for years now. i appreciate that remotely and efficiently judging future success based on a resume is now basically a wash, that sucks. but no one seemed to treat it like an emergency that perfectly qualified candidates have been getting filtered out after tripping various invisible wires for years (due to ATS systems but also not having word-for-word experience across the board, or not having big enough logos on your resume, which in turn makes it harder to get bigger logos in the future, etc.) and that's to say nothing of the rampant ghost postings, which someone else mentioned here, which STILL happens all the time. it's cruelty.

ericol 5mo ago

What is means is that now hiring is symmetrically broken. Hiring has always been broken. May be not completely at the FAANG level, but below that, and more importantly across the globe it's seriously broken, and there's a high variance when it comes to hiring consultants quality. The widespread use of AI vy applicants is very likely surfacing how comfortable consultants were doing the bare minimum when hiring. Source: I've been working for 10+ years for a company that has an ATS for mostly European clients. I know for a fact how crappy work around hiring is. P.S.: the article focuses mostly on one direction of hiring. The opposite direction is also suffering from this (briefly explained in the article about AI fueled hiring bias). In my opinion, that is an even greater problem.

late2part 5mo ago

Here's how you fix hiring... Have them demonstrate competency. It's really easy to screen out people when you say "Hey - login to this VM and show me how to import raw data into postgres and run a report." Or do whatever you're going to do. My favorite story is from a particular sean who had a candidate that said they'd been using VM for 20 years, and when he went into a document the candidate hit j 200 times to go line 200.

prepend 5mo ago
Comically I only know about 10 commands in vim and I’ve been using it for 30+ years. Qwxdypa$0 will get you pretty far in life. I don’t use it as an IDE, I use it 5-10/year to read or edit a random file. I probably wouldn’t remember “g” or whatever the goto command is. And hitting j 200 times isn’t the end of the world.

dude250711 5mo ago

> "For the C-suite, this is no longer just an HR headache, it is a critical strategic risk." I have seen this phrase structure before.

dlcarrier 5mo ago

HR/legal departments broke hiring. AI is just revealing how broken it is.

neilv 5mo ago

> When the earliest filters in your hiring process stop working, your organization begins to systematically select for candidates who are best at performing the hiring process, rather than those best equipped to do the job. Isn't "performing the hiring process" theatre what Big Tech hiring has been demanding for ~20 years? And gifted to most smaller companies? (Because people already knew Google frat-hazing student style interviews, from their own interview prep, to try to get into a FAANG, so they mimicked that when they went elsewhere?)

titanomachy 5mo ago
I thought Google interviews were kind of fun, back in the days when they were done in-person. Most of my interviewers were engaged and helpful, and seemed genuinely excited when I got on the right track. They would get up and write on the whiteboard with me. The experience really made me want to work there, because I’d never encountered coworkers like that before. I didn’t get hired the first time but went back for a redo as soon as I was allowed. Online interviews are a lot less fun, but still seemed more or less fine until the recent cheating epidemic.
- lokar 5mo ago
  I had fun on both sides of that process. As both a candidate and interviewer I prefer the in person whiteboard because it makes it more clear this is about ideas, not exact syntax.

cleandreams 5mo ago

I was walking through a startup neighborhood in San Francisco the other day and I encountered several telephone poles which were posted with advertisements for software engineering jobs. These were not generic or scam advertisements. This was a particular startup, looking for software engineers. What is old is new again.

neilv 5mo ago

> The era of the standard behavioral interview (“Tell me about a time…”) is over; those answers are easily scripted by live-assist tools. Instead, organizations should introduce dynamic friction: sudden constraints, changes in project scope, or prompts that require candidates to defend a counterintuitive tradeoff. Isn't this already easily faked with an ordinary general-purpose consumer $20/month AI tool? > Cultivate a culture of intellectual honesty over polished perfection. This is one good idea I saw in the advertorial. Or, better yet, start with honesty at all. But you have to understand and believe in it, or it will immediately be twisted into yet another gamed performative bit of interview theatre, like most other aspects that emerge from big-corporate mentality of herding worker drones. (Perhaps the authors, coming from Meta and Microsoft, appreciate that reality.)

adamtaylor_13 5mo ago

Are there any battle-tested strategies for hiring that are generally known to be good, but aren't often used because it's hard or doesn't scale? Asking because my business is growing and we've gotten lucky with our hires so far, but I'd like to add my discipline to hiring well.

Bjartr 5mo ago
Apprenticeship? Actually spend time working with them on real work. It's both hard and doesn't scale.
- vkou 5mo ago
  The problem is that you have 100 applicants and one apprentice slot.
  - maccard 5mo ago
    You don’t have 100 candidates though - you likely have 90 applicants that just fail to meet the basic criteria. I hire for games and every single job posting we make for programmers we get about 10% of applicants who have literally never programmed before, even for lead level roles .
    - vkou 5mo ago
      Well, these days you'll have 1000 candidates, you drop the 900 that fail to meet the basic criteria, and you're left with 100 that you can't immediately tell are frauds.
      - maccard 5mo ago
        I’ve been hiring for remote game programmer jobs. We got 300 applicants in 6 weeks for the last one.
alexpotato 5mo ago
Recommendation from a trusted 3rd party. Bill Gurley has a great line about this: "I use LinkedIn like this: If Person A reaches out to me and there is a Person B that is a common connection between A and myself, I want to be able to call Person B and have 100% confidence in their evaluation. That's the bar I set to connect with someone on LinkedIn." From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmYekD6-PZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmYekD6-PZ8

peab 5mo ago

Anecdotally At the moment, about half of our inbound applicants are fake profiles

itronitron 5mo ago
How do you make the determination that an applicant is fake?

vanuatu 5mo ago

as someone who has done 100+ first round interviews for SWE, including new grad zero signal: resume & cover letter. applicants will mass-apply with ai-tuned resumes that happen to perfectly match our listing medium signal: top 15 school / top N internship experience / built something with paying users highest signal: personal referrals

tayo42 5mo ago
Refferal make sense, but all of mine ended with rejections. Clearly I'm not a moron since I'm getting reffered by ex coworkers and still ill even get an automated rejection...
kajman 5mo ago
> zero signal: resume & cover letter. applicants will mass-apply with ai-tuned resumes that happen to perfectly match our listing How often do you interview candidates with bad or mediocre resumes, though? My impression is that a perfectly tuned (and almost certainly dishonest) resume is just table stakes now.
- vanuatu 5mo ago
  not very often which is why its zero signal in rare occasions it might go the other way around, like someone who has so much experience they dont need a pretty resume because their work speaks for itself New grads are the biggest offenders of the resume slop
jgafni 5mo ago
Could you be overlooking great candidates who didn't go to top school or have a personal referral, yet have the skills and would be great to work with? I've worked with many engineers who fit that category. Both of those signals reflect prior selection by someone else. Admissions committees, your network's hiring choices. Those signals also correlate with class, geography, and network access. I'm not saying that referrals and schools don't predict. They do. But no referrals and no top school doesn't necessarily mean a candidate isn't a fit. The more AI advances, the greater the need for a new signal.

tedggh 5mo ago

“…live video interviews are now easily gamed by real-time assistance tools.” I am not too sure about that. Possible, yes. Easily? only if the interviewer sucks at interviewing. If are “gamed” during live interviews, you probably should not be interviewing.

j-bos 5mo ago
Most interviewers at big cos do in fact, suck. Very by the book, do you know this or that pattern/tool by name. Can you write this or that under time pressure with none of your tool stack.
gojibary 5mo ago
Sure, and? Generally, someone has to be an interviewer. People dedicated to it are expensive and tend to become useless, results are also not properly measurable so whether one improves at it has nothing to do with whether one thinks one is improving at it.

apwheele 5mo ago

An AI written article writing about AI resumes and AI interviewers -- https://www.pangram.com/history/38790b9f-dda1-4ea9-9b6c-385833f550ac?ucc=CKC3ULfhaaL https://www.pangram.com/history/38790b9f-dda1-4ea9-9b6c-3858....

recursivedoubts 5mo ago

To modify the old russian saying: "we pretend to have expertise and they pretend to be interested in hiring us"

cloche 5mo ago

I don't understand why tech companies are so reluctant to go back to in-person interviews. This used to be the norm before COVID and it would solve most of these issues. It's also ironic that the authors are from Microsoft/Amazon and Meta which have very structured interviews that tend to be about just hitting the right keywords during the interview itself. None of these places even really care about what you've done previously, for better or worse.

bartread 5mo ago
> I don't understand why tech companies are so reluctant to go back to in-person interviews. Tech companies probably aren’t that reluctant, but I’d bet a lot of job applicants are.
- ghaff 5mo ago
  I do understand there are job applicants who don't want to travel and/or don't want to do an in-person interview. But <shrug>. I also do think that (mostly) post-COVID I mostly want to meet with a candidate in person.
  - bartread 5mo ago
    I think the point is that people have different preferences: those didn’t matter before COVID but they do matter now. There are at least a couple of trade offs here. 1. Companies compete for applicants, and applicants - even good applicants - will often prefer companies with less arduous hiring processes except where they specifically want to work at that company. 2. Filtering out applicants who don’t want, or for whom it will be impractical, to attend in person interviews will meaning losing out on good applicants, but also reduces the applicant pool (e.g., to a geographic region). I could see a world where we’re slowly forced in this direction though simply because I can see that even the kind of dynamic reasoning interview recommended in TFA will become gameable by AI before too much more time passes.
    - ghaff 5mo ago

IshKebab 5mo ago

Pretty much all of their suggestions sound like things that should already be being done (and mostly are in my experience). I was asked a "tell me about a time" question for a job interview recently and it really took me by surprised because nobody asks those questions in tech anymore! They literally asked me what my strengths and weaknesses are. Wtf. I didn't get that job but it was a blessing in disguise - I got a MUCH better job a few months later.

titanomachy 5mo ago

Just ask them to break into a server, their AI tool will refuse to help and you’ll get an honest representation of their abilities.

not_the_fda 5mo ago

Tech hiring has been broken for decades. AI just makes it so obvious how broken it is.

AaronAPU 5mo ago

I wonder how much talent is out there who, like me, simply isn’t interested in debasing themselves to go through the interview process so just nopes out of employment. It’s all such an absurd joke at this point.

Valodim 5mo ago
In my experience, networking also helps sidestep a lot of that stuff.
esaym 5mo ago
Me right now
colesantiago 5mo ago
There is are loads. They do not apply on the job application as they know of the AI screener will just filter them out. It is no wonder why HR and businesses cry "Hiring is hard" and in reality, the talented people are: + Making their own startups / businesses. + Joined a much more attractive company and they don't bother go through the process. + Networks their way through other people. + They are fed up of the interview process and they check out of the job market altogether. Also lastly, these people do not want to talk to HR, it wastes their time and creates friction.

exabrial 5mo ago

My favorite "funnel" so far was applying for certain company in Colorado. It twas I think 10:45p in the evening, and I got a reply about 15mins later indicating that I was invited for an "interview". Scratching my head, I mean who was up working at this time, I looked into it... It wasn't an interview, even though they insisted it was. It was a completely automated skill assessment "interview" with an AI. Or put better... it's a CAPTCHA that takes roughly 60mins to complete. If you just happen to pass their CAPTCHA, you might get to then talk to a real person. I laughed and of course did not continue. This is the biggest honkin piece of baloney I've seen yet. It puts 100% of the burden on the candidates, so the HR department at the company can go back to trimming their hangnails or whatever they do.

lovich 5mo ago
I recently took a “one way interview”(I’ve had multiple recruiters use that term) where I had to be on camera, and talk to a machine that interpreted responses completely incorrectly causing me to have to try and negotiate with a fucking clanker that when I said I could work in the US I actually meant I could work in the US. 2 days later they replied back that I hadn’t had a long enough tenure in my career and couldn’t trust me enough to hire. I don’t know what companies plans are because they are creating an environment where even the people they do end up hiring are going to resent them from day one based on the dehumanizing treatment they are applying to the interview process.
- jghn 5mo ago
  A policy I started to adhere to a while back was never take a job somewhere that doesn't invest at least as much time & energy into interviewing you than you are with them. If they expect me to put in a bunch of effort and they're putting in 0, that's a hard no.
  - lovich 5mo ago
    I wish I could live that way, but I am still trying to get a job as an Engineering Manager again since I genuinely enjoyed the work the same way I enjoy playing excel sheet simulators like EU IV, but the position has been annihilated or halved in a lot of firms. I have taken the time to try and drop back down to just an IC engineer again but have been explicitly told that I either, was trusted to be able to do the job since I became a manager, or that they didn't trust that I would stay around since I had already reach manager level. Most companies seem to be applying the heuristics of the pre 2022 era for software to prospective employees, while still demanding the benefits of this new era. Hell I see a ton of people in this post talking about how referrals are the only way to get real signal, and I had two different Principal Engineers respectively at Riot and a financial firm too niche to name without outing myself refer me and not even get a phone screen. With said friends who referred me getting a brick wall from their HR department when trying to follow up. The hiring system for tech is fundamentally broken atm, but companies are the ones with only leverage.

trhway 5mo ago

[dead]

shirleypatrick 5mo ago

[dead]

daft_pink 5mo ago

If I were looking for a job right now. I would scrape all the LinkedIn profiles at the target company to understand what skills they valued and tailor my resume with ai based on those profiles and the initial job posting and my skills. I think you just have to go a step or two above what most other candidates are doing. In my experience, that works really really well.

zombot 5mo ago

> your organization begins to systematically select for candidates who are best at performing the hiring process, rather than those best equipped to do the job. I submit that this is nothing new. There just may be one more way to fulfill that criterion. But I don't see how the outcome would be worse than before.

codethief 5mo ago

To everyone saying that this has always been a problem: The issue is the scale of the problem. Deleting the occasional spam email by hand is not a big deal but once you're getting flooded with spam emails, you better have a good spam filter in place. In the same vein, the early hiring funnel discussed in TFA did work in many if not most cases or otherwise people wouldn't have used it. This no longer seems to be the case.

runamuck 5mo ago

I asked Candidates (who claimed to work at site) to describe the parking at their office, Garage or Flat? Some of them couldn't answer that question. If they did answer, I would ask the name and purpose of the organization (accounting, HR, tech etc.) they supported and screened some more that way. I got some people who mentioned an Acronym (the project they supported "for years") and asked them to define it, and they couldn't. A lot of fraud in the candidate pool.

thomascgalvin 5mo ago
> I got some people who mentioned an Acronym (the project they supported "for years") and asked them to define it, and they couldn't. That could be a valid test, but I do a lot of government contracting, and that industry is absolutely rife with acronyms nobody knows the expansion of, as well as names that were chosen because somebody thought they were cool but aren't acronyms, but everyone else assumes are acronyms, so they get the capslock treatment.
ralferoo 5mo ago
Haha, I get what you're saying but I've worked on several projects for many years where nobody knew what several key acronyms meant. We could guess what they might mean, but nobody actively working on the project knew what the original programmers thought they meant. One example was a file extension called .phtm - the best I could guess it meant (and how I thought of it) was "parsed HTML", but that's kind of stupid because every HTML file is parsed. Maybe it meant "proto HTML" because not all of HTML was supported. Maybe it meant "Phil's HTML" or "perhaps HTML". Nobody had any idea. There wasn't an obvious P that related in any way to the business needs or function of the file format. As a programmer, do you need to know what XML, SOAP or REST mean to be able to use them? Not really. And to give another example, back in the days when I also did sysadmin work and had to deal with both IDE drives and SCSI drives, I wouldn't have remembered what the initials meant, nor would I probably know what the e in NVMe is if I hadn't just googled it even though I've used them for years.

pukarkhanal 5mo ago

I have built something similar, its in a really early phase but we have cracked candidate user acquisition, checkout at ResumeAI(cvai.dev)

CoderCouple28 4mo ago

[flagged]

insaneisnotfree 4mo ago

[flagged]

insaneisnotfree 4mo ago

[flagged]