If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to land a single interview, then can you blame someone for automating it? I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already found a job!

I’ve hired for 3 companies for engineers from entry level to staff level, and for non technical candidates for other departments. Applicant tracking systems like greenhouse send me an email for every application that comes through, you get the resume and cover letter attached. There’s a reject candidate button where you choose why, and it auto fills in the template for you with the reason you selected (and the email was pre written).

Don’t mistake an automated email for assuming your resume wasn’t looked at.

I don't fill my my resume with a bunch of spam buzzwords for every adjacent technology I've ever used, because certain things are kind of implied by other things. If I put "set up multiple clusters across different Linux systems", I don't also cram in "systemd, bash, upstart, scripting, ls, cp, du, nohup", despite the fact that I know how to use all of those things, because I think they're implied by "me setting up Linux clusters".

A software engineer reading my resume would come away with a decent understanding of what skills I have, but a recruiter who doesn't know anything outside of keyword-matching and hitting the `fwd` button in Outlook (which appears to be most recruiters) will see "HE DOESN'T KNOW BASH, SEE HE DIDN'T PUT IT ON HIS RESUME."

Now, of course, most of this is on me, it's up to me to learn how to play the game, whether or not I like the system doesn't really change anything, but as far as I can tell, the "solution" to this is to turn my resume into a low-quality SEO-spam piece of shit so as to try and satisfy the most incompetent person who might read it.

I don’t write it to be “read by software engineers” per se. I describe my skillset and things I have worked on. I don’t load it with a million buzzwords of every single noun that I am aware of.

I acknowledge that I probably play the game “wrong”, insofar that there’s any “right” way of doing it, but I don’t have to like the game, and I certainly am allowed to think that it’s very frustrating that I have to fill my resume with SEO spam of synonyms because most recruiters are unwilling to learn anything more than basic keyword matching.

The same is true of those other fields too really - I certainly wouldn't want a newly qualified doctor operating on me, or lawyer defending me, or civil engineer designing a bridge I'm driving over. It's nice to know that someone has been professionally educated and passed some entry level exam, but to be useful in a field it's experience that counts.

Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...

A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me. I had people trying to argue that my feedback was wrong, someone stalking me across social media and trying to argue everything there, and eventually someone who threatened to use my feedback as the basis for a discrimination lawsuit.

So now we’re back to simple “we’re proceeding with other candidates” feedback.

If we’re going to play the blame-game, then you have to see the full picture. Many candidates can be awful and even vengeful. Many people do not handle rejection well.

The line is between saying something brief and saying nothing.

Somehow, it has become standard to say absolutely nothing instead of telling people a simple no.

I've even had situations where people said they wanted to keep talking to me, and then went completely silent.

The sad truth of the situation is that all the incentives for a company point in the direction of giving no feedback at all. This isn’t because hiring managers are sociopaths.

It's just common decency. "Sorry, we're not continuing" is not going to get you sued.

The time to send the "Sorry, not continuing" email is as soon as the company has decided that, and if that really is 1-2 months later, you may as well have just ghosted the candidate.

This happened to one of my bosses. As a result, I've never attempted it.

Except once, a candidate realized at the end of a technical screen they had done poorly and demanded feedback. I gave an initial bit (shouldn't have, my mistake) and instantly turned it around on me.

Hell if companies would even do that - I've spent a lot of time (7+ hours) interviewing with some known companies including meeting with the VP of engineering and then they just stop messaging and ghost you (looking at you Glassdoor..)

For example, in an interview once I got the typical "design Twitter" whiteboarding question, and it's going fine, until the topic of databases and storage comes up.

I ask "do we want consistency or availability here?"

The interviewer says that he wants both. To which I say "umm, ok, but I thought you said you wanted this to be distributed?", and he said yeah that's what he wants.

So I have to push back and say "well I mean, we all want that, but I'm pretty sure you can't have stuff be distributed or partitionable while also having availability and consistent."

We go back and forth for about another minute (or course eating away at my interview time), until I eventually pull out my phone and pull up the Wikipedia article for CAP theorem, to which the interviewer said that this is "different" somehow. I said "it's actually not different, but lets just use assume that there exists some kind of database X that gives us all these perks".

Now, in fairness to this particular company, they actually did move forward and gave me a (crappy) offer, so credit there, but I've had other interviews that went similarly and I'm declined. I've never done it, but I've sort of wanted to go onto LinkedIn and try and explain that their interview questions either need to change or they need to become better informed about the concepts that they're interviewing for. Not to change anything, not to convince anyone to suddenly give me an offer, but simply to prove my point.

And I say that even while writing this comment in Firefox

... Legal action on what basis, exactly?

Dumb example, say you didn't hire someone because they wore a Marilyn Manson Antichrist Superstar shirt to an interview and you think that's not appropriate attire for an interview, and suppose you put that into your feedback for the rejection letter.

Now the candidate has a specific "I was rejected for this shirt". They might come back and say "Actually I'm a satanist and this shirt is part of my religion, so I'm going to sue you for religious discrimination". Suddenly you have a lawsuit on your hands, simply because you thought they were dressing unprofessionally.

Obviously this is a hyperbolic example and I doubt that there are a ton of Marilyn Manson fans trying this, but it's just to show my point: It's much safer to simply leave it vague with something generic like "while we were impressed with your qualifications, we've decided to pursue other candidates" email. They can maintain plausible deniability about the reasons they rejected you, and you don't really have fodder to sue them over that.

That said, I absolutely hate how normalized ghosting is in the job world. A candidate isn't entitled to a job, but I do think they're entitled to a response, even if it's just a blanket form rejection.

Hiring manager here. I don’t like the situation either, but to honest a lot of what you’re seeing is a natural reaction to the shenanigans that applicants are doing.

When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application.

  >When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application.

Awhile ago I applied to an internship at one of the larger, successful startups that most tech workers have heard of (several thousand employees). I got a response from a real person in a day. There's really no excuse for not being decent.

This is one of the few aspects of hiring I feel government employers handle better than private. My state hold monthly events where you can just show up and talk to a representatives and if you pass the vibes check you are virtually guaranteed a proper interview.

We did some spot checks on resumes that were passed on to make sure we were filtering ok and the quality was awful - a significant amount of people were applying for jobs asking for 5 years experience in a Java-like language with no experience, no degree and a half assed cover letter about being a good learner. A decent number were data scientists who had 2 years of python experience, and a surprising number were wildly over-qualified people who I realised after speaking to one or two they were actually trying to sell us their consulting services. That’s before you even get to “are they lying?”

Possibly the single most distracting alert on my phone and pc is my work email. It’s probably prioritised wrong, but if I have 200 candidates for a position, and I get an application that doesn’t meet the tech stack or YOE requirements when I have 20 who do, I’m just going to reject them.

> or late at night ATS let you schedule emails. I used to send mine at 4am EST despite being in the UK

> definitely some companies are using software to filter resumes

I don’t doubt it, but I doubt that it’s rampant to the degree you’d believe on this site. I’d instead that it’s far more likely that the hiring manager, or a recruiter, is spending about 15 seconds looking at “does the tech stack match, how much experience, and how many other candidates are there that I think have an edge”. The people on this site are a small minority of very smart folk, but if you spend any time in a comment section of a topic you are an expert in, you’ll quickly realise that you shouldn’t take everything you read on here as absolute.

Another suggestion - Reach out to two different recruiters and get them to review your resume. (You might need to pay them to do it). You’ll get two totally different responses. Both might work, and neither might work. At the end of the day, a human makes the call, and even if the ATS is automated, a human set those criteria. Honestly, having spent so much of my time hiring over the past 5 years, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was literally no ATS scanning, and everything that was sold to fix that problem was snake oil.

Of course my guess could be way off, but what you are saying is definitely the exception to the common narrative nor does it match what I've seen.

> AI screening

There's been aggressive keyword filtering since long before LLMs exploded.

> but what you are saying is definitely the exception to the common narrative nor does it match what I've seen.

As an anecdote, I posted on who’s hiring here, and we used a separate job requisition for HN, (this was my last job where we went from 2 -> 15 people). We got about 30 applications in the 7 days following that on that req, and of those 30, only one came even remotely close to meeting the requirements on the JD - we were looking for someone with a few years experience in a Java like language, in a Europe/US time zone. Most of the candidates failed both of those criteria, hard. My point being that people who are frustrated with their situation are likely to be more vocal than someone who isn’t.

I’ve spent enough time on HN reading about topics I know a lot about, and seeing people confidently claim how X is easy or if they just Y, and they’re totally wrong. I know a decent amount about working on the hiring side - it’s been a core component of my job for the last 6 years. I’ve worked with recruiters both internal and external, spent far more time with greenhouse than any engineer should ever have to do.

My feeling is that there’s far less sophistication going on, and the dearth of human responses (which is problematic) lets people make up their own reasons as to why it’s not working when the reality is that there’s just a hell of a lot of applicants for every single job.

Yes, a candidate is responsible for their own actions. This logic only sounds good until you’re on the hiring side and you see the stark difference between the LLM abuser applications and the people who are genuinely applying.

Those people who have to apply to 100s of jobs are probably in that situation because they’re spraying low-effort LLM resumes around and most hiring managers can see right through this game by now.

> I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already found a job!

Doesn’t work that way, in my experience. The people who game their way through the application process don’t suddenly switch to honest and high performing employees after they start. They continue the process of trying to min-max their effort given to the company, riding the line of finding how little or how low quality work they can get away with.

The mythical lazy applicant who suddenly becomes a brilliant and loyal employee isn’t realistic.

Just came off a brutal 7 month job search. And that's with a resume good enough, and care enough in jobs I applied to, that I got to the hiring manager with 1 of 10 applications (vs 1:100 or worse which is what I've heard is normal).

I think I interviewed at 50+ companies, which makes 500 or more applications.

Yes, this clearly says something about my interview skills, but there is a difference between interview skills and engineering/software skills-- I've done well in my career without having to heavily interview before (senior IC level) and I came by that strong resume honestly.

So please be careful about generalizing. I'm an example of someone who had to apply to 5x as many jobs as you say would be needed, and it would have been 50x if I didn't have a strong background and work ethic.

Yes, but I think it is overly reductive. As a candidate, you’ve to now apply for a magnitude more of jobs. Tailoring resumes per job takes time, and given how many more I’ve to send, this doesn’t scale.

Additionally, whatever ATS system is being used might auto-reject it because the algorithm decided it’s not a match. If tailored resumes increased hit rate, that would be a different story but that is not the case.

This increases the risk on applicants that their investment on a carefully crafted resume/cover letter is time wasted.

Fake job postings punish the behavior you desire from applicants and incentivize spraying low-effort LLM resumes.

If you do not post fake job postings, I applaud you. If you know a colleague who does this, I ask that you have a conversation with them about the damage they are doing to your industry.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fake-job-listing-ghost-jobs-cbs...

Thanks to the automated systems put in place on the hiring side, you often never see the applications of many of the people genuinely applying because your stupid automated filters determined they weren't qualified.

Less than 1/100th of 1%.

You should also see what I had to say about the history of slavery, and wage slaves, and what anyone can expect from them. The TL;DR is that what you are looking for no longer exists if it ever did, because you have adopted a scorched; salt the earth strategy for finding labor.

What you call lazy, may actually be incredibly hard working (given the current environment) to even get to the point where you see them. Is it their fault you didn't recognize them for the value they could potentially provide? If you pay wages comparable to an office assistant for skilled labor, why do you expect to get anything more than what that first role provides? The economics of things are important.

You need to re-calibrate unreasonable expectations (delusions) back to some more close to reality.

?? 1 in 1500 is 1/15th of 1%, which is more than 1/100th of 1%...

We know from the irrelevant offers that many professionals have automated the processes for casting a net. How it is a problem if individuals do that in reverse?

You're missing the point. The primary people who suffer for this environment isn't hiring companies—they'll eventually work through all the resumes and find someone who will be qualified to fill their open roles, it's just much more expensive—the primary people who suffer for this is qualified employees who now have to work that much harder to stand out from a sea of garbage.

Your odds and my odds of having our resumes thrown out summarily are 100x what they were a few years ago, because time-per-resume has dropped dramatically. That's the fallout from this trend to be concerned about, and we're the real victims of it, not the hiring companies.

Who will champion the necessary regulations? In terms of financial incentives, employers can pay lower wages when candidates have a tougher time getting interviews, and individual candidates usually can’t afford lobbyists.

Now it’s ATS’s turn to fix its own mess or someone else will. Start creating private benchmarks. Select from problems that LLMs can’t easily answer and use those for screening. Complaining that the genie won’t go back into the bottle isn’t a productive use of time.

If they can bullshit job description to reach more applications why candidates cannot do the same with CV?

The result we are going to is almost every CV now will be a 99% matching to the job description thanks to LLM tools.

And cover letter is even more useless now.

The saddest part to me is watching the AI and social media malaise infect young mentees. I’ve been doing volunteer mentoring for years. Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max. It’s sad to see smart, motivated young people get their opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit and TikTok, which teach them that trying is lame and the only way to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a job, lie your way through interviews, and “quiet quit” by testing the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok swoop in to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies and CEOs, not their own decisions.

The recent tech recession was a huge wake up call for a lot of these people. The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug malaise to being very humbled when they got laid off due to their own low performance. It’s depressing for me and other mentors who have been trying to warn that workplace behavior has consequences for years, but the weird tech market of 2021 and 2022 led a lot of young people to think the worst thing that could happen to them was that they’d get fired and get a new job next week with a 20% raise.

The new version of this malaise is believing that AI will take their jobs anyway so the game is to use LLMs to bluff your way through applications, through interviews, and then use LLMs to coast as long as possible at their jobs until the next one.

The problem is so bad that one company withdrew from partnering in our internal job board, citing rampant LLM-generated applications and obvious LLM cheating in interviews. The other side of this is that anyone who makes any effort to be genuine and learn (rather than rely on LLMs for communication and coding) is automatically in the top 25% or so.

I don’t know how this ends. My sense is that the job market is continuing to bifurcate into jobs that people take seriously on one end and jobs where everyone just does performative LLM ping-pong as long as they can get away with it.

Can you blame them? Other comments mention that automating applications is just the response to automating rejections, so why wouldn't an employee min-max their job when companies are min-maxing their employees?

I was given Tech Lead duties after being hired as a Senior SWE, but when it came time for the promotion and pay bump at the end of this year, I kept my current title and only got a 3% pay increase. All of the feedback was good. If there was criticism or bad opinions, it was withheld. I have to wait until next year to see if I can get that now while still carrying those duties, which is ample time to look for new positions.

I was also shown a chart where I was under the 50th percentile (roughly 33%) of pay of other Senior SWEs at the company. That was a nice disclosure, but they don't want to do anything about it. That is patently saying they believe I am below average even though I am doing regular senior SWE work plus tech lead duties without the title and pay. But they don't have any feedback for that. It's possible I just accepted a lower salary and they want to keep it as low as possible.

There could be other reasons why I didn't get it, but I have to guess at those reasons. I'm not going to do more than the minimum if they don't give me actionable feedback and don't reward taking on additional duties. Their move is to not give rewards for working harder, my move is job hopping for that increase.

You can't have many of these experiences before you become jaded. I am definitely not spending a minute outside of work when I take up additional duties on the job and still don't get rewarded for it.

I'm going to act like a business of one and just take as much as I can for as little as possible throughout the career. If that means spamming LLM applications for the next position, then so be it I guess.

Playing the blame game about whether workers or businesses caused this is pretty pointless, but the simple truth is that many people get far more money for far less effort than a Senior SWE (and certainly more than manual labor at all levels below where I'm at).

All of these stories we hear paints a picture of how the world really works, so can you really blame people for getting ahead that way and not taking the path of hard work when it doesn't reward you? I don't want to be taken advantage of and be a sucker - do you?

I've been working for nearly 30 years now. This is pretty standard. Talk to your friends who dont work in tech a 3% raise is pretty good.

It's not perfect, but it's far from zero in my experience.

I'm now on the side of the table where I frequently make personnel decisions: hire, promote, offer a new role, offer a new assignment, merit adjustment, expand a successful team, disband or merge an unsuccessful team into another, transfer in, transfer out, put on a PIP, etc. Most of the good things on that list go to people who demonstrate ability and results, and rarely do those results come without effort. Most of the bad things on that list go to people who demonstrate an inability to deliver results, which is sometimes related to a lack of effort.

I saw people doing great get laid off all the same. Not really how things should work, should it?

I see sovietization everywhere in the country now.

What is happening is the same mechanism that RNA interference plays in cellular networks. Equilibrium means no one gets jobs, and its far more cost effective to ramp up the spam (and indirectly the lagging, but adaptive noise floor) than to correct the underlying issue. Nothing else works.

Also, there is a big problem with wages when you can't support yourself a wife, and multiple children and because of cooperation among companies in various little things they have integrated, this has gotten worse (like a sieve) over decades.

The recent tech recession is manufactured and AI driven. You have execs looking to use AI to replace wholesale any workers further driving wages down while vigorously replacing any workers that would dare to pace their wages independently of inflation (just keeping them static in terms of purchasing power, not even increasing).

The malaise is because jobs aren't available, and people are working for slave wages, they are no better than wage slaves in many respects. Companies care far more for short term profits than they do for sustainability, despite there being clear documented evidence that slaves are the worst most costly type of labor because of that lack of agency (malaise as you call it).

Slaves do subtle sabotage, and front-of-line block with minimal output, they also don't have children. If you read a bit of history this goes all the way back to where Spain during the inquisition had to outlaw slavery by decree in the Americas because threatened their colonies there (from the destruction of the natives, i.e. killing themselves in granary, or killing their children so they wouldn't have to suffer). How bad did it have to get for the government responsible for the inquisition to at the same time say, no we can't have this. (The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Landis)

Business chooses what they do, Candidates don't choose for them. When business has adopted bad assumptions and frameworks, you need to re-examine your premises.

Qualified labor didn't just disappear, you filtered it out, and the fact that people don't see this shows just how blind people are today.

Also, when you black tarp out a landscape for long periods of time, of course everything dies underneath it, and its barren even if you change and remove that requirement, for a good amount of time.

Intelligent candidates have options in that they are flexible (and go to other sectors for business when no jobs are available). This is a sticky psychological decision, and they rarely as a general rule return to previous bad investments.

When you and most other businesses scorch the earth in pursuit of profit, why is there any surprise that talent can't be found? You selected and filtered against talent in the first place by the actions taken.

You can see this perfectly in the fact that for most companies, any gap in employment (not continuously employed, larger than 6mo), puts you at the bottom of a pile or straight to the waste-bin, regardless. False association says its because there is something wrong with the candidate, when in a downturn there may be nothing wrong. Its completely irrational when these people then say they can't find talent. The brain drain is real.

Incidentally, experience at companies outside your given sector is also considered another redflag as well, with a discard or waste-bin non-response. Perfectly competent candidates which your HR department, or 3rd-party pre-screener (AI), ignored, and that isn't even touching on all the protected class violations silently occurring in unenforceable ways, thanks to AI's black box characteristics (where age, gender, and other things are being used to decide).

Of course later, in time, countries impacted more people. Population grows with time, and any rational comparison along these lines would need to be normalized against population, but the truth in the ambiguity of the latter phrase doesn't make the former phrase true.

The inquisition lasted quite a long time (1478-~1820), it has been attributed to the collapse of Portugal/Spain as a national superpower of the time (which was dependent on sea power), the brain drain from fleeing refugees (mostly Jews) was also quite impactful (for France), and it was self-financing. The events became less about heresy, and more about seizing wealth domestically, while creating an environment of persecution for cover. The impacts of it are still felt today in those localities where it was worst.

In terms of the many domains important for measuring the health of a country, these events dramatically impacted the state of things towards the negative across multiple critical domains, as well as their neighbors.

Its improper to discount, minimize, and nullify (through fallacy) both events and their effects, that have been well established by experts without providing some proper basis.

Characterizing it solely as propaganda in isolation isn't a valid characterization. Many people died, or were imprisoned and abused, and the surviving records show this.

According to wikipedia (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisizione#L'Inquisizione_sp... they put to death 826 people, so that's less than 3 people per year and less than 2% of the people they judged.

We know this accurately because it was a legal proceeding that left paper trails which can be studied.

Your claim that it led to the collapse of portugal and spain seems quite wild. And certainly doesn't explain why you think it had no ill effect in protestant countries that kept burning people for 200 years more.

Wikipedia isn't a valid historic source, this is consistently repeated in introductory college courses and throughout academia. Any derivations you make on unsound data remains unsound data and nothing more than your own personal opinion, you shouldn't make it out to be less or more than it is.

You neglects quite a lot in an attempt to nullify, discount, and minimize to suit your biased narrative, like the fact that established estimates show roughly 150,000 people were prosecuted, and the fact that confessions of the time were extracted using torture. Many died without ever being formally executed.

Yes there are legal proceedings that did leave paper trails which I have studied, as well as where those paper trails stop being accurate.

The claims were "collapse as a superpower", not what you improperly referenced as a quote.

When you omit important context intentionally to try and put words not said in other people's mouth (as you did here to strawman), its fairly blatant that you are operating from a place of delusion or severe bias, or potentially malign personal hidden agenda.

Portugal/Spain was known for their technology, seafaring, and maps right up until the inquisition.

This is not wild at all, when you have mass migrations of intelligent and educated people wherever they migrate to benefit from their intellect whereas the places they travel from stagnate.

In any case, the fact that you tried to change what was said kills any possible credibility you might have, and there is no impetus or need for me to respond to you any further.

There is no value in unnecessarily giving a platform in the guise of discussion to the delusional or the malevolent. Best of luck to you in correcting that vile behavior, deceitful behavior is not tolerated by rational or intelligent people.

Population levels are not the same, this comparison is without basis.

You also assume the formal documented executions are the only deaths where people were killed and died, they are not.

About 5 minutes of 'proper' research based in method, will establish that you are mistaken and don't know what you are talking about. This is the problem when you try to have an AI think for you, you get it wrong, and potentially become delusional.

The inquisition lasted almost three centuries. At its height, Spain had a population of about 7.5 million people. Many prosecutions occurred, but few executions as part of trials. The majority of people died from maltreatment, torture, and executions (absent trials) and these records are sparse in the historical record, but there are credible records to support more died than were executed.

The mortality rate was also significantly higher than it is today, and the families of the accused individuals often died from poverty as a result of fear from guilt-by-association (if you were to include that, most don't). Additionally, the Spanish inquisition inspired surrounding countries to similar acts of terror, and in the Latin America's as well. We are only talking about Spain here. The full global death count as a result of the inquisition is much much higher.

You can find established historical material linked at: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/39443/what-was-t....

This is the sixth result down on google.

The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are being performed at shared workspaces. That's the world we live in now.

Nah, if I was running a 100% remote job company ten years ago before all of this, I would still absolutely want to meet each of my hires in person before inking a deal. Maybe I'm old-school but I've been very successful and lucky with hiring.

I mean, I don't disagree emotionally, but this is a lot closer in spirit to what the OG hackers did than most of the stuff you see on the front page.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/capn-crunch-whistle

Your comment is like "why use AES256? People can still brute force it." Sure... good luck

This is just a natural response to the automatic screening methods that have been used by the hiring side for years. Finally the sides have more equal power again in this arms race started by the hiring side.

Of course the consequence is that everyone loses and is worse off than if this arms race never started, but you (not you personally, hiring managers in general) should have thought about that before screening automatically. This is on you.

It's absurd, and only getting worse.

Based on what you're saying, the only way to actually fix this is to fix the underlying systematic problem. No idea how you do that, but seems like the only logical way I can think of

win-win-win situation for every party, they got me my last two jobs in Vienna

The costs will diffuse through a mix of incompetent inhouse HR and already overworked seniors and leads that now need to waste time on hiring.

Idea 2: Bid to have yourself reviewed for the job. Money goes in escrow pool.

I already saw "work" offers where YOU have to pay them their salary. As in, to employer, for the "opportunity"

Apply like a bot, work like a bot.

IIRC "nepotism" is specifically family/relatives, and the larger Venn-diagram circle would be "favoritism."

There's noise all around happening.

Maybe the problem is that spamming people is free.

We don't even have the job posted publicly anywhere and we get >100 submissions per day. Many are duplicates. I've found some that with some minor research turn out to be foreign organized crime. A large number of them had the exact same cover letter with changes in the names and past jobs.

Not only is it difficult to find candidates that actually fit the job role, it's hard to go through any that are even real people.

I've told many friends of mine to use connections and not online job postings because it's basically impossible right now with the automated resume submission companies.

And then the candidate management tools such as lever told me that no, every one of those candidates that applied were real people -- even when I provided proof that at least 40 of them were linked to a single organized crime group out of China.

During interviews, candidates use tools like HDMI dual-screen setups, ChatGPT, Otter AI, or Fathom AI to cheat and secure jobs. These consulting firms even fabricate green card verifications and other documents, enabling them to crack most interviews unless the candidate is exceptionally unskilled.

Once hired, these companies often delegate the actual work to individuals in India, paying them as little as $500 while profiting $4,000–$5,000 per month from the arrangement.

We uncovered this issue when we began conducting on-site interviews. While these candidates can handle medium-level LeetCode problems during virtual evaluations, they struggle with basic tasks, like implementing a LinkedList or solving simple LeetCode problems, in person.

Alarmingly, these consulting companies are becoming more sophisticated over time. This raises a critical question: how can genuinely experienced candidates compete in such a landscape?

Not yet!

You must work in a super specialized industry, then

But arguably, a candidate who hasn't ever had to contemplate the concept of "linked list" but can derive the necessary ideas on the spot given the basic design, has some useful talents.

I am sure 12+ years of experience should be able to do it easily.

I mean when I write a cover letter I take the cover letter I took the last time and change a couple of names and that's it.

Why do I want the job? I want the job because I do work for money, I don't have some idea that your SaaS is really giving me anything that any of the others I've worked at in the past didn't give me - no company means anything to me aside from having reasonably interesting problems to work on and hopefully not onerous working environment.

But per downthread comment, applicants don't care if their actions make things worse for the market as a whole. And it's not clear if they should as a one-turn game. (As someone else remarked, Prisoner's Dilemma and all that.)

They are not a new idea, in fact they are well known, but also prohibited by law in many places because of their widespread abuse.

There’s also a more general idea in competition law that companies shoul, well, compete their fields, and allowing cartel-like behaviour on the labour market is contradictory to this.

And come to think of it, actually, credit scores can be gamed. It's well known that when companies and territories get credit scores they are largely a con game, as in based on the conifdence the raters have on your future performance, and not objective reality.

Likewise, credit scores can be juiced and tools exist to help you improve them and track them. But a bad credit score doesn't always mean fiscal mismanagement. It could be loans from a predatory lender or due to a medical expense or something completely outside the context the credit check is to be used for. Credit scores tell you if someone has lots of money first, and if they are smart with their money second. People with financial means often have good credit scores but can be as likely to default if their circumstances change. Perhaps more likely if the amounts of money at play are greater. People got those subprime mortgages with great credit scores, somehow.

So... Yeah, credit scores for loans are a form of outsourcing of responsibilities. But the point is somewhat well taken. The equivalent in hiring to a credit score isn't to ask banks but to do reference checks and ask a network or former manager about a hire.

Credit scores can easily be discriminatory as much as criminal charges (without due process, at least) and other unfair systems. We just normalize it because it works for most people. We poke fun at it when other countries try to come up with e.g. a social credit score, though.

1. A third-party assigns everyone a hidden score, and gives them a cryptographic signing key.

2. They can sign off on one-time lookups to companies they apply to. Every time their credit score is looked up, it decreases to disincentivize "spray and pray".

3. Companies are incentivized to go directly to the third-party (to ensure truthiness), and not divulge the score to other companies (since they are in a competition).

4. The actual algorithms used to determine scores should stay hidden to avoid manipulation. However, how do you also ensure accuracy? Maybe have several dozen reputation companies, and apply Shapley values based on hiring decisions. To avoid correlation, you should only update a reputation's weight when the hiring decision didn't query it.

    > many companies have methods available to them to remove bad glassdoor reviews

University admissions has followed a similar trend, going from 5–10 being "spray and pray" twenty years ago to 20–30 applications nowadays. However, it didn't increase as much because (1) each application costs money, and (2) most universities expect a cover letter. It still costs quite a bit to filter the applicants, but the fee helps pay for that.

On the flipside I'm not finding good resources to find startups to apply to that don't have hundreds of applicants already. There's no good answer the market has come up with as far as I can tell, so everything just gets worse for everyone as a result.

"School" is quite variable.

Weak signal: you only went to class and did OK in them.

Strong signal: you had an internship, or undergrad research experience, or part-time employment as a TA/tutor, or have a completed project to show off, or some kind of non-trivial community/group/club/fraternity leadership.

Really strong signal: you published a paper with someone I know and they recommend you to me.

Most people are looking at whether you just went to (whatever they consider) a top tier university.

1) There is too much noise occluding their signal.

2) There is a form of gatekeeping going on.

Gatekeeping only really works in exploitative systems (e.g. "me and my children are the masters, and you and your children are the slaves") or when the noise is so high that companies wouldn't gain much from not gatekeeping (e.g. Harvard admissions in the late 1800s).

So, if you don't exist in an exploitative system, providing more signal is going to both benefit deserving candidates and punish gatekeeping companies. I don't see why a reputation score would increase gatekeeping.

At the end of the day, every applicant could be ranked on their ability at the job. Wouldn't it be best for everyone—companies and prospective employees—to know where they rank up, so they don't waste time applying to hundreds of jobs or sifting through hundreds of applications?

The only people who are hurt are the hustlers: people who spend far more time hustling for a position than gaining the skills needed to do well in that position. Their goal is the extreme limit of noise, where success rate is directly proportional to how many applications are filled out, and I have no sympathy for the destruction of the commons (that I have to live in).

I guess that would work in societies where this was legal - not sure if I know of any though.

Enjoy. It's Nobel prize material.

But, yeah, if you don't have a network you're in a more difficult position.

The lesson people should take from this is you need to cultivate your network through your career. Sadly it seems most people would rather complain about how broken the system is.

Either the market needs to come up with a good solution that encourages good behavior from both sides or the governments can step in and start regulating.

How could regulations help?

Both sides already have good incentives to match positions to candidates; yet we are collectively failing.

On the company side, only some people in the organization are strongly aligned with hiring. The vast majority are indifferent or even somewhat negative as new hires mean more work.

There have been posts here on HN about people applying to 500 jobs in 8 months and not even getting so much as a human reply, let alone a job. There are other posts proving that companies are posting false job openings to give the impression of growth to Wall Street or also just to argue that more immigration is needed.

You may complain about it, but just be happy you haven’t been replaced by AI application reviewers, because that is coming. I suggest you start thinking about pairing down expenses and increasing savings. No, seriously. Worst case, you have more savings.

...

"Click here to submit to having your resume processed by a bot that will do all the filtering for us"

This might not be you and your company, but it seems to be most of them.

Lol I dipped out of further consideration once they sent me what the interview process was gonna be like. Like 6 rounds, whiteboard coding, leetcode crap, "behavioral" interviews, a talk with some pencil pushers and some extra stuff. I don't know how desperate you have to be to put up with that.

I look forward to the day the average person has the same level of access to agents to counter all this. Oh, Wall Street Journal you want to make it difficult to unsubscribe? You want me to call, waste time on the phone, etc. OK, I'll just have my AI agent call and take up your calling agents time, increasing your costs.

... my AI agent goes through phone tree... finally connected to agent... WSJ Support Person:'Hello, Wall Street Journal support' My AI Agent: 'please hold as I connect with my human' hold music plays... My AI Agent: 'sorry, we are taking longer to connect than normal, please hold while you are connected' hold music plays...

Would you hire a statistician that didn't have 'n' years of MS Excel experience, or had never used Pandas?

If I were a statistician with 20 years experience, would I even apply to positions listing those as requirements?

It's an interesting problem, as giving information on the position requirements clues applicants into the game they need to play and also runs the risk of turning some otherwise qualified people away.

Job seekers do not care and should not care what you want. They want the job, you are paid to find the best candidate. Just arriving at a situation where you get flooded with hundreds of resumes, means that you or your organisation has failed with what you were trying to do. You should have had hand picked candidates ready in the pipeline when it came time to hire. You are a hiring manager after all.

I saw this as a marketing kind of problem, your conversion is based both on number and quality of your leads.

The solution is likely some kind of highly curated list you have to pay to be on, for both sides to increase signal and get rid of scammers. Many friends of mine have gone down the line of replying to recruiters only to be met with “contract to hire <20% of market rate and you must move to Nowhere, MN” when clearly your profile says what metro you are attached to.

Things are gonna be worse longer I think. Leaning hard on my network.

Frankly, seriously consider a career change. The ladder has been pulled up for entry-level positions due to AI, interest-rates, etc. This will come back and bite us as an industry, but it’ll be 10 years from now and most people can’t wait that long.

I can’t speak for everyone, but 3000+ applicants for a single opening is typical at my org. The odds of any given individual getting in are essentially zero. Referrals get priority over everyone else, even candidates that are on-paper better qualified.

It sucks for everyone involved, especially for job hunters. But from the hiring side, truthfully, there’s no end in sight.

I also have friends and family in Netherlands, France, and UK who help me keep tabs on how things are going in various places and where might be better locations to target for an American with a technical background looking to just up and leave the US.

hate the game playa ;)

I blame all the ASTs and companies that fail to give any feedback whatsoever other than a generic "We went another way". If you can't give people the 5 minutes of effort of looking over their resume, why do you expect them to respect your time instead?

Spoiler alert, it doesn't work. The result is a mountain of overfitted garbage, with keyword spamming like there was no tomorrow. And they all find the same unqualified candidates.

If you're a recruiter, you're supposed to find the qualified, non-trivial to surface candidates. And yes, unfortunately that means it's a lot of hard work. (The top-notch agency recruiters value their personally built candidate networks for a good reason.)