Ask HN: How to deal with fake job applicants?

It may not be possible but charge 1 cent to submit. Should filter out the bots.

What's your goal? Is it to avoid hiring someone fake, or to avoid interviewing them at all?

If you are just trying to decrease the number of AI-generated applicants, one tactic I've seen is to ask applicants to complete a short (~30 minutes) evaluation alongside or even before applying. As in, your application won't be considered if this isn't done.

That will weed out 95% of people who are just spitting fake applications at you -- it won't be worth their time. It might dissuade some real applicants, too - just be upfront about why you're doing it, and don't make your overall process onerous.

The remaining folks, the ones who are actually trying to fake it for money, are harder to spot, and you will need more traditional methods.

> You could require people mail in their resume

That is supremely annoying for industries where applicants must average about 500+ submissions per successful job offer.

I ran across two of those last year. Great-looking jobs, too. In a fit of pique, I submitted to one with everything typewritten using an Olympia SG3, and for the other I wrote out everything longhand. With a fountain pen. In cursive. It took me nearly 3 days. I should have scanned it in for posterity, because it looked like a government treaty from the 1890s. Gorgeous, but doubtful that anyone under the age of 45 could even read it, and almost certainly that anyone under the age of 35 couldn’t. I even did a wax seal on the back fold of the envelope.

Obviously, neither produced any sort of a response, because mail-in Resumes are typical of companies that are trying to justify foreign workers. If the barriers to application are stupidly high, then of course they won’t have any domestic applications and will need to find foreign (and much cheaper) applicants.

What? It's much less effort to perform 'an evaluation' with an llm than actually do it. You are actually just weeding out 95% of real applicants.

The market is a horrible shit show, fake applicants and fake openings is the norm. I applied for dozens of job openings with only a 25% response rate and even less for a first interview. Started looking how to spot the fake ones. You need to add to your application a deterrent, like in person interview, meet a team member in person or like somebody else mentioned pick a laptop in person. That was one of the ways I spotted fake openings from real ones, aside from the typical company reposting the same job for months.