Live data from Hacker News

Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload

wired.com

31–40 of 119 posts

Re: Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload

#31

My partner has been searching for an SDE job for 8 months and recently received an email requesting her to do a recruiter screen. She responded and got a call instantly where the “recruiter was a text-to-speech AI. Presumably the entire process was automated; I’m assuming if they’re using text-to-speech, the selection and initial email was all AI. It’s an arms race on both sides.

AI startup idea, CaaS, candidate as a service.

Re: Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News monthly threads for “Who wants to be hired” and “Who is hiring”. That’s how I got hired for my current job (2019) and that’s how I’m hiring currently.

All I got from that was some spam and "defi" recruiting for whatever Ponzi scheme the cryptocoin community is hot on right now.

Yeah I'm still getting spam from sketchy crypto orgs months after I put my email into a HN hiring thread once. Don't recommend.

Re: Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload

#33

My partner has been searching for an SDE job for 8 months and recently received an email requesting her to do a recruiter screen. She responded and got a call instantly where the “recruiter was a text-to-speech AI. Presumably the entire process was automated; I’m assuming if they’re using text-to-speech, the selection and initial email was all AI. It’s an arms race on both sides.

It's the curse of scale. Automation allows there to be plenty of job postings and job applications, but it sidelines the human part of actually talking to someone. Those in the know will end up sidestepping this altogether and using their networks to get a direct line to a real hiring manager or applicant. I've done this myself where I talk to past collaborators and professors I know and ask "Do you have an intern/so…

That’s why we’re building Touvlo.co (for hardware engineers) - human engineer interviewers, interviewing humans on real world applicable engineering skills, more fair to outsiders, standardized, scaleable!

Re: Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload

#34

My partner has been searching for an SDE job for 8 months and recently received an email requesting her to do a recruiter screen. She responded and got a call instantly where the “recruiter was a text-to-speech AI. Presumably the entire process was automated; I’m assuming if they’re using text-to-speech, the selection and initial email was all AI. It’s an arms race on both sides.

Anyone have a text-to-speech AI to talk to recruiter text-to-speech AIs?

Re: Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload

#35

My partner has been searching for an SDE job for 8 months and recently received an email requesting her to do a recruiter screen. She responded and got a call instantly where the “recruiter was a text-to-speech AI. Presumably the entire process was automated; I’m assuming if they’re using text-to-speech, the selection and initial email was all AI. It’s an arms race on both sides.

It's the curse of scale. Automation allows there to be plenty of job postings and job applications, but it sidelines the human part of actually talking to someone. Those in the know will end up sidestepping this altogether and using their networks to get a direct line to a real hiring manager or applicant. I've done this myself where I talk to past collaborators and professors I know and ask "Do you have an intern/so…

I generally agree that relying on a network and human referrals is the way to go but building an effective network is much harder than it used to be. Meetup groups and local conferences were a good source to make connections pre-pandemic but that has really withered in the last couple years.

Past collaborators are also a great source but she is junior and doesn’t really have any she can leverage.

My initial advice to her was do some real projects, document her work and insights in a blog and engage with others on social media but that’s mostly screaming into a void.

My approach to hiring is to focus on competencies (what do I need them to accomplish) rather than skills (how many years of JS) but that doesn’t cut down on the number of applicants any, just makes initial eval a little easier. I was pondering the idea of leaning in more on AI to screen on competencies which might incentivize higher information density on resumes but the quality of that eval might not actually be any better and only increase the “black box”-ness of it all.

Re: Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload

#36

My partner has been searching for an SDE job for 8 months and recently received an email requesting her to do a recruiter screen. She responded and got a call instantly where the “recruiter was a text-to-speech AI. Presumably the entire process was automated; I’m assuming if they’re using text-to-speech, the selection and initial email was all AI. It’s an arms race on both sides.

Anyone have a text-to-speech AI to talk to recruiter text-to-speech AIs?

I love that idea. Record the messages and use that to fine tune your own language model to improve the chances of talking to a real person? If she does that and can’t get a job, the market is officially broken.

Re: Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone have a text-to-speech AI to talk to recruiter text-to-speech AIs?

I love that idea. Record the messages and use that to fine tune your own language model to improve the chances of talking to a real person? If she does that and can’t get a job, the market is officially broken.

Yeah but if it's a local minimum and legal too, nothing will change.

Re: Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload

#38

My partner has been searching for an SDE job for 8 months and recently received an email requesting her to do a recruiter screen. She responded and got a call instantly where the “recruiter was a text-to-speech AI. Presumably the entire process was automated; I’m assuming if they’re using text-to-speech, the selection and initial email was all AI. It’s an arms race on both sides.

I can understand having to respond if it's been 8 months, but this is a pretty big red flag that the company doesn't respect humans.

It’s a giant telecom company that already had some pretty big red flags around how they treat employees from my own network.

The best part is that she already interviewed there a while back. She got a backend interview and didn’t pass (she’s primarily frontend); not a big deal but she gets a message from a new recruiter about every 2-3 months about the same role. This time it was just AI doing it.

Re: Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload

#39
> So far, over 3,000 people have applied to one open data science vacancy at a US health tech company this year. The top candidates are given a lengthy and difficult task assessment, which very few pass

Obviously the company should select one large project, break it down (with the help of AI) into 1500 steps, and farm it out to candidates as "task assessments" that can be cross-checked and then folded together into an app.

Re: Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload

#40
The interesting thing to me reading this is that it's basically saying how much recruiters and hiring managers dislike/are wary of this AI-infused job application process. On the flip side, I've heard tons of complaints on the other side from job seekers: not just that job hunting is hard in a down market, but that the reign of modern ATSes means that it's a constant "battle against the algorithm" to even get noticed, tons of fake or outdated job postings, and rarely even an acknowledgement about the state of the application.

I mention this because this seems like an area where lots of people wanted to throw AI at the problem, but I have a tough time finding anyone, on either side, that thinks that automation and AI improves the process in any way.

Post reply on HN