Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 119 posts

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

#51

Post by ghaff »

eikenberry wrote: post #24
kthejoker2 wrote: post #13

Fo any other professions have thse challenges? Our lack of basic professional certifications has just led to nonsense in every corner of the hiring and job seeking process.

The challenge for certifying in software engineering seems similar to the challenges you'd face in any creative, building oriented professions. That is you can't test for it with some sort of standard exam. You need to have the person build something and then have established masters of the field evaluate it. But that requires a professional structure we don't have.

Relatively few engineers of any kind (outside of Civil Engineering)--much less other STEM--have PE licenses in the US. They're mostly required if you're going to be signing off on things for regulators etc. You could do it but now you require a 4+ year degree, exams, and some years of working under a certified engineer.

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

#52

Post by kgermino »

chipdart wrote: post #43
robertclaus wrote: post #28

My experience the last few months is that the saying "It's who you know, not what you know." is alive and well. For jobs where I met the hiring manager (referral, networking, etc.) I had 2 out of 3 applications lead to offers. For resumes submitted online I had 1 out of 50 even respond. Obviously there's some alignment - I know people working in the area I know best - but from what I've experienced the hiring teams a…

> For jobs where I met the hiring manager (referral, networking, etc.) I had 2 out of 3 applications lead to offers. For resumes submitted online I had 1 out of 50 even respond. I don't think this means what you think it means. In fact, I only see survivorship bias in your personal anecdote. Meeting the hiring manager usually takes place after resume filtering. This means that you received offers in processes where y…

I think the question is how are you meeting the hiring manager?

If you submit a resume to a recruiter (or worse, online job posting) and get to the hiring manager you've absolutely gone through a bunch of formal screening steps. However if, as I believe GP is describing, you're able to connect with them through a side channel (such as a referral) you usually haven't gone through the formal screening so much as you've skipped it entirely. That obviously will dramatically increase your odds of success but it's not the same as getting through the resume scan and HR filter

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

#53

Post by everybodyknows »

mvdtnz wrote: post #32
ohthatsnotright wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Consider a "burner" email alias for such situations. Fastmail makes creating them easy enough.

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

#54

Post by kgermino »

mead5432 wrote: post #14

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.

Yep, I just had this happen too. I'm not looking nearly that seriously but the position as described was nearly perfect. The AI phone call plus a couple other minor details (slight changes in the description/requirements) which could probably be easily cleared up with a human made me distrust the entire process and walk away.

It's incredibly annoying

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

#56

Post by Aurornis »

mead5432 wrote: post #14

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 an arms race on both sides.

In my experience, the AI-vs-AI hiring battle takes place in parallel to normal hiring pipelines. Even before ChatGPT went mainstream, recruiting for key roles was largely happening via referrals or scraping LinkedIn for people at target companies.

When I posted jobs (for a moderately well known company name) on public job boards, we'd get 1000s of applications within the first week long before people were using ChatGPT to fill out applications. The majority of the submissions were absolute junk: People spamming their resume to every job out there, resumes from people completely unqualified (like tech support people applying for Staff Software Engineer roles), or mad-libs style resumes where people threw word salad into a PDF while forgetting to tell me what they actually did ("spearheaded initiative to reach across the company and leverage synergies, increasing company revenue by 23%")

It has been like this for a long time. ChatGPT only seems to have emboldened more people to switch to spamming resumes and sending vacuous applications everywhere.

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

#57

Post by meristohm »

chipdart wrote: post #43
robertclaus wrote: post #28

My experience the last few months is that the saying "It's who you know, not what you know." is alive and well. For jobs where I met the hiring manager (referral, networking, etc.) I had 2 out of 3 applications lead to offers. For resumes submitted online I had 1 out of 50 even respond. Obviously there's some alignment - I know people working in the area I know best - but from what I've experienced the hiring teams a…

> For jobs where I met the hiring manager (referral, networking, etc.) I had 2 out of 3 applications lead to offers. For resumes submitted online I had 1 out of 50 even respond. I don't think this means what you think it means. In fact, I only see survivorship bias in your personal anecdote. Meeting the hiring manager usually takes place after resume filtering. This means that you received offers in processes where y…

> referral, networking, etc

Presumably not through the bottom-up filtering process.

All of my current jobs (I'm in my 40s, been working for money outside the family since my teens), and most of all the jobs I've ever had, were thanks to reaching out to individuals to make a connection, or leveraging an existing connection.

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

#58

Post by Aurornis »

I've participated in a coaching and resume review program for many years. Most college students always struggled to write resumes, but at least they were aware of their shortcomings and reached out for help.

Something about ChatGPT has convinced a lot of them that they don't need help or even to put much effort into the process. They hate writing resumes, so they just dump some words into a ChatGPT prompt and copy-paste into a resumse.

To the inexperienced, the ChatGPT structure feels like brilliant, polished content magically appearing on their screen. They aren't looking at the content, but rather the structure, which ChatGPT can formulaically provide.

Then recruiters get their resumes and instantly recognize ChatGPT garbage, because it's their job to read resumes and they've become good at recognizing low signal to noise ratio ChatGPT output.

One of our local college programs had a company reach out and ask to be removed from their referral pipeline because the majority of the resumes submitted by their students were clearly ChatGPT drivel. It was a real blow to the people who had been working hard to set up these relationships and give the students opportunities to apply for.

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

#59

Post by nnurmanov »

mead5432 wrote: post #35
the_snooze wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My suggestion is to focus on a fewer number of companies, instead of sending resume in bulk. When you narrow your choices you can study well and notice bugs or issues that need to be addressed. Fix them, send the results to someone in the company, it will increase your chances substantially.

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

#60

Post by dang »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #3

To summarize the article though: Online hiring continues to be overwhelmed by huge numbers of low quality applications, now with some extra AI tools that make it easier to lie about your experience. Same issue as before, now wrapped up in OpenAI API calls.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265635.
Post reply on HN