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I automated my job application process

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101–110 of 884 posts

Re: I automated my job application process

#101
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s our alternative? It doesn’t seem to be “carefully consider and apply to a handful of highly relevant postings”. I don’t see the downsides for candidates to play the numbers game.

Referrals and networking? When has submitting a resume to a portal ever been the way to find a job other than a cookie cutter one? Apply like a bot, work like a bot.

I haven’t seen the power of referrals for 10 years now. At work I can give you a “referral” by uploading your resume to our ATS. That’s it. It receives no more consideration than if you were to click Easy Apply on LinkedIn as far as I’m aware.

Re: I automated my job application process

#102
post #65

Nice. But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want. Flooded with auto submitted Resumes. I posted a job recently and got 100+ resumes in 2 days and 99% were not even remotely close to being a good fit. I struggled to sort through so many Resumes to find someone worth interviewing. The problem is that with so much noise, good candidates may get ignored or rejected by mistake. And the cycle continues. I get…

I haven’t hired in years but I am surprised there aren’t AI agents that can intelligently rate the compatibility of resumes to your job posting

There are recruiting agencies who have tried this method: "Use AI to match the most relevant candidates to the job spec you gave us."

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.)

Re: I automated my job application process

#103

Nice. But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want. Flooded with auto submitted Resumes. I posted a job recently and got 100+ resumes in 2 days and 99% were not even remotely close to being a good fit. I struggled to sort through so many Resumes to find someone worth interviewing. The problem is that with so much noise, good candidates may get ignored or rejected by mistake. And the cycle continues. I get…

With automated hiring spam and our industry's tenuous grasp of basic integrity with actual HN posts proudly boasting of their apps to help you cheat during interviews using LLMs, several of my friends who assist in hiring at their companies have already returned to "on site" interviews to cut down on the proverbial chaff. The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are being performed at shared workspaces…

I’d be absolutely fine going in person to interview for a remote job if I thought I had any reasonable chance of success with your process. We are talking about where I’m going to be working for at least the next few years. That’s kind of a big deal.

Re: I automated my job application process

#104
post #93

Nice. But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want. Flooded with auto submitted Resumes. I posted a job recently and got 100+ resumes in 2 days and 99% were not even remotely close to being a good fit. I struggled to sort through so many Resumes to find someone worth interviewing. The problem is that with so much noise, good candidates may get ignored or rejected by mistake. And the cycle continues. I get…

It all ends up being a nasty feedback loop. (Especially) junior people in a somewhat tough market for tech end up spamming resumes so companies respond with pretty crappy algorithmic filters which basically somewhat randomly toss most of the resumes into the bit bucket. Rinse and repeat. 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…

There's actually a solution around this: name and shame! Just like bad companies get called out on GlassDoor, companies should create a reputation system for prospective employees (e.g. a professional credit score). This already exists for potential tenants, so I don't really understand why it doesn't exist for potential employees given they occur at about the same frequency and have a similar amount of money trading hands.

Re: I automated my job application process

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With automated hiring spam and our industry's tenuous grasp of basic integrity with actual HN posts proudly boasting of their apps to help you cheat during interviews using LLMs, several of my friends who assist in hiring at their companies have already returned to "on site" interviews to cut down on the proverbial chaff. The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are being performed at shared workspaces…

Thinking that "in person" will stop or prevent cheating is laughable. For god-sakes, the chess world is freaking out over an ANAL BEADS cheating scandal! https://kotaku.com/chess-champion-anal-bead-magnus-carlsen-h... https://github.com/RonSijm/ButtFish A candidate who wants that job will figure out some way to have ChatGPT help them in a way you can't detect, even if it also has an impact on their ass health.

You're right, you can't ever stop cheating. That's not the point. The point is to make it harder & more expensive. To make it not worth it.

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

Re: I automated my job application process

#106

Nice. But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want. Flooded with auto submitted Resumes. I posted a job recently and got 100+ resumes in 2 days and 99% were not even remotely close to being a good fit. I struggled to sort through so many Resumes to find someone worth interviewing. The problem is that with so much noise, good candidates may get ignored or rejected by mistake. And the cycle continues. I get…

As a hiring manager, I've chosen to opt out of this system altogether. Instead of public postings, I just poll my network and post job announcements in private channels in my professional community. Much higher signal-to-noise ratio.

I wish I knew how to find one of these channels. My real human professional network has slowly evaporated over the last decade.

Re: I automated my job application process

#107
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all ends up being a nasty feedback loop. (Especially) junior people in a somewhat tough market for tech end up spamming resumes so companies respond with pretty crappy algorithmic filters which basically somewhat randomly toss most of the resumes into the bit bucket. Rinse and repeat. 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…

There's actually a solution around this: name and shame! Just like bad companies get called out on GlassDoor, companies should create a reputation system for prospective employees (e.g. a professional credit score). This already exists for potential tenants, so I don't really understand why it doesn't exist for potential employees given they occur at about the same frequency and have a similar amount of money trading…

Applicants have long sprayed and prayed even when it involved sending physical letters. Some of the current systems have decreased the effort per company applied-to but, for entry-level employees, it was rarely a carefully-targeted thing for new professionals. It was always a numbers game to some degree although admittedly the scale and tools involved have changed.

Re: I automated my job application process

#108

Nice. But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want. Flooded with auto submitted Resumes. I posted a job recently and got 100+ resumes in 2 days and 99% were not even remotely close to being a good fit. I struggled to sort through so many Resumes to find someone worth interviewing. The problem is that with so much noise, good candidates may get ignored or rejected by mistake. And the cycle continues. I get…

'We can use automation tools to just throw away your resume, but heaven forbid the average person does' isn't a take average people care about.

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...

Re: I automated my job application process

#109

It will be interesting to see a SaaS that applies to jobs come up. I wonder if the application process will switch up in the near future to people posting their profiles for then company recruiters/AI to reach out and contact since if they post a job they just get 10k automated applications.

A fun variant: - scrape linkedin and apply to jobs based on the result - take the responses with "positive sentiment" and then contact the linkedin person Service is now connecting people with companies that already thought their generated CV was close enough to what they want. Call this a "recruitment agency".

> - scrape linkedin and apply to jobs based on the result

That was my first thought when looking for jobs, but maybe I am naive, wouldn't this break their ToS?

Re: I automated my job application process

#110
post #99

> Format the response as a JSON object with these keys:{ "status": "success" or "error", ... Would it not be better to ask the LLM to generate the status key last, since it cannot know ahead of generation whether the generation will actually be successful?

Yes, you are right. Not to be too snide about it but this is not optimal.

You get provably better performance if you let the thing analyze the situation / think through the problem / whatever before letting it commit to choosing a status like that.

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