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I automated my job application process

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Re: I automated my job application process

#131

Post by salomon812 »

I'm a software manager that has been doing some form of interviewing/hiring for 13 years.

I did two rounds of hiring software engineers last year, one in spring that seemed normal, and one in the fall that was was brutal. The fall hiring had a flood of applicants, and in retrospect, most seemed like AI was used in some way.

For the fall round, I suddenly had a higher percentage of applicants that qualified after resume screening and initial phone screen, but they all collapsed when I did a technical round. And failure rate on the technical was much much worse than usual.

We have a full-time recruiter working with us, and I'm not 100% sure what tools he used, but I switched to manually reviewing each resume, and given that it was 100s, it took a long time, but I still had my problem of great initial screen, terrible technical interview.

Then, I decided to throw out anyone who heavily mentioned AI, LLM, or data science. After all, with almost a thousand applicants, I needed to sort some how. (To be fair, our use case is more esoteric, we're not writing Javascript or parsers, so it's not as much of a time-saver.) Large chunks of applicants dropped and the process felt more normal.

I also switched to only on-site interviews. My initial technical screenings are still done remotely. Before COVID we were 100% on-site interviews, but did hybrid after COVID. Now, I'm back to enforcing on-site for my group.

Re: I automated my job application process

#132

Post by pknomad »

divbzero wrote: post #114

This is pretty cool, though it seems more beneficial as a neat demo project than for its actual functionality. First, automated job application submission probably doesn’t endear you to hiring managers. And, moreover, you probably don’t want to optimize your life for job hunting in the same way that you probably don’t want to optimize your life for being very good at first dates. Life is more fulfilling if you can fi…

Agree.

It also feels like it's optimizing for the wrong thing (getting past the screening for as many job as possible, regardless of fit). I personally felt like the most successful experience I had with job search (and retention) is if I knew someone at the company and just bypassed the initial resume screening altogether and hand-crafted a nuanced resume and cover letter with a strong backing from people that knew me.

I realize not everyone has that luxury but I made diligent effort to network in and out of work and it has mostly helped me filter out bad jobs/fit and save time for both parties.

Re: I automated my job application process

#133

Post by odyssey7 »

lolinder wrote: post #129
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not your company, but it seems hiring companies brought this upon themselves with immediate AI rejects of qualified candidates, ghost jobs, ghosting candidates after interview, etc, etc. 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 hi…

> it seems hiring companies brought this upon themselves 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…

Alas, in this case it appears that unchecked competition and automation have led to a divergent outcome, creating worse outcomes for everyone.

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.

Re: I automated my job application process

#134

Post by maeil »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #109
JonChesterfield wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Whoopsie, guess OpenAI et al broke a few million ToSes while training their models!

Re: I automated my job application process

#135

Post by DavidDodda »

kqr wrote: 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?

thanks for the feedback!, that's something I haven't though of!

Re: I automated my job application process

#136

Post by highcountess »

codegeek wrote: post #12

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 am sure it’s tough for you, but imagine being someone looking for work when you probably don’t even realize the massive amounts of noise on the employee side. I get friends asking me for input on whether I think that a job listing may be a fraudulent or scammy listing, and that’s from the top job board sites. People have zero trust in the system because the corporations have created this toxic hell of commoditized humans where you are now all the sudden competing with the whole rest of the world in this poss as t-American transitional hell we are currently in.

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.

Re: I automated my job application process

#137

Post by HDThoreaun »

theoreticalmal wrote: post #91
ripped_britches wrote: post #33

As someone who automates everything and normally loves this type of thing, my approach for job hunting has been way different. Instead of spray and pray, I spend a week or so deeply researching where I want to work and figure out how to get there role-wise. Everything 100% manual and focused, no more than 8 total companies. Maybe spray and pray works if you’re more junior, but later in your career you’ll want to be v…

This sounds like a good and noble pursuit, but I would be able to take exactly one ghosting or premature rejection before abandoning it completely. There are so many BS reasons applications are ignored, I can’t see this approach working well. Maybe if you can network your way to a manager or something

There are no foolproof methods. Shotgunning makes it much harder to get past the recruiter screen. Yes the high touch method leads to larger feelings of rejection but its also more likely to actually work.

Re: I automated my job application process

#138

Post by maeil »

Volundr wrote: post #34
the_arun wrote: post #10

Is cover letter important? Do hiring managers/recruiters read those?

It's highly dependent on the manager I'm afraid and impossible to guess who's on the other side of that. The process outlined in the post also isn't a path to writing a good cover letter. You don't want to just go over your resume again you want to either talk about things that wouldn't be there (e.x. why you want this job specifically, because your 100% applying because this is the unicorn job for you, not because y…

> (e.x. why you want this job specifically, because your 100% applying because this is the unicorn job for you, not because you need money to feed yourself)

In 99.9% of jobs in the world, there are zero applicants for who this truly holds. You might be working at a company hiring for a job that's part of the 0.1%, not sure. Otherwise, you're just selecting for those who are willing to lie as blatantly as required.

Re: I automated my job application process

#139

Post by fasteddie31003 »

I worked on a side project that generated the AI resume and cover letter. I did a controlled experiment applying for jobs with the generic vs AI customized resume. The AI customized resume out performed the generic resume by 4x. https://customizedresumes.com/custom-vs-generic-resumes

Re: I automated my job application process

#140

Post by programjames »

CactusOnFire wrote: post #116
programjames wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just like how many companies have methods available to them to remove bad glassdoor reviews (or make fake 5-star reviews), this system is even more rife for abuse.

Credit scores seem to be pretty robust? Maybe this kind of system would work:

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.

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