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I automated my job application process

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Re: I automated my job application process

#141

Post by pknomad »

salomon812 wrote: post #131

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 resu…

I am a Platform Engineer and it feels like your experience mirrors mine. Like you, our challenge is filtering out large volume but also filtering out LLM abusers. We're not opposed to people using LLMs, when appropriate. I find that candidates inappropriately use it to circumvent the process and that is a big deal for me (and our team). We try to do the right thing(TM) by the candidates by creating minimal interview workloads, asking highly relevant questions that aren't "gotchas", and updating their candidacy as soon as possible. It doesn't feel like many candidates are interested in returning the same courtesy. This kind of behavior means we have to lean harder into tapping our existing networks for sourcing "trust-worthy" candidates. That puts us at risk for creating additional blinders and also unfairly filters out "un-networked" candidates. For whatever it's worth, we are remote-first org so all of our interviews are done remotely.

One of the things I'm thinking about doing in the future is sharing the screen with diagrams and adding irrelevant annotations to it (while clearly indicating to the candidates that those are irrelevant) as a primitive adversarial AI technique. Perhaps on-site interviews is part of the solution.

Re: I automated my job application process

#142

Post by programjames »

ghaff wrote: post #130
programjames wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The smaller scale in the past made it so managers either knew (at least by reputation) the person submitting the resume, or it was not too expensive to find out. Nowadays, jobs are getting 100x as many applications, most of which are far lower in quality. University admissions has followed a similar trend, going from 5–10 being "spray and pray" twenty years ago to 20–30 applications nowadays. However, it didn't incre…

The "solution," such as it is, is that companies strongly bias towards referrals and managers towards people they personally know. And, from some conversations I've had, that is exactly what is happening. With the result that it's tough for junior people with no real networks (OK maybe their school is a signal) because companies really don't want to sift all the junk they're getting and I don't really blame them.

That's a solution, but I'd prefer a system that, when ideal/efficient, is optimal.

Re: I automated my job application process

#143

Post by plagiarist »

neofrommatrix wrote: post #79
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…

What I find most infuriating is that people just don’t care, even when faced with enough evidence that their strategy of mass applying even when they are not a good fit is failing. It just makes it harder for everybody else as you said.

This is the human condition. "If everyone would just," but everyone will not just. All of civilization is full of these tragedies of the commons.

Re: I automated my job application process

#144

Post by olddustytrail »

programjames wrote: post #127
andylynch wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re talking about blacklists. They are not a new idea, in fact they are well known, but also prohibited by law in many places because of their widespread abuse. There’s also a more general idea in competition law that companies shoul, well, compete their fields, and allowing cartel-like behaviour on the labour market is contradictory to this.

A reputation score is only a blacklist if you target specific people to tank their reputations.

Yes, that's what happens.

Re: I automated my job application process

#145

Post by Aurornis »

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…

Public job board listings have always been flooded with low-effort spam applicants, but AI tools have supercharged the problem.

The saddest part to me is watching the AI and social media malaise infect young mentees. I’ve been doing volunteer mentoring for years. Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max. It’s sad to see smart, motivated young people get their opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit and TikTok, which teach them that trying is lame and the only way to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a job, lie your way through interviews, and “quiet quit” by testing the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok swoop in to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies and CEOs, not their own decisions.

The recent tech recession was a huge wake up call for a lot of these people. The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug malaise to being very humbled when they got laid off due to their own low performance. It’s depressing for me and other mentors who have been trying to warn that workplace behavior has consequences for years, but the weird tech market of 2021 and 2022 led a lot of young people to think the worst thing that could happen to them was that they’d get fired and get a new job next week with a 20% raise.

The new version of this malaise is believing that AI will take their jobs anyway so the game is to use LLMs to bluff your way through applications, through interviews, and then use LLMs to coast as long as possible at their jobs until the next one.

The problem is so bad that one company withdrew from partnering in our internal job board, citing rampant LLM-generated applications and obvious LLM cheating in interviews. The other side of this is that anyone who makes any effort to be genuine and learn (rather than rely on LLMs for communication and coding) is automatically in the top 25% or so.

I don’t know how this ends. My sense is that the job market is continuing to bifurcate into jobs that people take seriously on one end and jobs where everyone just does performative LLM ping-pong as long as they can get away with it.

Re: I automated my job application process

#146

Post by euvin »

DavidDodda wrote: post #74
xianshou wrote: post #9

One of those cases where the act of building the system serves as sufficient qualification in itself, even when the results of the system are mediocre.

that's how I got my new job offer!, I talked about this system I was building during a technical interview.

I've thought about the optics of talking about my own automatic job application system or including it on my resume, but I thought it'd be risky given the topic (like how listing your own startup is frowned upon, if I'm not mistaken?). Is it normally considered a bit risky or taboo?

Re: I automated my job application process

#147

Post by maccard »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #98
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…

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…

I’ve been hiring for teams for a few years now, and I’ve heard people lament these things like you are. In practice I’ve not seen any of these “smart” scanning techniques used, it’s a recruiter comparing resumes to a checklist I gave to them (5-ish years experience, maybe a degree role dependent, or something that you think is super relevant, one of c#/java/kotlin, hiring for a mid level role so we expect some amount of experience at being self sufficient) and they filter the hundreds down to 10-15 that they screen and pass 4-5 on to me.

We did some spot checks on resumes that were passed on to make sure we were filtering ok and the quality was awful - a significant amount of people were applying for jobs asking for 5 years experience in a Java-like language with no experience, no degree and a half assed cover letter about being a good learner. A decent number were data scientists who had 2 years of python experience, and a surprising number were wildly over-qualified people who I realised after speaking to one or two they were actually trying to sell us their consulting services. That’s before you even get to “are they lying?”

Re: I automated my job application process

#148

Post by [deleted] »

salomon812 wrote: post #131

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 resu…

[deleted]

Re: I automated my job application process

#149

Post by ghaff »

yuliyp wrote: post #111
nsxwolf wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That type of referral indeed is mostly worthless (it might get you actually looked at by a human instead of rejected before that). Useful referrals are the kind where you go chat with your friend, figure out what they want in a job, then go find the hiring manager and tell them about this amazing ex-colleague who's a perfect fit for the role. That gets the candidate treated seriously. Sometimes it doesn't work out, b…

At a former employer, I sort of hated the referral ambassador or whatever it was called thing (with financial rewards attached I think). I always felt it encouraged quantity over quality. I actually sent a couple people I knew off on their merry way and suggested a couple others just go to the job site. On the other hand, I got several jobs through people I actually knew and had worked with in some manner.

Re: I automated my job application process

#150

Post by maccard »

xingped wrote: post #121
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…

100%, this is a natural reaction to the situation companies have created. When you get a rejection response mere minutes after submission that claims "after careful consideration..." then of course I'm not going to spend any more time than that applying to any jobs anymore. Prove a human actually took the time to review my resume and I'll actually apply to your company like a human.

If I get 500 applications to a role and spend 1 minute writing each person a personalised no sorry, that’s 20% of my week just writing rejection emails (never mind actually reviewing the resume).

I’ve hired for 3 companies for engineers from entry level to staff level, and for non technical candidates for other departments. Applicant tracking systems like greenhouse send me an email for every application that comes through, you get the resume and cover letter attached. There’s a reject candidate button where you choose why, and it auto fills in the template for you with the reason you selected (and the email was pre written).

Don’t mistake an automated email for assuming your resume wasn’t looked at.

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