Live data from Hacker News

I automated my job application process

blog.daviddodda.com

171–180 of 884 posts

Re: I automated my job application process

#171

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.

> 100%, this is a natural reaction to the situation companies have created

Hiring manager here. I don’t like the situation either, but to honest a lot of what you’re seeing is a natural reaction to the shenanigans that applicants are doing.

When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application.

Re: I automated my job application process

#172
I did this as well and landed a job in 3 months. The most tedious part before I automated the process was copying and pasting relevant infos into my cover letter, updating stuff, creating the word document for the cover letter and a copy of my resume in a folder for that company/offer. Also, I auto added job details to a Notion table (a Kanban board) where I tracked open applications.

The whole process took me previously half an hour to 45 minutes. Afterwards it took me less then 2 minutes. I didn’t apply for more, but could write an application in a fraction of time. And then focus on researching the company and the job.

Chatgpt made the whole process super smooth. We live in wonderful times.

Re: I automated my job application process

#173

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…

Over Christmas I met up with a friend who teaches part-time at a local college. He said he’s failed more people this year than the cumulative total of his entire past teaching career due to LLM abuse. He doesn’t use LLM detection tools, but he says it’s easy to identify papers with warning signs of LLM use. For some reason, using ChatGPT for his specific niche topic overuses a few obscure, rarely-used words that most…

I know the on-site is time-consuming and expensive, but so is firing people (at least in United States it is.) I've had a few on-site interviews where having them on-site made us realize we could never work with them. Given how much time they will spend with you, it's totally worth it to spend your resources on hiring.

Re: I automated my job application process

#175

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…

> If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to land a single interview, then can you blame someone for automating it? Yes, a candidate is responsible for their own actions. This logic only sounds good until you’re on the hiring side and you see the stark difference between the LLM abuser applications and the people who are genuinely applying. Those people who have to apply to 100s of jobs are probably i…

> Yes, a candidate is responsible for their own actions.

Yes, but I think it is overly reductive. As a candidate, you’ve to now apply for a magnitude more of jobs. Tailoring resumes per job takes time, and given how many more I’ve to send, this doesn’t scale.

Additionally, whatever ATS system is being used might auto-reject it because the algorithm decided it’s not a match. If tailored resumes increased hit rate, that would be a different story but that is not the case.

Re: I automated my job application process

#176
I remember talking to techie friends about this a couple years ago. With the advent of AI screeners, it would only be a matter of time before candidates figured out how to craft and rewrite not just their cover letter, but their whole resume to semantically best-fit a job listing. It could even A/B test for the best response.

Everyone laughed and said it was too much work. I predicted it would be a YC company before long.

Only a matter of time before AIs will be talking to AIs to have a technical interview and negotiate salary.

Re: I automated my job application process

#177
post #11

This is some next level bs spam. I know job search in IT is difficult these days but this kind of automation will not make it better; if anything, the opposite. The most recent place where I applied and my earlier workplace both asked for a video recording early during the recruitment process. I guess employers will ask for in person interviews next.

Yup, in person and worst, only in network.

So you end up using technology to de-evolve society back to tribes.

Still, at least we are other people who are creating this AI technology and all of its application ... so we see the pain up close and we can start to steer it in a better direction that's more healthy for society.

But you know we have to find our integrity first.

Re: I automated my job application process

#178

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…

>But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want.

This is just a natural response to the automatic screening methods that have been used by the hiring side for years. Finally the sides have more equal power again in this arms race started by the hiring side.

Of course the consequence is that everyone loses and is worse off than if this arms race never started, but you (not you personally, hiring managers in general) should have thought about that before screening automatically. This is on you.

Re: I automated my job application process

#179

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…

Too bad, fix hiring. A five interview cycle that takes nearly two weeks which keeps me from applying to other companies who are shitting up job listings with fake or ghost listings is reducing the SNR of hiring dramatically.

The solution is likely some kind of highly curated list you have to pay to be on, for both sides to increase signal and get rid of scammers. Many friends of mine have gone down the line of replying to recruiters only to be met with “contract to hire Things are gonna be worse longer I think. Leaning hard on my network.

Re: I automated my job application process

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God, I wish I could respond to denied applicants like a human, but the threat of legal action prevents me from giving good feedback. I know it sucks, but I'm not sure what to do about this, and I'm already so burnt out from the hiring process as it is, it's hard to work up the strength to do this fight as well. Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...

I tried giving honest and actionable interview feedback at first. A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me. I had people trying to argue that my feedback was wrong, someone stalking me across social media and trying to argue everything there, and eventually someone who threatened to use my feedback as the basis for a discrimination lawsuit. So now we’re back to…

> A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me.

This happened to one of my bosses. As a result, I've never attempted it.

Except once, a candidate realized at the end of a technical screen they had done poorly and demanded feedback. I gave an initial bit (shouldn't have, my mistake) and instantly turned it around on me.

Post reply on HN