This is one of the big reasons why it's so hard to get an interview these days, it's pretty lame.
I automated my job application process
261–270 of 884 posts
Re: I automated my job application process
#262I'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 also switched to only on-site interviews. My initial technical screenings are still done remotely.
Pro tip for anyone hiring engineers for remote positions:
Tell the applicant that there “might be” an in person technical assessment, even if you know the process will be 100% remote.
The amount of fake candidates at the moment is insane. The only thing that makes fake candidates self-select out is knowing there’s the possibility that they will be required to be somewhere in person.
Another trick I’ve used is saying “Oh, you live in Flint Michigan?? We happen to have an employee 20 minutes away, would you be open to meeting them?” And then suddenly they drop out of the interview process.
There are a lot of foreign scammers exploiting the WFH trend in the US to the point where it drowns out real candidates. It’s really bad.
Re: I automated my job application process
#263Nice. 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’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.
Charge $x for a candidate to apply for your job. Put the money in an escrow pool. Pay it to the person you hire for the job.
Idea 2: Bid to have yourself reviewed for the job. Money goes in escrow pool.
Re: I automated my job application process
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
a company would run this… Not your company taking over candidate’s computer, an intermediary that candidate and potential employer are using. candidates are already using Slack/Teams/Zoom/… now they get to use Pouixy or whatever BS name someone in SF comes up with. guarantee you this will be a thing in 2025, some stanfords are on the case
If you (the company) send me a company laptop to use for that shit, sure, we can interview that way. It is the same deal with Teams and Zoom. None of that shit is touching my personal devices, it is strictly limited to the work machine.
have you ever taken a certification exam remotely from your own computer?
Re: I automated my job application process
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think their main complaint (or at least mine would be) is the laziness in many companies recruitment strategies. As an applicant in the software space I used to only apply to roles where I fit 70% or more of the qualifications but there is no difference in how often I get an interview compared to blindly applying to anything in the web space. I have 0 incentive to take the time to only apply to jobs I'm qualified for.
This is one of the few aspects of hiring I feel government employers handle better than private. My state hold monthly events where you can just show up and talk to a representatives and if you pass the vibes check you are virtually guaranteed a proper interview.
Re: I automated my job application process
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hiring agents have been spamming potential job seekers for years with garbage and then came up with the abomination known as ATS, which makes it very difficult to argue that job seekers should not use automation. Either the market needs to come up with a good solution that encourages good behavior from both sides or the governments can step in and start regulating.
> both sides or the governments can step in and start regulating How could regulations help? Both sides already have good incentives to match positions to candidates; yet we are collectively failing.
Only sort of. Lots of employees are only looking for any job and the adverse selection nature of hiring makes the typical job seeker pool look worse than average.
On the company side, only some people in the organization are strongly aligned with hiring. The vast majority are indifferent or even somewhat negative as new hires mean more work.
Re: I automated my job application process
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
When folks are engaging in mass circumventing of pervasive processes, it's because the process has broken 'typical' attempts to interact with it. You're being penalized for doing right by candidates but it's likely that a lot of those candidates were penalized previously when they tried to interact the 'right' way with other folks hiring and adapted workarounds as a result. It's a quintessential arms race. For what i…
Yep. Hiring managers are flooded with thousands of bullshit applications because job seekers are flooded with thousands of bullshit jobs, and/or unfairly filtered out of the funnel for real jobs. So now it’s a matter of sheer application volume for candidate employees more than ever, who after all are in a rather more desperate position than potential employers will ever be.
Besides the arms race with AI on both sides to filter/escape being filtered, the other problem is that it’s completely normal these days to use so called “hiring” more as cheap version of advertisement or a growth signal to investors rather than to indicate you are actually hiring.
I would hazard a guess that the average job-seeking application count for individuals has gone up not 2x, not 10x, but like 100x in many fields the last few years, and similarly for the time involved. And this happens without the economy as a whole even being in serious troubles. The only people that win here are the staffing platforms like indeed and linked-in, and the options in that space and in recruitment/staffing generally are decreasing as the industry consolidates with M&A. Brutal
Re: I automated my job application process
#268Earlier 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…
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.
Yeah I get that. My friends (the hiring managers) are in relatively large tech hubs (Austin and Seattle), so from what I understand 90% of the applicants have been "locally sourced". It'd be another story entirely if you had to travel a significant distance just for an interview.
Re: I automated my job application process
#269I'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 also switched to only on-site interviews. My initial technical screenings are still done remotely. Pro tip for anyone hiring engineers for remote positions: Tell the applicant that there “might be” an in person technical assessment, even if you know the process will be 100% remote. The amount of fake candidates at the moment is insane. The only thing that makes fake candidates self-select out is knowing there’s t…
I agree with this approach.
In this field, unless you're hiring a junior engineer, you can have a reasonable expectation that a potential candidate will fly out for an interview even if it's a 100% remote job.
If they refuse, well, there's a chance it's just because they can't afford to. The chance is far greater, though, that you dodged a bullet.
Re: I automated my job application process
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max Can you blame them? Other comments mention that automating applications is just the response to automating rejections, so why wouldn't an employee min-max their job when companies are min-maxing their employees?
Yes we can. Resume spamming is not a new phenomenon. Ten years ago we were already struggling to sift through the nonsense at the big co i worked for, llms just expanded the “tam”.
I don't understand why more companies don't leverage in person events. It's something my state does for government jobs and as an applicant, it's so much easier to chat up an agency rep about what they're looking for and schedule a formal interview.