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I automated my job application process

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Re: I automated my job application process

#371

Post by hibikir »

belinder wrote: post #351
MrMember wrote: post #314

I'm seeing a lot of back in forth in the comments between hiring managers and employees discussing who is more responsible for the current situation, but from the perspective of someone looking for a job what should I be doing? I've been pretty aggressively looking for a job for the past six months or so. I have 10+ years of professional software dev experience so I've mostly been looking at senior dev positions. I h…

I was hiring manager for 3 positions about 4 months ago and the amount of fake applications out there was mind boggling to me. I would say 90% were either entirely fake or had the exact same generated ai text. It got so bad that we started only looking at resumes that had a working LinkedIn link. Also after so many bad resumes I started being very forgiving for the ones that didn't fully match the job requirements if…

And that's not even enough: A few weeks ago I had to interview someone who had what appeared to be a realistic profile. Everything that came out of their mouth was from chatGPT It was suspicious, but the ruse became clear when they shared the wrong screen, so we could see his prompt, and how everything we said was being read in.

At this point every remote internet checklist has to include checks for humanity, because the percentage of straight out fakes is too high. Even the questions to ask me at the end were GPT provided.

Re: I automated my job application process

#372

Post by yosito »

whiplash451 wrote: post #322
MrMember wrote: post #314

I'm seeing a lot of back in forth in the comments between hiring managers and employees discussing who is more responsible for the current situation, but from the perspective of someone looking for a job what should I be doing? I've been pretty aggressively looking for a job for the past six months or so. I have 10+ years of professional software dev experience so I've mostly been looking at senior dev positions. I h…

Did you get (or asked for) feedback from the interviews you failed? Hiring managers / recruiters are sometimes quite transparent on this front. Ask them if it is possible to re-apply in a few months. Show your resume to friends and colleagues you trust and ask for honest feedback.

Personally, I've just been getting generic rejection responses from no-reply email addresses. There's no way to get feedback. My guess is that they're just sending out mass rejections for anyone except a few candidates they've selected to interview, and the other 1000 applications just get automatically tossed.

Re: I automated my job application process

#373

Post by throwaway2037 »

salomon812 wrote: post #173
Aurornis wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In most places, even with strong labour laws, you can layoff people for any reason in the first 30/60/90 days. And, the US has extremely weak labour laws. Usually, a month of severance for each year of service is customary, but probably not strictly required.

Re: I automated my job application process

#374

Post by jcutrell »

margalabargala wrote: post #334
randomNumber7 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't stand out from an LLM then why can't it do your job? Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev that is not open to this technology...

> Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev that is not open to this technology... The person you're replying to is a senior, not junior candidate. For junior devs who are still learning, LLMs are a great force multiplier that help them understand code faster and integrate new things. For senior devs, LLMs are a maybe-optional tool that might save a couple hours per week, on a good week. I would…

I've been in the industry for something like 15 years. I've been using LLMs to help me create the stuff I always wanted but never had time to make myself. This is how LLMs can be used by seniors to great effect - not just to cut time off tasks.

Re: I automated my job application process

#375

Post by bovermyer »

biztos wrote: post #312
bovermyer wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean by "can't afford to?" Because you can't possibly mean you think candidates are going to fly out for an interview at their own expense. Traditionally (i.e. pre-Covid) flying out a senior candidate was the standard signal that both sides were taking the process seriously. And for competitive hires, the quality of the hotel and the restaurants they were taken to and the seniority of the people who joine…

Speaking from the point of view of an interviewee rather than an interviewer... I would pay for flying out to someplace for an in-person interview on my own dime, if I thought I would get a reasonable return on investment.

If the interviewer _expected_ that I would pay for a cross-country (or cross-border) flight myself, that would cast a shadow on the opportunity for me.

Re: I automated my job application process

#376

Post by bovermyer »

kevinventullo wrote: post #276
bovermyer wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be clear, you expect candidates to fly out on their own dime just for the interview?

Not candidates for a position I'm hiring for, no.

But positions that I'm applying to? I'm senior enough now that if I can't negotiate a paid-travel interview, clearly I either don't care enough and should cross that opportunity off my list, or it's tempting enough that I don't care.

Re: I automated my job application process

#377

Post by ghaff »

Terr_ wrote: post #244
ghaff wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nepotism is most associated with relatives although I guess it doesn't have to be. But I've definitely gotten several jobs through senior managers I had worked with which largely bypassed the whole HR system where it existed.

> Nepotism is most associated with relatives although I guess it doesn't have to be. IIRC "nepotism" is specifically family/relatives, and the larger Venn-diagram circle would be "favoritism."

Wikipedia disagrees even if relatives seems to be the predominant meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepotism

Re: I automated my job application process

#378

Post by twelve40 »

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…

fwiw the article seems to describe a pretty mild type of automation to deal with tons of job ads and mundane stuff like cover letters that often get completely ignored by all sides, so why not try to automate that in good faith? didn't find anything about fake or cheating or misrepresenting one's skills in there.

Re: I automated my job application process

#380

Post by austin-cheney »

internetter wrote: post #318
austin-cheney wrote: post #193

For hiring managers, if you getting a flood of resumes here is a possible solution for a filter: unpopular things and manual instructions. 1. Manual instructions. On the application submission page mention something like: All resumes or cover letters must copy and apply the following statement or will be dropped from consideration. This tests that candidates actually read and follow the instructions and rejections ca…

> they will be required to do something unpopular as a demonstration of prior coding experience. In my case as a JavaScript developer it was walking the DOM from one node location to another. Is this open book? I can walk a DOM in many ways. With my eyes closed, I could hack something using `childNodes` and `nextSibling`, but the best way would be the the TreeWalker class, which I have previously used, though I could…

Yes, that is the entire point of why something like that is a good filter. It is stupendously simple and trivial to demonstrate live in code. The REPL of the browser console even helps with suggestions. Yet, 95% of people writing JavaScript would rather commit seppuku than try it live during an interview.
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