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I automated my job application process

blog.daviddodda.com

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Re: I automated my job application process

#501
In general, people have numerous reasons for posting fake ads for applicants.

I would say the signal-to-noise ratio is so low now, that entry level positions at any firm are impossible for domestic applicants.

* Contract rules in institutions that show your faculty interviewed at minimum 3 external applicants before tabling your preferences

* Corporate youth-employment tax credits that incentivize purging anyone over 32 to save money

* Immigration scams that need to show at least 5 domestic workers don't qualify for the company needs (usually list proprietary internal software and languages the public never hears about...)

* Staffing agencies posting nonexistent positions to run a lead-generation scheme, and legally exclude applicants from their product pool via a contract catch-22

* 10% of your towns population arrived in the past 3 years, and understandably will say/do anything to get their Visa secured

* Cons illegally farming data for their AI/LLM project, and various other scams

We need more investment bankers and CEOs that work for regular wages.

Fun Times =3

Re: I automated my job application process

#502
Without reading any comments below, I want to praise the author for fighting fire-with-fire. From what I hear from my new colleagues and ones laid off, the landscape got pretty dystopian. HMs want to minimize their effort to 1% by happily renting LLM services which work 10% of the times and put up weird garbage(please record a 10min video to tell us why we should hire you, please also upload a cover letter that we clearly never read, please state your salary expectations, please choose a time slot when we can reach you but all time slots will be effective working hours only, please paste all your social media links) in addition uploading the résume+cover letter and then again pasting your top 10 skills and experiences. Then you get an auto reject 30min later or after a prolonged screening call only to see that opening taken down in 2 days and reposted after a week and repeat the same for months. What I hear from my friends and colleagues and insane all in all and I have zero sympathy for any HM and would be happy to start a new startup with LLMs to automate them away entirely.

Am I too cynical? Yes, because I do not like people who play games with desperate people.

(Now please all HR/HM downvote me because I told your truth).

Re: I automated my job application process

#504
post #502

Without reading any comments below, I want to praise the author for fighting fire-with-fire. From what I hear from my new colleagues and ones laid off, the landscape got pretty dystopian. HMs want to minimize their effort to 1% by happily renting LLM services which work 10% of the times and put up weird garbage(please record a 10min video to tell us why we should hire you, please also upload a cover letter that we cl…

> I want to praise the author for fighting fire-with-fire.

On the contrary, I think these automated application games are most likely to land interviews with the companies doing LLM-based hiring and interviewing.

From what I’ve seen, the automated job application results are generally pretty bad. The few companies that get interviews are just bad at screening and interviewing, so even if you get in you’re going to be working with a lot of other people who self-selected into a company with a bad hiring process.

> HMs want to minimize their effort to 1% by happily renting LLM services which work 10% of the times and put up weird garbage(please record a 10min video to tell us why we should hire you,

I’m in a big Slack where people ask advice on hiring and interviewing. I can think of only one time someone asked about applying to a company asking for videos, and the advice was universally to skip that company.

I think these things happen very rarely, but angry internet culture never forgets and before long people act like these weird practices are happening everywhere when they’re definitely not.

I can’t even imagine what hiring manager would want to have to sit through 10 minute videos of each candidate. The whole thing doesn’t make sense and it’s definitely not common.

Re: I automated my job application process

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firing people isn’t as expensive as people make it out to be. People vastly overestimate the chance of a lawsuit. And they overestimate the chance of a lawsuit that makes it far enough that it costs significant money even more. Hiring fast and firing fast (for lying or misrepresentation) is almost always a better business decision than being ultra defensive in the hiring process.

The fastest that I can possibly fire somebody is still months from the date I choose to hire them. I decide they are the best candidate. A recruiter talks with them to negotiate compensation and they accept the offer. This takes a week at best, but can take weeks if they are choosing between multiple offers. Then they choose a start date. They've got a couple weeks at the old job, plus probably some time in between r…

Just hire them as contractors first. Give them a 2-3 month contract, if it doesn't work out, you just don't renew the contract.

Re: I automated my job application process

#506
post #470

Kinda funny that LLM creates an personalized cover letter which in the end will be deciphred to list summary by another LLM because this will be automated in no time.

https://marketoonist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/230327.n...

Article link: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

Re: I automated my job application process

#507

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…

On-site interviews. This is not ideal, but is the way. As long as you're willing to shell out on my flight and cover the expenses, I'll fly anywhere for an interview.

Re: I automated my job application process

#508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not making numbers up here; the controlled studies that have been done agree with me. See here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566 Worse/less experienced developers see a much greater increase in output, and better and more experienced developers see much less improvement. AI are great at generating junior level work en masse, but their output generally is not up to quality and functional…

interesting paper and lots of really well done bits. As a senior dev that uses LLM extensively: This paper was using copilot in 2023 mostly. I used it and chatgpt in that timeframe, and took chatgpts output 90% of the time; copilot was rarely good beyond very basic boilerplate for me, in that time period. Which might explain why it helped jr devs so much in the study. Somewhat related, i have a good idea what i can a…

Another factor not brought into consideration here may be that there are two uses of "senior dev" in this conversation so far; one of them refers to a person who has been asked to work on something they're very familiar with (the same tech stack, a similar problem they've encountered etc.) whereas the other one has been asked to work on something unfamiliar.

For the second use case, I can easily see how effectively prompting a model can boost productivity. A few months ago, I had to work on implementing a Docker registry client and I had no idea where to begin, but prompting a model and then reviewing its code, and asking for corrections (such as missing pagination or parameters) allowed me to get said task done in an hour.

Re: I automated my job application process

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fastest that I can possibly fire somebody is still months from the date I choose to hire them. I decide they are the best candidate. A recruiter talks with them to negotiate compensation and they accept the offer. This takes a week at best, but can take weeks if they are choosing between multiple offers. Then they choose a start date. They've got a couple weeks at the old job, plus probably some time in between r…

Just hire them as contractors first. Give them a 2-3 month contract, if it doesn't work out, you just don't renew the contract.

That only works for desperate people. Sr people or people with other options would not take that risk.

Re: I automated my job application process

#510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has made hiring especially in technical industry an absolute shit show. I agree with parent comment that ideally government could do something about it but agree with you on how would you even do that. Maybe if they required all the job board companies like indeed and glassdoor and LinkedIn to properly vet candidates else those companies would be fined, but it's hard to imagine a solution that doesn't also hurt un…

And then you run into problems on the corporate side: fake job listings to build up resume databases for comparison shopping of applicants. Regulations in this area should have to cut both ways.

I would REALLY love if job postings had to go through a government clearing house. Only real jobs get posted. Only real applicants can apply.

Bonus: jobs would have to be classified according to a single government standard, so it should be possible to search for a good job match by at least limiting the field and (allowed) location(s).

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