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The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

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Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#171

Post by mancerayder »

zulux wrote: post #78
oblio wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”. Yeah, but it's now 1000x worse. Before you needed actual skill (or luck) to create a good looking CV, especially for niche positions. Now you take their job description, the company's "About us" webpage, your old CV and have LLMs generate a CV with pretty solid grammar and most o…

We ask for something stupid like "3 years of Pascal experience." If the resume has it, it goes straight to the trash unless it has specific real-world Pascal experience.

Won't that filter out actual sane people who would find Pascal knowledge requirements off-putting? It's like if you said, must have experience with OS/2 Warp to a DevOps guy. Or do you mention somehow that it's an AI canary signal?

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#172

Post by tptacek »

maxnevermind wrote: post #167
tptacek wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ tests in employment are not illegal. This is an Internet myth. Several large corporations (with deep pockets for employment lawyers to go after) openly use them. The reason more companies don't use IQ tests in candidate qualification is that they don't work well.

Don't big tech ask meaningless LeetCode problems because it serves as a proxy for IQ?

No. Mensa types on the Internet have been pushing this idea for decades. Companies ask Leetcode questions because they genuinely think it evaluates domain-specific programming aptitude[†]. Nerds --- reasonably --- hate Leetcode and have axiomatically derived an explanation for it that flatters their intellectual superiority complex.

The idea that companies need to be discreet about running IQ tests is trivially falsifiable. Not many companies administer IQ tests, but some of the ones that do (for some positions) are household names.

[†] (domain here meaning "programming", not, like, "systems" or "graphics")

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#173

Post by zulux »

nottorp wrote: post #144
zulux wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We ask for something stupid like "3 years of Pascal experience." If the resume has it, it goes straight to the trash unless it has specific real-world Pascal experience.

I have Pascal experience :) My first job was a Delphi application... For that time and task (accounting app), Pascal was great.

Indeed! It's only to filter out people who don't put in details. If you put "I survived Embarcadaro's bullshit and used Kylix to make a Linux version of our app." then YourResume := YourResume + 1;

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#174

Post by kajman »

vanuatu wrote: post #90

as someone who has done 100+ first round interviews for SWE, including new grad zero signal: resume & cover letter. applicants will mass-apply with ai-tuned resumes that happen to perfectly match our listing medium signal: top 15 school / top N internship experience / built something with paying users highest signal: personal referrals

> zero signal: resume & cover letter. applicants will mass-apply with ai-tuned resumes that happen to perfectly match our listing

How often do you interview candidates with bad or mediocre resumes, though? My impression is that a perfectly tuned (and almost certainly dishonest) resume is just table stakes now.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#175

Post by horticulturist »

madarco wrote: post #127
somenameforme wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes the other way as well though. Companies are increasingly filtering resumes/candidates in a sufficiently aggressive fashion to the point that they're strongly incentivizing, if not actively selecting for, people that are gaming the system in some way or another. Quite odd this is all happening when ostensibly the unemployment rate is very low, which should make it an employee's market.

It had already been like this long before widespread LLM adoption: quality hiring was only really possible through manual candidate scouting on LinkedIn, at conferences, through word of mouth, and so on. Sending a CV had already become mostly useless 3–4 years ago because of the huge amount of noise: candidates applying from all over the world, often even spoofing their actual location, FAANGs firing, flooding the ma…

It is a great model, but many HR departments will not let you do this. Every termination becomes an exercise in endless documentation, including what you thought was an open-and-shut, by the numbers trial period.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#176

Post by addaon »

sanderjd wrote: post #109
addaon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask the best people you’ve ever worked with who the best people they’ve worked with are. Recurse. When names start repeating through different graph paths, make those people an offer they can’t refuse. Once they join, ask them to do the same, and give them the budget and role to make it happen.

The best people I've ever worked with and the best people they've worked with all have good jobs at all times. You have to have a mechanism for matching with people who are actually interested in a new job.

Yes, making people an offer they can't refuse isn't scalable. It generally requires both deep pockets and the time investment to understand what would motivate them to leave a good job for one that they think can be great.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#177

Post by clates »

paulbgd wrote: post #31

As an engineer working on my company’s top of funnel it’s tough. Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call. Async technical challenges are obviously gamed but you’d be surprised at how few people both cheat + take longer than 3m to submit the solution

> Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call.

Funny because I do the same; I don't commit to doing any work/assessments before at least an honest interview round. Businesses have to understand that _they_ are the ones who have to solve for the filtering problem. Most great candidates that you are hoping to snipe are already in a stable job and do not _have_ to jump through hoops to get past a filter.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#178

Post by jghn »

lovich wrote: post #162
exabrial wrote: post #161

My favorite "funnel" so far was applying for certain company in Colorado. It twas I think 10:45p in the evening, and I got a reply about 15mins later indicating that I was invited for an "interview". Scratching my head, I mean who was up working at this time, I looked into it... It wasn't an interview, even though they insisted it was. It was a completely automated skill assessment "interview" with an AI. Or put bett…

I recently took a “one way interview”(I’ve had multiple recruiters use that term) where I had to be on camera, and talk to a machine that interpreted responses completely incorrectly causing me to have to try and negotiate with a fucking clanker that when I said I could work in the US I actually meant I could work in the US. 2 days later they replied back that I hadn’t had a long enough tenure in my career and couldn…

A policy I started to adhere to a while back was never take a job somewhere that doesn't invest at least as much time & energy into interviewing you than you are with them. If they expect me to put in a bunch of effort and they're putting in 0, that's a hard no.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#179

Post by qkeast »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #131
oblio wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's astonishing how many people working in tech don't realize the impact of automation in this regard. This basically kills any "cold job application". Now it's all back to references and nepotism. I've gotten almost all my past jobs by applying to a job I liked, someone figuring out my CV was decent and then passing interviews. Now the same people filtering CVs have to wade through so much crap that it's almost imp…

> Very likely, waiting for you in line in front of the unemployment office, 10 years from now. so nothing's changed? > This basically kills any "cold job application". Now it's all back to references and nepotism. I've gotten almost all my past jobs by applying to a job I liked, someone figuring out my CV was decent and then passing interviews. and my argument is that THERE WERE NO COLD APPLICATIONS even you yourself…

A cold application just means that the candidate applied directly with no referral or introduction. It’s always been the case that both warm and cold applications went though the same interview processes, maybe just with a different first conversation. The argument is that there’s no way to get to a first conversation without already knowing someone who can provide the warm introduction.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#180

Post by vanuatu »

kajman wrote: post #174
vanuatu wrote: post #90

as someone who has done 100+ first round interviews for SWE, including new grad zero signal: resume & cover letter. applicants will mass-apply with ai-tuned resumes that happen to perfectly match our listing medium signal: top 15 school / top N internship experience / built something with paying users highest signal: personal referrals

> zero signal: resume & cover letter. applicants will mass-apply with ai-tuned resumes that happen to perfectly match our listing How often do you interview candidates with bad or mediocre resumes, though? My impression is that a perfectly tuned (and almost certainly dishonest) resume is just table stakes now.

not very often which is why its zero signal

in rare occasions it might go the other way around, like someone who has so much experience they dont need a pretty resume because their work speaks for itself

New grads are the biggest offenders of the resume slop

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