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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

#181

Post by jjav »

somenameforme wrote: post #35
Aurornis wrote: post #11

> “There is a growing gap between the candidate’s written persona and their live presence. I’ll see a cover letter that is poetic and a résumé that is flawlessly structured, but then the person on the video call struggles to explain their own bullet points. This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”. I can remember a few int…

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.

> Companies are increasingly filtering resumes/candidates in a sufficiently aggressive fashion

Last open position I hired, about eight months ago, received about 1000 resumes/day for the first few days. For my whole career I've made it a point to read every resume sent for a job. If someone took the time to write I will at least take the time to read it. Sadly, that's no longer possible.

Most of the resumes were a clear case of people giving AI the posted job description and their actual resume, with a prompt of "Rewrite my resume so it sounds as much as possible as the job description, fill in any gaps with vague experience claims". Spot checking some of these against their linkedin profiles, showed vastly different job history descriptions.

I'm sure some qualified people did the same, but no way tell.

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

#182

Post by khuey »

bartread wrote: post #129
cloche wrote: post #117

I don't understand why tech companies are so reluctant to go back to in-person interviews. This used to be the norm before COVID and it would solve most of these issues. It's also ironic that the authors are from Microsoft/Amazon and Meta which have very structured interviews that tend to be about just hitting the right keywords during the interview itself. None of these places even really care about what you've done…

> I don't understand why tech companies are so reluctant to go back to in-person interviews. Tech companies probably aren’t that reluctant, but I’d bet a lot of job applicants are.

Applicants did this routinely ten years ago.

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

#183

Post by [deleted] »

bee_rider wrote: post #102
Aurornis wrote: post #11

> “There is a growing gap between the candidate’s written persona and their live presence. I’ll see a cover letter that is poetic and a résumé that is flawlessly structured, but then the person on the video call struggles to explain their own bullet points. This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”. I can remember a few int…

I have one project on my resume that I have trouble remembering some details of. It feels weird to drop it off (it was an internship at a sort of well known company), but it was a while ago. Is “can’t remember details” still a huge red flag from the employer’s point of view, even if the explanation is legitimate? It’s not exactly the crown jewel of my resume anyway, so I guess I could cut it, it just adds to my backs…

[deleted]

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

#184

Post by khuey »

ghaff wrote: post #139
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best hiring is generally expected to happen through referrals, so there's not a ton of pressure to improve the public application pipeline beyond the minimum required to keep it functional.

One problem with referrals is that referral bonuses tend to encourage referring people they barely know and never really worked with. But actual networking often works.

This is an easily solved problem if you start discounting referrals from employees who refer a lot of people who generally fail your screening interviews.

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

#185

Post by somenameforme »

trhway wrote: post #170
madarco wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In US it is at-will employment. What would be the difference really between a trial period and just letting an employee go 2 months or 4 months of 7.83 months down the road. I mean, in at-will employment trial period sounds just like an artificial gimmick that the employer forces onto the employee's mental state.

At-will (or not) employment is only relevant in the absence of a contract. Most/all tech employment has contracts with terms of dismissal. And in my experience this is generally a good thing for everybody. I've lived/worked in countries with for-cause employment and it's overwhelmingly more common for it to be used for abuse than protection - somebody gets fired for very good reason, but then sues just because it's generally cheaper/quicker/better PR to settle than litigate. Montana probably has the best idea of a global probation - 12 months at will, and then the employee can only be dismissed for cause after that.

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

#186

Post by rekabis »

Aurornis wrote: post #46
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.

> 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. Which itself is a symptom of companies getting drowned in AI generated resumes. It's becoming more common for people to use AI tools that will operate browsers to mass-submit resumes for…

>Which itself is a symptom of companies getting drowned in AI generated resumes.

I would say that it is the exact opposite. IME, it is a tsunami of companies using AI as the gatekeepers as a cost-saving tool, instead of a human in HR, forcing applicants to use AI to get past AI.

It’s an arms race by the greedy looking to save a few pennies of payroll, against those whose CVs are just sufficiently non-standard, and so are culled in nearly 100% of AI filtering, so they have no choice but to use AI to write their CVs.

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

#187

Post by rekabis »

jjav wrote: post #181
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.

> Companies are increasingly filtering resumes/candidates in a sufficiently aggressive fashion Last open position I hired, about eight months ago, received about 1000 resumes/day for the first few days. For my whole career I've made it a point to read every resume sent for a job. If someone took the time to write I will at least take the time to read it. Sadly, that's no longer possible. Most of the resumes were a cl…

>For my whole career I've made it a point to read every resume sent for a job. If someone took the time to write I will at least take the time to read it.

The reason why you are so discouraged is because you are a unicorn.

Companies have been looking to automate the application process for a long time, now. AI is just the latest dehumanizing tool employed to seprarate wheat from chaff long before any human needs to look at the results. And the reason why people are using AI to rewrite their CVs is precisely because companies are using AI to do the filtering. It is an arms war, started by companies, in which applicants have NO CHOICE but to use AI or remain unknown and unseen.

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

#188

Post by lovich »

jghn wrote: post #178
lovich wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish I could live that way, but I am still trying to get a job as an Engineering Manager again since I genuinely enjoyed the work the same way I enjoy playing excel sheet simulators like EU IV, but the position has been annihilated or halved in a lot of firms.

I have taken the time to try and drop back down to just an IC engineer again but have been explicitly told that I either, was trusted to be able to do the job since I became a manager, or that they didn't trust that I would stay around since I had already reach manager level.

Most companies seem to be applying the heuristics of the pre 2022 era for software to prospective employees, while still demanding the benefits of this new era.

Hell I see a ton of people in this post talking about how referrals are the only way to get real signal, and I had two different Principal Engineers respectively at Riot and a financial firm too niche to name without outing myself refer me and not even get a phone screen. With said friends who referred me getting a brick wall from their HR department when trying to follow up.

The hiring system for tech is fundamentally broken atm, but companies are the ones with only leverage.

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

#189

Post by addaon »

cloche wrote: post #121
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.

Unless you're hiring for rare roles that require niche skills, it's unlikely that you'll get people that are in overlapping networks. If you do, you might be encountering the problem where Company A has a bunch of people that used to work at Company B. Now Company A is just an "old boys club" from Company B and is biased towards their old colleagues. If you ask for single referrals, how do you combat the problem of p…

> it's unlikely that you'll get people that are in overlapping networks

Networks all overlap if you search deep enough, ask Kevin Bacon. For good-enough talent and starting with random nodes, yeah, you'll probably not overlap. But there's a few dozen people of top talent for any particular role you're looking for, so by the time you iterate to the top of the tree, you really do get a lot of repeats.

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