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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

#191
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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;

I've dabbled with Kylix when it was new but in spite of still keeping in touch with my old job they weren't interested in cross platform. Possibly because their customers had no idea what Linux was back then...

At some point they went Oracle backend so maybe they don't care about Embarcadero's bullshit because they have bigger licensing problems to worry about...

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

#192
If I were looking for a job right now. I would scrape all the LinkedIn profiles at the target company to understand what skills they valued and tailor my resume with ai based on those profiles and the initial job posting and my skills.

I think you just have to go a step or two above what most other candidates are doing. In my experience, that works really really well.

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

#193
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once casted volunteer actors for short movies. It costed me literally nothing to write: "Deadline for application is $DATE, you will hear from us within X days. You will either get a rejection or an invitation to a casting on $CASTINGDATE1 or $CASTINGDATE2." And on the casting I personally guaranteed for a date when they will get a result. Rejections included feedback that helped candidates understand our decision…

The problem is - that’s unlikely to be true. If we make a miss, or the candidate(s) pull out we don’t want to re-list and re-funnel. So we keep the job open while we’re hiring. Usually we close it out once we have anyone at the final stages of 5-6 people in the interview loop. But every job posting I’ve set up, I’ve configured an auto response template. It’s just a generic “sorry we decided to proceed with someone el…

Six months into a new role, started getting rejections from applications nearly a year ago. It feels like not a single norm from 2019 has persisted.

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

#194
> your organization begins to systematically select for candidates who are best at performing the hiring process, rather than those best equipped to do the job.

I submit that this is nothing new. There just may be one more way to fulfill that criterion. But I don't see how the outcome would be worse than before.

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

#195

> “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…

Devil's advocate: In a culture where lying and cheating is venerated once you get rich enough doing it, don't these candidates just demonstrate how they've deeply understood and internalized the most important rules? Fake it till you make it. Naturally, getting busted by follow-up questions reveals them to be bloody greenhorns who didn't rehearse enough.

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

#196
To everyone saying that this has always been a problem: The issue is the scale of the problem. Deleting the occasional spam email by hand is not a big deal but once you're getting flooded with spam emails, you better have a good spam filter in place.

In the same vein, the early hiring funnel discussed in TFA did work in many if not most cases or otherwise people wouldn't have used it. This no longer seems to be the case.

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

#197

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…

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.

That seems like a self-inflicted HR problem.

In the UK, employment law is strongly on the side of the employee, and so I'd understand HR departments trying to do everything they can to protect the employer. But having a (typically 3-month) probation period is common in almost every company, and it's not uncommon for people to be let go in the third month when they haven't been up to standard. Everybody knows it happens, and in fact you can see people's attitudes shift - for the first 3 months, every new employee is tiptoeing around very gentle, trying not to offend anyone, going above and beyond so that they are seen to be making a positive impact. After the probation period ends, most people revert to a "normal" working attitude, everything's a bit more relaxed, you'd push back on unreasonable demands, etc.

In somewhere like the US, where the laws strongly favour the employers, I'm surprised that HR departments make it so hard to fire people in a trial period. If you can fire people for any reason, underperformance in a trial period seems the most safe reason possible for dismissal.

The opposite extreme is France where employment law favours employees so much, many companies are reticent to hire at all because it's so hard to fire someone once hired.

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

#198
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The gaming of the system has been happening for a very long time. When I was a teen looking for my first job, companies were being flooded by resumes due to cheap laser printing (either…

Kind of reminiscent of the online dating market, at least for hetero relationships: From the man's point of view, he is flooding the field, swiping yes on every woman on the site, because there's a 0.0001% chance that he's matched. Consequently, from the woman's point of view, she is flooded with an absolutely huge deluge of "applicants" with nothing but blunt tools to hopelessly try to filter the garbage out. Neithe…

The main difference, of course, is that in the employment market people are generally taken out of the market when they get a job (although fully remote has driven a huge rise in moonlighting).

In the dating market, women are inundated with matches from hundreds of guys, so they just pick the hottest guy, have a short term fling, and the guy ditches her after a couple of dates and continues working through the rest of the women (often in parallel). So, the hottest guys are never taken off the market, meaning the middle tier guys get few chances, and women complain that "men are all the same" and only want ONS not a relationship.

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

#199
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once casted volunteer actors for short movies. It costed me literally nothing to write: "Deadline for application is $DATE, you will hear from us within X days. You will either get a rejection or an invitation to a casting on $CASTINGDATE1 or $CASTINGDATE2." And on the casting I personally guaranteed for a date when they will get a result. Rejections included feedback that helped candidates understand our decision…

The problem is - that’s unlikely to be true. If we make a miss, or the candidate(s) pull out we don’t want to re-list and re-funnel. So we keep the job open while we’re hiring. Usually we close it out once we have anyone at the final stages of 5-6 people in the interview loop. But every job posting I’ve set up, I’ve configured an auto response template. It’s just a generic “sorry we decided to proceed with someone el…

I hope of those 5-6, 4-5 are at least told something like "we are intending to proceed with another candidate, but we were impressed by your interview and may contact you again in the future".

That at least gives them an understanding that they are probably not going to get the job, but there's a slim chance they may be offered it in the future (although as I've said before, I'd rather be a different company's first choice than their second), rather than continuing to make them keep their life on pause because they don't know if you've already offered the job to someone else or whether you're still deliberating.

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

#200
I asked Candidates (who claimed to work at site) to describe the parking at their office, Garage or Flat? Some of them couldn't answer that question. If they did answer, I would ask the name and purpose of the organization (accounting, HR, tech etc.) they supported and screened some more that way. I got some people who mentioned an Acronym (the project they supported "for years") and asked them to define it, and they couldn't. A lot of fraud in the candidate pool.
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