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I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

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Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a unit of dystopia called Kafka, these days. Renting an apartment from a management company should be like 3-4 Kafkas. Go from there.

Yes oh my god. I'm trying to rent right now and the application has me doing this fucking approveshield bullshit where they request every document you've ever had and direct access to your bank account before they'll approve that I'm not a criminal or liar. Whatever happened to bank statements?! Why does some random company need to know that my closest grocery store is kroger and i went to miniso for my girlfriend bi…

Because one of the facets of the New World Order is treating mere mortals as guilty by default.

Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#392
post #304
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time I was hiring I gave out a take-home test, and I thought it was the opposite of an imposition on candidates' time. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts: - It was designed to be fast to complete (20min max -- not a huge imposition if being hired is likely, obviously very expensive if you're taking one for every job posting). - I only gave them out after a resume screen. If you had a 0% chance then I didn'…

Any take home test trivial enough to complete in under 20 minutes could be completed by an AI. The only signal you get from a take home test is whether or not they can submit answers. It doesn't let you know if the candidate is capable of passing the test unassisted. Take home tests were never a worthwhile signal. Pre-AI, people would search for solutions or have another person complete it.

Cheating is possible in the abstract, but I found a tight correlation between interview and take-home performance. For whatever reason, candidates didn't seem to cheat much.

The AI point is worth diving into a little. This was a year ago, so SOTA was worse, but I didn't find it terribly hard to write questions AI couldn't solve, whose answers you couldn't search for, and which good candidates could solve. The test was a few of those questions and a few which were easier to cheat, and almost nobody had good scores on just the cheatable section.

I don't think that moat will exist indefinitely, but today's AI just isn't very good at a lot of incredibly basic tasks unless the operator has enough outside knowledge to guide it in the right direction (and if a candidate did that I mostly wouldn't care because, by definition, they had the knowledge I was looking for). I use AI a lot, it's great at a lot of things, some even quite complicated, but it was weaknesses, and those are pretty easy to exploit.

Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are biased. Human interviewers are biased. Are LLMs more or less biased than human interviewers, on average? I have no idea.

LLMs have no awareness of their own bias, and no incentive or ability to mitigate it. A human can, in theory, realize "hey, I tend to be a little harsh on , is this negative judgement just that?" while an LLM could never. In practice I doubt many people are aware of their biases either, or think "it's not bias if it's true" or something. But at least on the less "internally" biased end of humans there will be less ex…

I wonder what would happen if you tell the LLM to have no/less bias. What would the 1913 one say

Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessarily a reflection on the team you are going to be in. Large companies have the problem that they get 100's if not 1000's of applicants for a role, and so HR screen them before they even get to the hiring manager. And whether HR screen via keyword search, AI CV reading, online tests, phone screens or AI interviews - it's always massively imperfect - as the HR recruiter doesn't have the expertise of the…

That's assuming they open up a role for public applications, I think (assume, believe, etc) that these companies will have internal recruiters reaching out first before opening it to the public.

That works better but is expensive - quite often you have to show the public route has failed before you can justify active recruitment.

Also large companies intrinsically know that in the end active recruitment is a bit of a zero sum game - you poach your competitors staff they poach yours - so there is a hesitancy in getting involved in that game.

I have seen people who are actively recruited ( hey we think your great please apply ), who are then forced to do these kind of HR screenings ( because that's the process ). This clearly doesn't make any sense and sends entirely the wrong signal.

Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#395
post #2

> If your potential employer is dehumanizing you before you’re on the payroll, how will they treat you once hired? For me, this is the key point. If a company can't even be bothered to show up for my interview -- when everyone is trying to put their best foot forward -- that bodes very ill for how I'll be treated if I were to work there.

To me the issue isn't seeming inhuman, but cost. Employers often seem happy to impose rediculous time costs on the people they're hiring: take home tests, long series of interviews, etc. What held that back is they also paid a price. Full automation leaves them free to impose infinite cost with no guarantee of anything.

Taking time to figure out if you’re the right fit for the company and the company is the right fit for you is a very good thing. For both parties! Rushed hiring processes increase the chances of you being fired for not being the right fit. Short hiring processes are a massive red flag for me.

Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#396
post #2

> If your potential employer is dehumanizing you before you’re on the payroll, how will they treat you once hired? For me, this is the key point. If a company can't even be bothered to show up for my interview -- when everyone is trying to put their best foot forward -- that bodes very ill for how I'll be treated if I were to work there.

I'd like to think I'd still treat you well, even though the interview process was decided by someone else and is completely out of my hands.

Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#397
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the issue isn't seeming inhuman, but cost. Employers often seem happy to impose rediculous time costs on the people they're hiring: take home tests, long series of interviews, etc. What held that back is they also paid a price. Full automation leaves them free to impose infinite cost with no guarantee of anything.

The last time I was hiring I gave out a take-home test, and I thought it was the opposite of an imposition on candidates' time. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts: - It was designed to be fast to complete (20min max -- not a huge imposition if being hired is likely, obviously very expensive if you're taking one for every job posting). - I only gave them out after a resume screen. If you had a 0% chance then I didn'…

How many candidates did you send the take home to? You may have done a resume screen first, but it's unlikely your time commitment was equal.

I've worked at places that would send out 100. People would spend their weekends working on it and we often wouldn't even look at the submissions.

Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#398

If I'm being interviewed by a bot, I see no reason not to send my own bot to represent me. It levels the playing field. I’ll probably start building an AI agent to sit in these AI bot interviews

As an interviewer who does all his interviews himself, I experience this already. I'll ask questions and candidates will answer them reading from chat gpt output. It's very frustrating and clearly the start of an arms race that must end in requiring face to face interviews and on site employment

Interested to know: when you experience that, have you addressed it directly and said that you have an issue with it, and want them to stop? If so, do they try to pretend they aren't doing it? Or do they apologize and own up to it? Or what? I've been on the interviewer-side, but haven't run into that. I would absolutely see that kind of thing as an ethics violation; like paying someone else to pretend to be you for the interview process.

Personally, any time I have ever been the interviewee, I write up notes for things to cover during an interview, or list a few common problems, etc. I've dealt with in the past, but I would strongly prefer to share my screen with them so they can see I'm not getting "assistance" from an LLM or whatever. I just personally get very, very stressed when I interview for a job. Having a simple set of notes helps keep me on track with covering XYZ.

Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever talked to a lawyer? The only thing that they keep repeating is "shut your mouth".

Which is the right advise when you live in the current society.

Advice. (Yes, it's a compulsion; I can't help myself.)
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