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I automated my job application process

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Re: I automated my job application process

#661

Post by resonious »

Aurornis wrote: post #168
salomon812 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God, I wish I could respond to denied applicants like a human, but the threat of legal action prevents me from giving good feedback. I know it sucks, but I'm not sure what to do about this, and I'm already so burnt out from the hiring process as it is, it's hard to work up the strength to do this fight as well. Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...

I tried giving honest and actionable interview feedback at first. A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me. I had people trying to argue that my feedback was wrong, someone stalking me across social media and trying to argue everything there, and eventually someone who threatened to use my feedback as the basis for a discrimination lawsuit. So now we’re back to…

I've also seen the "your feedback is wrong" pushback. Like... do they expect me to say "oh woops my bad. actually here's an offer"?

Re: I automated my job application process

#662

Post by casenmgreen »

iamacyborg wrote: post #636
casenmgreen wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as a contractor since 2017, I have given up using recruitment agencies in the UK to find work. I am likely the number one expert, in my field, globally. I apply for roles which specifically ask for an SME in my field. There is no question here of skills, and it is as certain as it can be without actually knowing that I am a light year ahead of all other applicants (because there is practically no one else ac…

The UK job market is pretty screwy. I got made redundant back in March, applied for a bunch of stuff I matched profile for and maybe got 5-6 interviews off the back of it. The worst was the agency that lined me up for a contract role, got me to fill out all the paperwork only for the job to fall through because the client apparently never got budget signed off for the position.

> The worst was the agency that lined me up for a contract role, got me to fill out all the paperwork only for the job to fall through because the client apparently never got budget signed off for the position.

I could be wrong, but I think that might have been a lie.

I've heard it before, too, and I've come to doubt it; I think it too unlikely to be heard with such frequency as I do hear it.

I've also had on three occasions agents call up after a day or two and tell "something about the budget, so the rate is now less than expected".

In two cases I came to know the agency was simply lying, and was keeping the difference for itself, and I expect it to be true also in the third.

Re: I automated my job application process

#663

Post by saagarjha »

Aurornis wrote: post #514
celdon25 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone affected by this and in the US might consider calling or writing to their congressman. The time to do that is now when the demand is high to bolster jobs but low for excessive laws. Nobody innocent is going to be wronged if this is made into a crime or otherwise regulated to put a stop to. The fake job applicants are only siphoning resources from the economy at the high expense of all other parties involved. T…

> Nobody innocent is going to be wronged if this is made into a crime or otherwise regulated to put a stop to. Good luck. The applicants doing fake job applications do not care about your laws at all. Many might be in foreign countries. They might plan on applying with stolen identities. Making a law isn’t going to change a thing. Even if you did, what company is going to spend resources tracking down the likely fake…

How exactly does someone who applies with a stolen identity get anything out of doing so?

Re: I automated my job application process

#664

Post by tugu77 »

hibikir wrote: post #371
belinder wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was hiring manager for 3 positions about 4 months ago and the amount of fake applications out there was mind boggling to me. I would say 90% were either entirely fake or had the exact same generated ai text. It got so bad that we started only looking at resumes that had a working LinkedIn link. Also after so many bad resumes I started being very forgiving for the ones that didn't fully match the job requirements if…

And that's not even enough: A few weeks ago I had to interview someone who had what appeared to be a realistic profile. Everything that came out of their mouth was from chatGPT It was suspicious, but the ruse became clear when they shared the wrong screen, so we could see his prompt, and how everything we said was being read in. At this point every remote internet checklist has to include checks for humanity, because…

> At this point every remote internet checklist has to include checks for humanity,

I genuinely don't understand this requirement. Isn't an interview exactly that? It's a conversation pretending to be about a technical problem/question/challenge but in reality its purpose is to find out whether you click with the person and would want to work with them. If some ChatGPT text can trick you then your process is broken anyway and everybody joining your company can expect colleagues selected by this sub-par process.

Re: I automated my job application process

#665

Post by beardedwizard »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #397
mvanbaak wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow Platform Engineer here, and I can relate 100% with your comment. We decided to stop announcing our engineering jobs and go back to mouth to mouth for sourcing candidates for now. It's a move I didn't want to make as, like you said, it means a lot of less networked engineers will not know about it and all. but for now this was the only way we got rid of the constant stream of letters from AI.

What is a "Platform Engineer"? I never heard that term before today.

Elitism is alive and well in this little nook. Equating platform engineering, SRE and sysadmin to the same thing.

Platforms are often large scale distributed systems, dealing with problems like ensuring 100000s of compute nodes are in a deployed and in consistent state. Millions of lines of code are written, peer reviewed and committed to solve this problem.

This mirrors an attitude I have frequently encountered from "traditional" or "mainstream" software engineers who devalue any work that isn't features, and don't want to have to work on problems like "make my feature appear on all deployments and work well" - it's just something sysadmins do amirite?

Re: I automated my job application process

#666

Post by mhb »

mhb wrote: post #263
nsxwolf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s our alternative? It doesn’t seem to be “carefully consider and apply to a handful of highly relevant postings”. I don’t see the downsides for candidates to play the numbers game.

Charge $x for a candidate to apply for your job. Put the money in an escrow pool. Pay it to the person you hire for the job. Idea 2: Bid to have yourself reviewed for the job. Money goes in escrow pool.

Idea 3: Use a prediction market to find the best candidate.

Re: I automated my job application process

#667

Post by mettamage »

normie3000 wrote: post #583
mettamage wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So do you network yourself into the companies then to get an interview? Or do you apply online? I'd like to know more about a manual approach. I think both approaches are valid. I took the automated approach to online dating, married now. So that worked out. Taking the automated approach for companies will probably work in a similar fashion as online dating. However, unlike online dating, I feel very strong targeted…

> Targeted approaches don't work with online dating What would a targeted approach to online dating be? From GP: > spend a week or so deeply researching where I want to work and figure out how to get there Replace "where I want to work" with "who I want to date" and it sounds concerning.

> What would a targeted approach to online dating be?

Courting someone, winning someone over. It's done in the offline world. I haven't thought about it much when it comes to online dating. I should've been a bit sharper on that.

When it comes to dating, I always went for the high volume approach. So I really shouldn't be speaking about a targeted approach. I guess I did because I was trying too hard to draw a parallel to applying to jobs.

So my mind just went:

              applying online    online dating
  volume           1                  2
  targeted         3                  4
But perhaps quadrant 4 doesn't really exist and I really was just shoehorning approaches of applying to jobs online into online dating because I saw this 2x2 matrix.

Re: I automated my job application process

#668

Post by 7thpower »

belinder wrote: post #351
MrMember wrote: post #314

I'm seeing a lot of back in forth in the comments between hiring managers and employees discussing who is more responsible for the current situation, but from the perspective of someone looking for a job what should I be doing? I've been pretty aggressively looking for a job for the past six months or so. I have 10+ years of professional software dev experience so I've mostly been looking at senior dev positions. I h…

I was hiring manager for 3 positions about 4 months ago and the amount of fake applications out there was mind boggling to me. I would say 90% were either entirely fake or had the exact same generated ai text. It got so bad that we started only looking at resumes that had a working LinkedIn link. Also after so many bad resumes I started being very forgiving for the ones that didn't fully match the job requirements if…

What did the working LinkedIn link help validate?

Re: I automated my job application process

#669

Post by kubb »

noen wrote: post #656
cs02rm0 wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been looking for a few months. I've got 20 years of professional dev experience, including in an eye-catching domain and haven't used LLMs in the process either. Since university I have never not been offered the first job I've applied for. For 10 years now I could ring any of the firms working in the niche I've been in and more or less set my rate. I still could, but I'm trying to get out of that niche into the…

Similar story here. 20+ years experience in leading dev, pm, and UX teams. Launched multiple 0-1 market leading products, worked with dozens of Fortune 500s. Applied to more than a hundred positions - one phone screen and one interview. Then I just went to my large network and within a week I have multiple opportunities - companies creating positions so they can hire me. Spoke to a number of colleagues in recruiting…

If this is a true story, then it means there’s no point in applying at all. You should just go full LinkedIn, and networking, preferably when you still have a job.

I’m not gonna do that so I’ll just keep my job until layoff, and then panic, automate my applications and belatedly start connecting.

Re: I automated my job application process

#670

Post by saagarjha »

Aurornis wrote: post #145
codegeek wrote: post #12

Nice. But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want. Flooded with auto submitted Resumes. I posted a job recently and got 100+ resumes in 2 days and 99% were not even remotely close to being a good fit. I struggled to sort through so many Resumes to find someone worth interviewing. The problem is that with so much noise, good candidates may get ignored or rejected by mistake. And the cycle continues. I get…

Public job board listings have always been flooded with low-effort spam applicants, but AI tools have supercharged the problem. The saddest part to me is watching the AI and social media malaise infect young mentees. I’ve been doing volunteer mentoring for years. Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max. It’s sad to see smart, motivated y…

> The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug malaise to being very humbled when they got laid off due to their own low performance.

I saw people doing great get laid off all the same. Not really how things should work, should it?

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