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I automated my job application process

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Re: I automated my job application process

#701

Post by coldtrait »

Aurornis wrote: post #461
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…

> So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting me nowhere? Why shouldn't I switch to an automated "shotgun" approach that applies me to as many jobs as possible to which I vaguely fit the requirements? I’m in a big semi-private Slack where people have been discussing CS application strategies for a long time (since before ChatGPT). The desperate people usually go through an arc where they try automated…

Where are these places where the interview processes allow for LLM cheating? I'm desperate.

Re: I automated my job application process

#703

Post by evilduck »

coldtrait wrote: post #701
Aurornis wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting me nowhere? Why shouldn't I switch to an automated "shotgun" approach that applies me to as many jobs as possible to which I vaguely fit the requirements? I’m in a big semi-private Slack where people have been discussing CS application strategies for a long time (since before ChatGPT). The desperate people usually go through an arc where they try automated…

Where are these places where the interview processes allow for LLM cheating? I'm desperate.

Unless the place has had 100% turnover in the last two years it sounds a bit dubious. Even some of the worst places to work that I know of haven’t churned through their entire development staff since ChatGPT first released.

Re: I automated my job application process

#705

Post by vegetablepotpie »

Aurornis wrote: post #163
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not your company, but it seems hiring companies brought this upon themselves with immediate AI rejects of qualified candidates, ghost jobs, ghosting candidates after interview, etc, etc. If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to land a single interview, then can you blame someone for automating it? I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate it well would make this guy a great hi…

> If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to land a single interview, then can you blame someone for automating it? Yes, a candidate is responsible for their own actions. This logic only sounds good until you’re on the hiring side and you see the stark difference between the LLM abuser applications and the people who are genuinely applying. Those people who have to apply to 100s of jobs are probably i…

Responsibility needs to be taken on the hiring side. Some companies post jobs with no intent to hire [1]. 70% of hiring managers surveyed say this is a morally acceptable, 45% of hiring managers have said they’ve done it.

This increases the risk on applicants that their investment on a carefully crafted resume/cover letter is time wasted.

Fake job postings punish the behavior you desire from applicants and incentivize spraying low-effort LLM resumes.

If you do not post fake job postings, I applaud you. If you know a colleague who does this, I ask that you have a conversation with them about the damage they are doing to your industry.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fake-job-listing-ghost-jobs-cbs...

Re: I automated my job application process

#706

Post by em-bee »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #128
nsxwolf wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I knew how to find one of these channels. My real human professional network has slowly evaporated over the last decade.

Advice from an old guy that went through this after moving to a new area and loosing my phat California income eventually. If you aren't working, pickup consulting gigs. They will probably suck and be high stress low reward, but it will help you build connections locally. Look for ones that don't just need a body but that really need help so you are in a position where your work is visible. Heck once I got in most of…

where do you find "come in and clean up our mess" jobs? i'd love to take on some of those (i actually enjoy doing that)

Re: I automated my job application process

#707

Post by yoshicoder »

lordnacho wrote: post #672
josephg wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But brief feedback is probably more likely to result in pushback / being sued by candidates, since candidates will feel like you didn’t properly consider them. The sad truth of the situation is that all the incentives for a company point in the direction of giving no feedback at all. This isn’t because hiring managers are sociopaths.

I'm not arguing for feedback, I'm arguing for an answer. It's just common decency. "Sorry, we're not continuing" is not going to get you sued.

See after just having through 3 rounds of recruiting over the past three years, I don't think the ghosting is intentional from most companies. I would say 60% of companies give a "not continuing" response after 1-2 months from application, while ~25% seem like they have a configuration/software mistake that causes it to send the rejection 6 months - a year later, which people in the meantime think was just ghosting. Not sure why this is so common

Re: I automated my job application process

#708

Post by evilduck »

fasa99 wrote: post #477
Aurornis wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting me nowhere? Why shouldn't I switch to an automated "shotgun" approach that applies me to as many jobs as possible to which I vaguely fit the requirements? I’m in a big semi-private Slack where people have been discussing CS application strategies for a long time (since before ChatGPT). The desperate people usually go through an arc where they try automated…

This is just the first pass. There are second pass strategies that could improve and are even more insidious: - review your generated CV pre-submission, make changes, do this a lot. Eventually you'll have a training set to fine-tune the model - throw 100-200 CVs at a job and see what sticks. That's your training set for that job. Now you have tuned the hiring manager's preferences. Follow up with your actual CV. Side…

Hiring managers don’t have infinite time and resources, they’ll just pursue other more fruitful avenues where a DoS attack isn’t possible.

This is a great way to entrench the recruiter middleman further though, because paying them a 20% cut to bypass the bullshit is already what they sell (and sometimes deliver).

Re: I automated my job application process

#709

Post by b8 »

Yeah, there's commercial services such as ApplyAll that automatically applies to jobs for you for a fee. Workday is the worst to automate. Companies can add in unique required questions such as "tell us two extraordinary things you've done", so edge cases like those are common.

Re: I automated my job application process

#710

Post by brookst »

davidclark wrote: post #690
tugu77 wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

> If some ChatGPT text can trick you then your process is broken anyway This is pretty unfair and seems like victim-blaming when we have companies spending billions of dollars to create these programs with the specific intent of trying to pass the Turing test.

There’s a bit of an echo chamber on HN where people convince each other that all LLM-generated text is easy to identify, riddled with errors, and “obviously” inferior to all real-human writing. Because some LLM writing fits those criteria and is easily identified, these folks are convinced they can identify all LLM writing and anyone who can’t must be a dunce.
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