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Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers

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Re: Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers

#711

Post by 9rx »

gchamonlive wrote: post #673
9rx wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could say the same for you. It, like every other followup response I have written, was a question. Do you mean that you would ask the same thing? > If you treat everyone this way there is no way people will talk to you or take you seriously. If asking questions means people will not talk to me or take me seriously, that's fine. What purpose would continually asserting random statements serve?

Not all questions are born the same. All questions you posed so far had this arrogant air to them like I'm missing something so obvious it doesn't have to be stated. If you can't bother to express yourself better why should I make this effort of guessing what you mean? You'd be surprised how far a bit of benefit of the doubt can take you.

> All questions you posed so far had this arrogant air to them

Arrogance has nothing to do with anything, so this seems logically flawed, no? However, in the interest of trying to better understand your take, how would you have alternatively phrased them to not have that "air to them"?

> If you can't bother to express yourself better why should I make this effort of guessing what you mean?

Why make a foolish guess when you can simply ask more about what was intended to be meant? Now that I have introduced you to the concept of asking a question, you've sensibly started doing exactly that, but if we look back at earlier comments...

Re: Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers

#712

Post by kjkjadksj »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #658

From a game theory perspective, it used to be that if I email a company with my resume and a custom-written cover letter, that's an "honest signal" that I'm genuinely excited about working for that particular company . Since I spent a few minutes out of my day to seek them out and write a cover letter just for them. ChatGPT degraded that honest signal. Nowadays if a company gets my email with a custom cover letter, t…

It is interesting how pared down job applications have become. Its like no wonder applicants are so high in numbers now. They put them on 1 click apply sites like linkedin or indeed. You can't even submit a cover letter if you wanted, much less references. I am in a round of job hunting and out of ~110 applications only 1 single company asked for references in the application stage. Very few had a spot to insert a cover letter, maybe 25%.

Re: Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers

#713

Post by t-3 »

JohnCClarke wrote: post #317

Anyone want to help me build a rehearsal service so that folks can be trained to ace robot interviews? The prompt HR uses can only be a half a dozen lines long, and I can guess it already.

The AI is not doing an actual interview IME, it's just asking for the resume and personal information and experience that you already submitted when you applied in the first place. It's wasting people's time just because, basically. When the AI moves you to the human interviewer they don't seem to have received anything from the AI or the application as they ask you everything again. It's profoundly demoralizing.

Re: Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers

#714

Post by atoav »

econnors wrote: post #548
bee_rider wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think “what is an interface” would trip me up actually, haha. My thought process was: Well, most of the code I use uses a Reverse Communication Interface. But, I think these are pretty old-school projects, maybe I should start by talking about the Object Oriented interface to the library that we recently did. Or maybe I can talk about the file IO based interface that I did, it was extremely cursed but kind of funny…

"Can you clarify what you mean by interface?" is the right answer

As someone who interviewed people for technical roles, I'd see that as a bad sign and answer: "Just tell me what you can think about."

This isn't school where teachers give you trick questions and you fail if you misunderstand it. If you are applying as a software developer and you can't talk at length about various forms of interfaces you are probably not very experienced. UI, API, ABI are all interfaces..

Re: Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers

#715

Post by [deleted] »

mystraline wrote: post #373
Workaccount2 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having recently come off a micro-binge of the rise of USSR and it's history, the common theme in keeping a state communist through change of leadership is "The system works great, they just didn't know how to run it properly." Then they also proceeded to just continue the devastation. The fundamental problem of communism is that everyone needs to play along, but the rewards for not playing along grow as more people d…

Chinese socialism is interesting and I think works quite well. Absolutely new stuff is basically unrestricted. Go build, have fun, make money. Intermediate stuff is partially state controlled, including cost, profits, pollution, and more. Essentials are effectively state owned, cost controlled, and 'very stable'. Also, the USSR was the first time it was tried. It succeeded some ways, but failed in others.

[deleted]

Re: Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers

#716

Post by Workaccount2 »

mystraline wrote: post #373
Workaccount2 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having recently come off a micro-binge of the rise of USSR and it's history, the common theme in keeping a state communist through change of leadership is "The system works great, they just didn't know how to run it properly." Then they also proceeded to just continue the devastation. The fundamental problem of communism is that everyone needs to play along, but the rewards for not playing along grow as more people d…

Chinese socialism is interesting and I think works quite well. Absolutely new stuff is basically unrestricted. Go build, have fun, make money. Intermediate stuff is partially state controlled, including cost, profits, pollution, and more. Essentials are effectively state owned, cost controlled, and 'very stable'. Also, the USSR was the first time it was tried. It succeeded some ways, but failed in others.

If you look at Chinese communism on a timeline, it just appears that they are walking backwards from communism to capitalism at a very slow pace.

Re: Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers

#717

Post by recursivecaveat »

SoftTalker wrote: post #485

> Still, stretched-thin HR teams say it’s the only way to handle thousands of applicants. You're doing it wrong if you're considering "thousands" of applicants. First of all ask your current good employees if they can refer anyone. If you need to go to resumes, sort by qualifications. Screen out obvious robo-applications, you know them when you see them just like you know spam email from the subject line alone. Hint:…

Having thousands of applicants is only an issue if you give yourself the contrived problem of hiring the best person who sent you a resume. Your true objective is to strike a balance between cost of search and hiring someone from the top N% of potential people. Nobody has ever walked into a grocery store and bemoaned that there's no way they could locate the ripest banana in the building. You pick a number, evaluate that many at random, move on.

I think it galls people that they are likely cutting the best candidate out of the sample, but to be real: you don't have a magic incredibly sensitive, deterministic and bias free hiring method that can reliably pick the single best candidate out of thousands anyways. Any kind of cheapo ai-driven interview step you run is very possibly doing worse things to your sample than just cutting it down to size.

Re: Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers

#718

Post by __loam »

fpoling wrote: post #642
akudha wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd hate being interviewed by a bot. Talking to these stupid automated answering machines is bad enough. That said, the other side of the equation is also bad, for employers. I was asked to conduct some interviews recently. I asked the most basic of questions (like absolutely basic stuff, "what is an interface?" level basic). The number of people who said "I don't know" is far less than the number of people who tried…

If recruiting is so broken I expect more certification courses to appear or even language knowledge exams done by independent agencies in physical presence. Like it was done for TOEFL and similar exams in past.

The industry is practically allergic to the strict certification processes that are present in other fields like engineering. Don't expect this to change anytime soon. I think these companies prefer a wider recruiting pool to standardization.

Re: Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers

#719

Post by atoav »

jg0r3 wrote: post #570
vkou wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far, in my experience, that kind of clarification question is highly correlated to be followed by a firehose of bullshit. But I keep an open mind, and am always ready to be pleasantly surprised.

It really depends what your industry is. I've been writing some printer drivers for custom hardware + windows applications at work. Much of the technical jargon I've been learning during development involve things like "driver interfaces" and "communication interfaces". Depending on how recently I'd been working on our printer drivers I also would likely need clarification. Now if the job is "frontend developer" I ag…

I interviewed people and I would prefer a broad answer to a broad question. A broad question is an invitation for you to present me a selected platter of knowledge you have aquired about the various forms of interfaces. And the candidate who does that will always outperform a candidate who can't think about those concepts on a broad abstract level and needs to be lead to the waterhole.

"What is an interface?", is a totally legit question that can be answered without thinking about any specific interface. E.g. it could could be described as a systemic boundary between two domains, that is ideally well defined. You could talk about different interfaces, what the advantages and pitfalls of introducing interfaces are, conventions that exist etc.

Re: Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers

#720

Post by ponector »

Jaygles wrote: post #689
rightbyte wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"what is an interface?" Heh. I had a brian freeze just reading that. That is not a basic question, just because the concept is fundamental.

In my opinion, a very generic question like that deserves a very generic answer, with a follow-up asking if that is what they had in mind. "An interface is roughly how a system is designed to be interacted with. A web page can be an interface with your bank if they have online banking. An API can be an interface for a back-end service to provide to other back-end services. Did you have anything specific in mind?"

Usually the interviewer has particular definition in mind and you need to guess it to pass to the next stages.
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