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I automated my job application process

blog.daviddodda.com

841–850 of 884 posts

Re: I automated my job application process

#841

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of you are being fed nonsense. During my 10 years of being a salaried employee I interviewed for only the first one. All of the rest including Faang companies I went in without any interviews by knowing people and pulling strings. You shouldn't have to "apply" for anything.

You can get away without applying , yes, if your network is strong enough to get referred wherever you want to work. FAANG and similar companies absolutely will not hire software engineers without interviewing them, since the cost of a bad hire is too high. What I have seen on occasion, especially for more senior people, is a carefully constructed charade. We're not interviewing you, that would be so uncouth, we're j…

At a bigger company, they need to more or less go through the motions even if the top person has basically made a decision after a chat and they're writing a job description for you.

At a small company, a chat over lunch that you didn't even go into thinking of it as interview may be enough.

Ask me how I know in both cases :-)

Re: I automated my job application process

#842
post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried that too e.g. messaging talent recruiter managers on LinkedIn - never got a reply or “accepted” to start chatting

No no, literally literally knocking on doors. Go to a company's office and ask of they have a job.

It depends on the type of job. The receptionist at Google or IBM or wherever is going to give you a URL at best.

Re: I automated my job application process

#843
post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I didn't know better I'd think this was satire. As far as I can tell the advocacy is for either companies to be empowered to sue people who apply to work with them (seems like madness) or to set up a situation where the government enforcement arm pro-actively goes out and harasses unemployed job seekers. Either way that sounds like a recipe for disaster for unemployed persons.

AI has made hiring especially in technical industry an absolute shit show. I agree with parent comment that ideally government could do something about it but agree with you on how would you even do that. Maybe if they required all the job board companies like indeed and glassdoor and LinkedIn to properly vet candidates else those companies would be fined, but it's hard to imagine a solution that doesn't also hurt un…

Hiring in tech has been pretty awful even before AI.

Re: I automated my job application process

#844
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I've just been getting generic rejection responses from no-reply email addresses. There's no way to get feedback. My guess is that they're just sending out mass rejections for anyone except a few candidates they've selected to interview, and the other 1000 applications just get automatically tossed.

I was just hiring for an associate role recently and we got more than 800 applicants within a day, and our recruiter had a short list within a few days. If we gave everyone individualized feedback we wouldn’t do anything else for months. You might need to pay someone to look at the roles you’re applying for and the resumes you’re sending in for the kind of feedback you’re expecting.

If you required applicants to pay a sufficiently high cost to apply you wouldn't get 800 applicants within a day.

I want to see a site or ATS that makes it non-free to send an application and non-free to ghost an applicant.

Re: I automated my job application process

#845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't assume it "wasn't looked at", but I absolutely do think that a lot of the time it "wasn't understood" because the recruiters reading it only have very simply "keyword lookup" ability, instead of actually reading the resume. I don't fill my my resume with a bunch of spam buzzwords for every adjacent technology I've ever used, because certain things are kind of implied by other things. If I put "set up multiple…

> but as far as I can tell, the "solution" to this is to turn my resume into a low-quality SEO-spam piece of shit so as to try and satisfy the most incompetent person who might read it. If a posting gets 500 applications (which is about how many apps the last 4 roles I’ve listed got before we closed them) and we have an engineer spend 5 minutes per resume reading through each resume, that’s a full week of engineer ti…

I don’t really put any snark into my resume, so I can’t tell you how successful that would be.

I don’t write it to be “read by software engineers” per se. I describe my skillset and things I have worked on. I don’t load it with a million buzzwords of every single noun that I am aware of.

I acknowledge that I probably play the game “wrong”, insofar that there’s any “right” way of doing it, but I don’t have to like the game, and I certainly am allowed to think that it’s very frustrating that I have to fill my resume with SEO spam of synonyms because most recruiters are unwilling to learn anything more than basic keyword matching.

Re: I automated my job application process

#846
post #669
post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that's more or less true. Outside of school (one of which was way back in spray and pray physical letter days), my few jobs have always been through personal connections. Any online applications pretty much resulted in nada.

Re: I automated my job application process

#847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just fear mongering. If a job posting got spammed with 200 fake resumes from multiple fake applicants then the first thing we’re doing is cancelling our job postings with whatever service is so poor that it can’t reject basic spam attacks like this. Honestly, I think people vastly overestimate how much hiring managers use AI for filtering. Blaming AI for rejections has become a common coping mechanism because…

You don’t need to blame “AI” (or LLMs specifically) for the rejection mess that, good old fashioned ATS (applicant tracking systems) already automated rejection either outright or due to selection priority, filtering for keywords or phrases, biasing towards certain more easily parseable document formats, and so on was already happening around 2018-2019, probably before. And resume refinement representing and reformat…

> Naysayers haven’t been submitting to cold options I suspect which is why the trend has always been denial. But with mass layoffs, people are having to resort to cold application processes and finally experiencing at scale how terrible the process has been.

Aye, this. Got all of my jobs historically though word of mouth. Sat next to someone at a wedding reception, or talks at a Linux User Group, or colleagues from one job going to the next and pulling everyone with them, etc.

cold applying was brutal. worked out, eventually, but it feels/felt like such a waste of time.

Re: I automated my job application process

#848
post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are very mistaken, and it shows you haven't studied enough to rationally discuss the subject matter. Of course later, in time, countries impacted more people. Population grows with time, and any rational comparison along these lines would need to be normalized against population, but the truth in the ambiguity of the latter phrase doesn't make the former phrase true. The inquisition lasted quite a long time (1478…

Let me take a wild guess and say that your upbringing is… protestant? According to wikipedia ( https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisizione#L'Inquisizione_sp... they put to death 826 people, so that's less than 3 people per year and less than 2% of the people they judged. We know this accurately because it was a legal proceeding that left paper trails which can be studied. Your claim that it led to the collapse of port…

Agnostic, and you are quite wrong about a lot of things.

Wikipedia isn't a valid historic source, this is consistently repeated in introductory college courses and throughout academia. Any derivations you make on unsound data remains unsound data and nothing more than your own personal opinion, you shouldn't make it out to be less or more than it is.

You neglects quite a lot in an attempt to nullify, discount, and minimize to suit your biased narrative, like the fact that established estimates show roughly 150,000 people were prosecuted, and the fact that confessions of the time were extracted using torture. Many died without ever being formally executed.

Yes there are legal proceedings that did leave paper trails which I have studied, as well as where those paper trails stop being accurate.

The claims were "collapse as a superpower", not what you improperly referenced as a quote.

When you omit important context intentionally to try and put words not said in other people's mouth (as you did here to strawman), its fairly blatant that you are operating from a place of delusion or severe bias, or potentially malign personal hidden agenda.

Portugal/Spain was known for their technology, seafaring, and maps right up until the inquisition.

This is not wild at all, when you have mass migrations of intelligent and educated people wherever they migrate to benefit from their intellect whereas the places they travel from stagnate.

In any case, the fact that you tried to change what was said kills any possible credibility you might have, and there is no impetus or need for me to respond to you any further.

There is no value in unnecessarily giving a platform in the guise of discussion to the delusional or the malevolent. Best of luck to you in correcting that vile behavior, deceitful behavior is not tolerated by rational or intelligent people.

Re: I automated my job application process

#849

I wonder if a type of escrow service could help solve the problem of hiring managers getting flooded with low effort applications and simultaneously solve the problem of applicants being passed over when they are obviously the most qualified for someone else who looks good on paper but who is actually mediocre. There could also be a case for some kind of ante that applicants have to contribute to when they apply. Pas…

I want to see a site or ATS that makes it non-free to send an application and non-free to ghost an applicant.

Employers can earn revenue from automated applications that aren't qualified. Applicants can earn income from fake jobs until the fake jobs can't afford to post anymore.

Re: I automated my job application process

#850

When I see posts like this, I think either I'm doing something wrong or they're doing something wrong. I never wrote hundreds of applications. When I'm looking for a job, I investigate a couple of companies where I'd like to work, write a handful of thought-out applications, and generally get at least a response, in most cases an invitation for an interview. Granted, I have a university degree but I guess many people…

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