| HN Mirror

> They say they "use AI to match the keywords in job description".

If recruiters only pick up your resumes based on keyword matching themselves, what is one to do, if not adapt their resumes to said keywords so they can at least try to get to a human interview?

Not talking about India specifically, but in general. Hiring is broken, so everyone tries to fix it in their own ways to maximize their chances.

never_inline 436 days ago

AI will often casually lie / make up points which sound authentic.

abirch 436 days ago

AI is the GOAT of Buzzword generation or should I/Gemini say

"Synergistic AI-powered paradigm shift: the ultimate game-changer for disruptive innovation in buzzword generation."

zellyn 436 days ago

It's also the perfect excuse if you get caught lying. “Oh shit, I ran it through ChatGPT one last time after proof-reading, and forgot to review the output carefully. Sorry!”

collingreen 436 days ago

Lying, excused with more lying! What could go wrong?

ohthatsnotright 435 days ago

Probably get promoted to C-suite.

rafaelmn 436 days ago

> what is one to do

Find roles where your skills match the required skills ?

What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed?

We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.

> What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed?

If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work. If not, this is the same as lying anywhere else. What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified? Should I be unemployed? Of course I should, as far as brain surgery goes, but there are other jobs out there I can do while I train.

> We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.

SW engineering is a critical component of both medicine and rocket science, and doing it wrong can kill people. Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

So the real answer to your question depends on how much you value other people and your principles, compared to valuing yourself and getting what you want. If you don't want to wrestle with that, just add some personal projects to your personal studying.

>If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work.

Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching on languages or stacks with "year of on the job experience". So white lies are the only way to pass through that initial filter and get to a technical person who will judge your knowledge less superficially.

>What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified?

Please stop arguing in bad faith. Switching to a different tech stack is not the same as switching to doing brain surgery. No offence, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy seems to comes form a position of privilege who never had to endure poverty and unemployment.

So please stop over-dramatizing the hurting people part. As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can in the interview and both parties are happy and getting their expected value out of it, who cares what experience in your resume was a lie and what not?

https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... :

tyzoid 436 days ago

> who cares what experience in your resume was a lie and what not

Just being blunt: that's called Fraud. Making false representations for personal gain (employment, in this case) is one of the classic examples.

It doesn't matter if nobody checks in the moment, or if you usually get away with it, dishonesty is dishonesty. If I were to discover that someone joined my team under false pretenses, you can bet I'll have very little faith in their credibility going forward.

> The Fourth Circuit, reviewing a conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 2314, also noted that "fraud is a broad term, which includes false representations, dishonesty and deceit." See United States v. Grainger, 701 F.2d 308, 311 (4th Cir. 1983), cert. denied, 461 U.S. 947 (1983).

> Switching to a tech stack is not the same as switching to brain surgery.

> Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching with "year of on the job experience".

I don't think this is always the case, as long as it's on the resume (skills + personal projects + YoE). Then, the technical person can judge your knowledge less superficially. It worked for me!

> So white lies are the only way.

It's actually just a regular lie: You'd be harming people by telling it.

> No offense, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy seems to comes from a position of privilege

This is actually an offensive thing for you to say, because you are claiming I have attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy, all of which are false. Please focus on substance over name-calling.

> [added later] ...never had to endure poverty and unemployment...

I encourage you to explore empathy regarding the poverty and unemployment you'd be causing for a better-qualified applicant who was passed over due to lies, and not just towards yourself.

We are all people, you are not more important than them, and poverty and unemployment is no worse for you than it is for them.

> [added later] As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can in the interview...

We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver what they said they can in their resume and/or interview.

before_the_law 436 days ago

> What then? Should I be unemployed?

Clearly philosophically I would love a world where everyone was taken care of, but this is a job market. All that money devs were getting this last decade has the dual side that tech is an aggressively capitalist industry. Competition is getting much more heated and, having been brought up in the dotcom bust, no not everyone who "wants" to be a software engineers gets to be one. I saw many, many people leave tech for lesser paying but at least hiring careers back in the early 2000s.

I feel that a lot of people that got into tech during this decade long boom period have never really experienced competition. In the last few years companies were often adding positions faster then they could fill them. If you passed the test, you got the job.

When I was getting started, virtually all hiring involved first building a pool of applicants, which could easily take weeks or months if the hiring team/manager wasn't happy with the quality of the pool. Then you had to interview with 5-10 other candidates that the team felt where at a similar strength to you. So even if you did your best, all it took was one other candidate that was better or even simply got a long better with the team to mean you didn't get the job.

You also had to wear a suit to an interview, even if it was for a role making a bit more than minimum wage.

>Clearly philosophically I would love a world where everyone was taken care of, but this is a job market.

In my comment, did you see me complain about the jobs market? Or about the broken hiring process?

> What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then?

I had some trouble finding a sw position after leaving mechanical engineering, but I went to the interview prepared to show I could do it, and it worked.

But you still had to get an interview first, which is often the most difficult part. Not everyone is so lucky to get such a chance. What then? Go homeless or lie till you get an interview?

The funny thing is I'm not even a mechanical engineer, but a a CS engineer, just mostly experienced in a stack that's not used much anymore but it's not like I can't learn another stack, I just refuse to put up with discriminatory hiring practices that treat you as a checkbox list, and so I have to work around the employers'/recruiters' bullshit hiring practices.

When you're got a thousand resumes, it is not possible to interview them all. You'll pick the most promising handful.

rafaelmn 436 days ago

What do you think happens when you lie through the interview ? I recently had this in my team - we were hiring fast and hired someone we shouldn't have - fired after two weeks. So your best case is receiving 6 weeks income after getting lucky and scamming someone through an interview ?

I dunno, I managed to get stellar reviews form my boss and colleagues after getting the job. Maybe not everyone is incompetent.

Maybe some people who are good at doing one thing, are also gonna be good at doing other things, but HR and recruiters are terrible at screening for adaptability and transferable skills, or they are just risk adverse and play it safe for an easy pay cheque, so you end up missing out on jobs you could do just fine, simply because in their limited understanding of tech jobs, you lack some buzzwords in your resume or some years of experience.

motorest 436 days ago

You touched on an important topic: if a candidate has potential but HR has no way to tell if that candidate is any good, should they hire him?

How can they tell apart a candidate with potential but an abismal CV from a candidate who is utterly incompetent and a bonafide scrub?

The problem is that this is not a HR problem. This is a you problem. Why are you failing to stand out and prove your value?

The problem with HR is not buzzwords. Their problem is that they need to justify their choices with objectively verifiable data. What are you giving them that allows them to say you are a safer hire than any other candidate around you? You are not giving them anything to work with. They can take a gamble on you, but they can also take a gamble on anyone else walking through their door. If they are going to take a gamble, wouldn't they bet on someone who on paper leads to better odds? What are you giving them to work with?

skydhash 436 days ago

And there's the reputation loss if someone decided to do due diligence.

never_inline 435 days ago

These people all have cushy jobs already. You haven't seen how people optimize for TC in the Indian market. There's a certain scale after which petty dishonesty starts to have a bad impact on overall environment and turn it into low-trust.

gosub100 436 days ago

There are many recruiters out there that will flat out reject someone if they aren't a perfect match for every single skill listed. I don't have a problem with lying to get past that gauntlet.

Just don't be surprised when you're passed over because someone else lied harder, and be aware that, like them, you're harming honest applicants by lying. After all, it's the same game.

That said, it's not surprising that humans are still okay with harming others to personally get ahead. A few thousand years doesn't cover a lot of evolution away from "fark you, I got mine".

gosub100 436 days ago

> it's not surprising that humans are still okay with harming others to personally get ahead.

Recruiters are harming me by taking a cut of my salary and offering nothing of value other than screening some calls and adding my resume to a spam listing and robodialer. Do you think I care about harming them

I'm sorry you feel hurt or harmed by someone. I've felt that, too, and it really sucks. It's not a good feeling.

I avoid recruiters unless they can serve me well, too (increased salary, signing bonus, etc), instead preferring to applying directly to individual companies whose mission is interesting and whose culture matches mine.

That said, I don't think hurt is a valid justification for hurting someone else, like the innocent parties I mentioned (potential future coworkers, other job applicants). That perpetuates a chain of hurt. Break the chain.

Employers pay big fees to recruiters who deliver qualified candidates.

Recruiters are middlemen, and middlemen match customers with providers. For that, they get paid.

They are not "harming" either, as the relationship and deals made are voluntary.

wqaatwt 436 days ago

And what happens when another candidate has the same skills and a bunch of other skills on top of those? Well maybe they don’t.. but of if they manage to take your interview spot it hardly matters.

motorest 436 days ago

> And what happens when another candidate has the same skills and a bunch of other skills on top of those?

Perhaps the first step anyone should take is to arrive at the realization that the point of a hiring process from the perspective of a hiring manager is not to find the absolute best candidate. The goal is to pick anyone, anyone at all, from a pool of acceptable candidates. If they are able to get through the door and not shit the bed, they are a superb hire.

wqaatwt 436 days ago

And what happens when another candidate has the same skills and a bunch of other skills on top of those? Well maybe they don’t.. but if they manage to take your interview spot it hardly matters.

Recruiters have gone beyond keyword matching, they're now using AI to judge the resume.

> Hiring is broken

How would you, as an employer, filter out the frauds?

flaburgan 435 days ago

Personally, I think free software are really important, and I love the developers that I am hiring to be in this mindset as well. So the first think I am doing is to check their gitlab / github profiles. If they love to write code and to share it, there obviously will be code there to check. Of course this code could be written with help of an AI but, nothing is preventing the developer to use it while working as well. As long as the result if good, everything is fine.

FirmwareBurner 435 days ago

I don't know. Depends on a case by case basis. Maybe someone has solid credentials, maybe someone has some FOSS contributions.