[almost]

Surely this now means now hiring managers (and people your code incorrectly identifies as hiring managers) now get spammed with loads of bullshit generated messages. Which obviously they'll ignore. But now you've made their jobs a bit harder by breaking a previously (maybe) working communication channel.

So you've put a effort in to build a product just to make the world slightly worse on net. Not hugely worse, but still it doesn't seem like the best way you could have spent your time.

[fhd2]

Things are turning truly bonkers right now. I've hired two developers in the last couple of weeks:

1. One from my network, just announced it, someone I had worked with in the past reached out, quick chat, hired, great.

2. One with the usual approach of posting job ads and all that. We got an _insane_ amount of noise, even as an obscure, small company. I've hired hundreds of people, but most of those three years ago or earlier. Never seen such noise, most candidates barely meeting any of the requirements, weird auto generated cover letters and CVs. It was a bit exhausting, but I went through everyone manually to make sure I'm not accidentally filtering out a solid candidate. We found two in the end, one quickly backed out because they got another offer. But there was one good candidate left, and they accepted the offer. I don't remember this being so hard.

A few years ago I'd call people trying to automate screening or mainly hiring from their network lazy. In this time, I see the appeal.

The last thing I need is more bots spamming me on my LinkedIn account on top of all this madness.

[neilv]

I think some recruiters are already doing AI-slop, too. (Not just the LinkedIn-spamming templates that some sourcers were doing before.)

Hopefully we'll get a big backlash against disingenuous passing off AI-slop as a communication from a human.

Maybe sending someone an AI-slop message will become universally recognized as trashy behavior -- employed only by the corporate communications of companies that really don't care, but not by anyone respectable.

[notpushkin]

Yeah. Personally, I’ve also tried reaching out to people in companies I’m interested in, but automating that just feels dishonest somehow.

[fhd2]

The reaching out might work, I know some people actually appreciate it. I personally don't, it feels like an attempt to circumvent the system, and the system is in place for a reason: It attempts to make the insane volume of candidate messages manageable. It's not perfect, I wish more people would work on better systems rather than ways to circumvent them.

There is one notable exception to this, a guy I actually ended up hiring: The job ad link I posted stopped working after a few days, and he wrote a nice message to the company (!) email address telling us about that, and saying he's interested if the role is still open. That's proactiveness I really appreciate. It's very different from random people reaching out on my personal LinkedIn account or email, which I simply ignore.

I'd _love_ it if there wasn't so much noise, then I would probably think about it differently. But the volume does burn you out, and any attempts at circumventing systems put in place to try and manage this is not helpful.

And that's for manually written messages. Automating that - Jesus.

[tough]

you should always pre-vet any message you send and sign with your name.

it doesnt really matter where the message or how was created, only that you're 100% ok with its contents reaching its destinatatary.

that still puts some limits to how much you can -spam- and should make you not want to -spam- but only send real messages, but you can certainly use AI to help you research/generate those leads initial messages

i have not tried to do this, but i wouldn't see how its problematic?

[notpushkin]

That’s how I would use this (and is my approach to LLMs in general). I’m just afraid that others would take a more lazy approach and spoil it for everybody else: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274583

[dloku]

thanks man!

[tough]

no problem! gl with the job search

[dloku]

right, we don't automate...

[notpushkin]

Yeah, but (if I understand how your product works correctly!) I’m afraid the laziest of your users would just copy-paste the suggested message and send it as is, to as many people as possible.

This would quickly saturate the decision-makers’ inboxes, and even those who genuinely put some thought into the roles they apply to and rewrite the suggested openers would be lost in this cacophony.

Is there some way to prevent that?

[dloku]

quick question: have YOU tried actually applying to any jobs right now? go on Linkedin and you'll see every JD has like 100 applications. Is this what you call "working" process?

[fhd2]

It's not. But I think you might be able to use your energy in ways that don't make the noise problem _worse_. Sure, if you don't do it, somebody else might, that occured to me. So what can one do?

1. Perhaps pivot to building a tool that cross references companies hiring with people attending local user groups or conferences you're interested in, to show an overlap? That might give you a hint about what circles you could enter for networking. Manual, human networking. It'd still be work, but a place to start. Of course this is stuff that's better to start when you're still employed and interested in a change, not when you've been applying for months. But it's one idea.

2. Try to work the other side. Why do fitting candidates get filtered out? Can you build a better system than what companies are using already? I wrote another comment about just how hard hiring is with all this automated spam, I'd love a human solution. This is hard of course, but I think I won't be alone and many companies will have similar experiences. Might be a problem they want to pay money for, but it's arguably harder to get than from job seekers.

Just some ideas. I emphasise with the situation and it's cool that you're trying to do _something_. Don't let folks like me discourage you from solving the problem. But consider the feedback on your proposed solution and consider other options to solve it, perhaps.

[almost]

I haven't, but it sounds honestly really bad. Sounds like it sucks for everyone right now. I just think your product will make it worse, probably only very slightly worse but still worse.