[jofer]

As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become.

We had 1200 applications for an extremely niche role. A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. Another huge portion were just unqualified.

The irony is that there actually _are_ a ton of exceptionally qualified candidates right now due to the various layoffs at government labs. We actually _do_ want folks with an academic research background. I am quite certain that the applicant pool contained a lot of those folks and others that we really wanted to interview.

However, in practice, we couldn't find folks we didn't already know because various keyword-focused searches and AI filtering tend to filter out the most qualified candidates. We got a ton of spam applications, so we couldn't manually filter. The filtering HR does doesn't help. All of the various attempts to meaningfully review the full candidate pool in the time we had just failed. (Edit: "Just failed" is a bit unfair. There was a lot of effort put in and some good folks found that way, but certainly not every resume was actually reviewed.)

What finally happened is that we mostly interviewed the candidates we knew about through other channels. E.g. folks who had applied before and e-mailed one of us they were applying again. Former co-workers from other companies. Folks we knew through professional networks. That was a great pool of applicants, but I am certain we missed a ton of exceptional folks whose applications no actual person even saw.

The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism. If you don't already know someone working at the company, your resume will probably never be seen.

I really feel hiring is in a much worse state than it was about 5 years ago. I don't know how to fix it. We're just back to what it was 20+ years ago. It's 100% who you know.

[jppope]

> The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism

Just want to comment on this, because I think think favoring unknown candidates is a mistake we make too often, and in fact the "normal" process is a disaster on both sides for this reason. Nepotism or Cronyism is granting resources, patronage, jobs to someone you know instead of a qualified candidate. In many industries this is how they function because qualifications and skill provide little to no differentiation (Think knowing Microsoft word and having a comms degree with no work experience).

In high skill industries where experience is hard fought... people know the who the "people" are because they stick out like sore thumbs. If your hiring process at work is throw up a job on indeed and see what resumes come through, your company likely isn't worth working at anyway because the best candidates aren't randos.

Think of it this way if you were putting together the Manhattan project again would you recruit the people with a stellar reputation in physics, engineering, manufacturing, etc OR would you throw up a job on a job board or your corporate site and see what comes back? The difference is active vs passive, good reputation vs no reputation (or a bad reputation).

Not trying to make a big semantic argument... I just want to say that things like reputation and network matter... and thats not really "nepotism"

[Bukhmanizer]

I think you’re just arguing for nepotism in a roundabout way.

My senior staff engineer can’t code at all. He got hired because he was friends with our engineering manager. You might say “well that’s nepotism then since he’s under qualified”, but I’m sure he would make the argument that he got the job because of his “stellar reputation and extensive network”.

It’s an abhorrent situation to be in. Everyone knows he can’t code but because he got hired at such a senior level he’s making high level decisions that make no sense. Give me a qualified rando any time of the day.

[tompark]

I agree, some of the worst employees I've seen were hired that way.

I haven't hired anyone recently but btwn 10-20 years ago I did hire a lot. Of course we reached out via our network of connections but that gets tapped out fast, so you have to rely on job postings. It was always hundreds of applicants per opening. Back then it wasn't 1000's but it might as well have been because I didn't have enough time to sift through them all. That's ok, you can just approach it like "the dowry problem" (also known as the secretary problem [1]).

But the job market and hiring is way worse now, and it's pretty horrible for job seekers atm.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

[hn_throwaway_99]

This situation is very weird to me. In my experience, referrals got your foot in the door, but you still always had to pass the same hiring screen/interview process as everyone else.

I recommended an engineer once who I thought was great - he was a total "get shit done" kind of guy. But he did poorly in the interviews (I won't say they were leetcode-type problems, but you did have to have some algorithmic skills - I warned him beforehand to brush up on some of those types of programs.) As much as I liked the working with the guy, we couldn't hire him because he was a pretty solid "no" from the other interviewers.

I've never worked in a company that hired people based on the referral of one person, and honestly that sounds like a pretty f'd up company.

[Bukhmanizer]

Yes we have the same interview process. This is something that no one knows about as I don’t know who interviewed him but my cynical guess is that if someone has enough power in the org and happens to sit on the hiring committee, it doesn’t really matter how well they do.

[Bukhmanizer]

In another much better incident, we once hired someone that did poorly in some interviews because I happened to present a project they made the week before. He turned out great, and he was doing some really cool stuff, just didn’t do coding interviews well.

[apwell23]

> My senior staff engineer can’t code at all. He got hired because he was friends with our engineering manager.

Well thats how it works everywhere. You have to suck up and pretent to be 'friends' with person with the power to get promoted too.

[hackable_sand]

You don't have to pretend. You didn't even have to be friends. You can even be mortal enemies with the powerful person.

Faking it is pathetic behavior.

[hnfong]

I think you're projecting your negative past experiences and trying very hard not to understand the GP's point.

It doesn't matter what the person hired thinks. The important part is whether those making hiring decisions are hiring people with "stellar reputation".

In your case, "everyone knows he can't code", so he doesn't have stellar reputation. If we apply this scenario to what the GP said, no company would have hired a person where "everyone knows he can't code".

You said "He got hired because he was friends with our engineering manager." That's nepotism.

GP says hire somebody with stellar reputation. That's a totally different situation.

[Bukhmanizer]

I understand just fine. There is no objective descriptor of a person. The engineering manager probably thinks he’s a perfect candidate.

> In your case, "everyone knows he can't code", so he doesn't have stellar reputation

Yes that’s what we figured out after he got hired. He obviously didn’t have a reputation within our org before he got hired. All we had to go off was the engineering managers opinion.

Are you guys really shocked that given the freedom to, people would rather hire their friends and people they know would do them favours rather than the “objectively best candidate for the job”?

By overweighting network and reputation all you are doing is turning every career into a political game.

[hnfong]

> > In your case, "everyone knows he can't code", so he doesn't have stellar reputation

> Yes that’s what we figured out after he got hired. He obviously didn’t have a reputation within our org before he got hired. All we had to go off was the engineering managers opinion.

Right, *he doesn't have stellar reputation*, and he got hired. The comment you replied to said "hire people with stellar reputation". I'm still not sure what you're missing here or why you think this is an applicable scenario.

> Are you guys really shocked that given the freedom to, people would rather hire their friends and people they know would do them favours rather than the “objectively best candidate for the job”?

I wouldn't be shocked, but I also don't think that what the "GP" advocated for. You might say this would lead to people using it as an excuse for nepotism, but if the engineering manager is the kind of person who has poor or malicious judgment and can't make a correct hiring decision by himself, then you're cooked no matter what.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> I just want to say that things like reputation and network matter... and thats not really "nepotism"

I strongly agree with this, and I'm glad you put it so clearly. If you've been in your industry say 10 years or more, you should have built a reputation by that point that makes people say "I want to work with that person again, or I'd recommend that person to a friend who has a job opening". (Important thing to clarify, though, I'm not denigrating anyone who has been out of work a long time. I've seen many categories of jobs in the tech industry where there are simply a lot fewer jobs to go around - it's musical chairs and a lot of chairs got taken away all at once).

I would put in an important caveat, though, and that's for people who are early in their careers. The hiring process really is truly shitty for people just entering the workforce and for people with only one or two jobs under their belt.

[em-bee]

building that reputation is harder than it sounds. you don't always work in positions where you have contact to other people that could build up your reputation. i was a contractor for a small company for 10 years. i had little contact with the employees in that company, only working with the boss. the boss was nice but he had no useful contacts into the industry. the employees that i did have contact with were to low in the hierarchy that they could provide meaningful connections even after they changed jobs.

how am i supposed to build up a reputation with that?

[nathan_douglas]

Yeah, I worked at a tiny company (<10 employees total) for five years, then was in a small company with a tiny dev team (3 engineers and 1 PM at peak) for almost five years. Now I've been at a government contractor for five years, so I have a ton of contacts now... but they tend to remain in the civic tech space, and I'd like to move into research. Where I know absolutely nobody. I feel ya.

[cheema33]

> As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become.

Same here. I have been hiring and it is a shit show. We advertise one position and get inundated with resumes. Many of these resume are complete fabrications, so we cannot rely on them at all. So we implemented a filter by asking candidates to do a small project. Candidates do not have to hand-code it. We encourage candidates to just use AI for the simple project. Only about 10% actually do the required work that typically takes 15-20 minutes to complete with AI assistance. Some get offended that we even dared ask them to take the assessment test and start using profanity to let their displeasure be known. Quite strange.

[Bolwin]

When you're applying to hundreds of positions, 99% if which will auto reject you, it can be quite annoying if you're asked to do extra work before you've gotten any further in the process

[apwell23]

like captcha for resume

[autoexec]

You'd think that many sites would already be using a captcha before accepting an application

[eclipticplane]

The number of fake resumes is insane. During reviews I ended up passing a number of fake profiles through because their CVs looked real. None of them showed up to the initial screening call.

There are now AI CVs mimicking real people, so the CVs point to real Linkedin profiles, Github profiles.

Not sure what their end game is unless it's to continually test CV creation or find woefully inept companies that will hire them with limited vetting.

[alimahmoudhu]

> I ended up passing a number of fake profiles through because their CVs looked real. None of them showed up to the initial screening call.

That's just crazy. Probably those were for collecting data to analyze what makes a CV pass. Mass apply everywhere, combine the results, and analyze the results manually or using LLMs. Selling these data can be profitable

[pavel_lishin]

It's also possible that they got a job elsewhere, and didn't follow up.

[alimahmoudhu]

Yeah, That would be more reasonable :)

[Terr_]

> Not sure what their end game is unless it's to continually test CV creation or find woefully inept companies that will hire them with limited vetting.

I wonder about (and didn't immediately find) case-studies that lay out the strategy of Resume Of Total Lies Dude, their expected payout before they get fired, etc.

[abathur]

This is probably crazy talk, but I have been wondering how requiring people to slap a stamp on an envelope and mail in a résumé would go.

[__turbobrew__]

I don’t think it is crazy and I have suggested beforehand there needs to be some sort of proof of work on the candidate side to prevent resume spam.

I think your idea is very elegant as everyone has access to the mail system, an actual stamp is pretty cheap, but it is just enough hassle to mail an application that it will filter out some of the spam.

The other suggestion I have had is that candidates need to hand in the resume in person, but I guess you could accept resumes from both mail and in person drop offs.

[pavel_lishin]

> The other suggestion I have had is that candidates need to hand in the resume in person

This might be a bigger lift than asking for a take-home project; if I'm expected to drop off a resume in Manhattan that's a minimum of a two hour trip for me. I'd rather spend two hours banging together a CRUD app to show that I can actually write code.

[BetaDeltaAlpha]

I read this as applying to in-office roles, If I were willing to commute, then it's a good chance to exercise the lift required.

[lelanthran]

> but it is just enough hassle to mail an application that it will filter out some of the spam.

More than that, bots currently have no way of sending snail-mail :-)

[obruchez]

The only time I had to hire somebody, the university I was working for in Switzerland made it mandatory for the candidates to send their application via mail, not email. That was back in 2014. I found this odd at the time, but I'm pretty sure it made my job way easier (less applications to review, motivated/serious candidates, etc.).

[about3fitty]

I wonder if we are back to “who you know” because of a couple of factors:

1. The risk of a bad hire is great, and this de-risks that

2. It facilitates more natural and spontaneous conversations, which for better or worse short-circuits a well crafted and pre-planned anti-bias interview process which can be too rigid for both parties to explore detail

[hansvm]

I must be missing something. 1200 real applications are hard to sort through. 1200 mostly fake applications are much easier. Hiring is a high-leverage activity, and it's absolutely worth spending a couple hours going through those by hand.

[saulpw]

For 1200 applications, a couple hours translates to less than 10 seconds per application. In the age of LLMs, why do you think you'd be able to discern whether an application was fake in 10 seconds? Remember, it's not "obviously fake", it's "designed to con you" fake.

[jofer]

^ This. Exactly. Low value comment on my part, but as the OP in this case, I feel the need to say that this is the exact issue.

The "smell test" takes longer than you think and often involves an actual interview.

[carlosjobim]

How about 50 per hour? That's just 24 hours of work and a reasonable first look at one minute for each application. Very little time to spend for an important company decision which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[Balgair]

That's a half week of work without breaks at one resume per minute-ish.

I agree that it is a very important decision, but that's also unreasonable for a manager to set time aside to look through. You've just set the other projects that you're already behind on (that's why you need to hire in the first place) back another half week or so.

It's like a reverse rocket equation here. You need time to make more time, so you take time, but that time needs time, so ...

The cost isn't really borne by the hiring manager though, it's just their budget (that they argued for) that they need to spend down. The decision makers really don't care that much about the numbers, just that they don't go over.

[carlosjobim]

How can that be unreasonable? To work at least half a week for a decision which will cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions of dollars in the long run. What else is the manager doing which is more important monetary wise? And if managers are really too busy with raking in the millions to the company, then it's a fine time to hire somebody who's only job will be to hire more people (not a HR person of course).

[Balgair]

The manager is responsible for $X but only gets paid their salary.

I'm their day to day, hiring is a pain. They need the extra hands, but they have to go through more work to get that person onboard. The activation energy is high, higher now with AI and automated job applications clogging things up.

Then you have onboarding and the continued costs of management of that person. Honestly, most managers would want the smallest team possible in terms of day to day workload.

This is also why AI is appealing. The promise of no sick days, no HR complaints, no chit chat. Just pure work done in plain language. Work done overnight, right, the first time. A middle managers dream worker.

The thing that is more important is the budget. It's always the budget. Nothing matters but the budget. That's the second iron law of beauraracy, of course.

[staticautomatic]

The AI-written cover letters are a dead giveaway and you can often spot them in less than 10 seconds easy, but it’s still a terrible slog.

If you don’t believe me, try clustering 1,000 cover letters.

[hansvm]

I don't know which 1200 applications they saw, but IME they're a lot better at trying to con you than succeeding. LLMs aren't great for a lot of use cases (yet?), and this is one of those areas where reality doesn't match the dream:

1. ~10% of applications are over-tailored. Really? You did <hyper-specific thing> with <uber-specific details> exactly matching our job description at $BigCo 3 years before the language existed and 5 years before we pioneered it? The person might be qualified, but if they can't be arsed to write a resume that reflects _their_ experiences then I don't have enough evidence to move them forward in the interviewing process.

2. ~40% of applications have obvious, major inconsistencies -- the name on LinkedIn doesn't match the name on the resume, the LinkedIn link isn't real, the GitHub link isn't real, the last 3 major jobs on LinkedIn are different from the last 3 major jobs on the resume, etc. I don't require candidates to put those things on a resume, but if they do then I have a hard time imagining the candidate copy-pasting incorrectly being more likely than the LLM hallucinating a LinkedIn profile.

Those are quick scans, well under 4s each on average. We've used 80 minutes of our budget and are down to 600 applications. Of the remainder:

3. ~90% of remaining applications fail to meet basic qualifications. I don't know if they're LLM-generated or not, but a year of Python and SQL isn't going to cut it for a senior role doing low-level optimizations in a systems language. If there's a cover letter, a professional summary, mention of some side project, or if their GitHub exists and has anything in it other than ipynb files with titles indicating rudimentary data science then they still pass this filter. If they're fresh out of school then I also give them the benefit of the doubt and consider them for a junior role. Even with that leeway, 90% of those remaining applicants don't have a single thing in any of the submitted materials suggesting that they're qualified.

So...we're down to 60 applications. We spent another 40 minutes. In retrospect, that's already our full 2hr budget, so I did exaggerate the speediness a bit, but it's ballpark close. You can spend 2min fully reading and taking notes on each of the remaining applications, skimming the GitHub projects of anyone who bothered to post them, and still come out in 4hr for the lot.

It's probably worth noting, that isn't all to say that <5% of programmers with that skillset are qualified. I imagine the culprit is spray-and-pray LLM spam not even bothering to generate a plausible resume or managing to search for matching jobs. If bad resumes hit 99 jobs for every 1 job a good resume hits then you only expect a 1% success rate from the perspective of somebody reviewing applications.

[aakresearch]

Your take is very sensible and I agree with it 100%, but the reality is that (by my assessment) it is absolutely not present in the wall of ATS filters one's job application is up against. I've sent hundred of CV/cover letters over last ten months, none of them are touched by LLM. Most cover letters I manually tailored to re-frame in line with job ad - where I cared a lot, some I just made with my generic template - still manually - where I couldn't be bothered to care. Invariably I either received no response at all, or for remaining 10% I received a generic rejection email, identically worded and styled in almost all cases.

Here it is, if you are curious:

"Thank you for your interest in the <position> position at <company> in <country>. Unfortunately, we will not be moving forward with your application, but we appreciate your time and interest in <company>."

The Resume I am sending out is just an evolution of one that worked very well for me for 25+ years. The roles, as far as I am able to see, are 80%-95% keyword match, with the non-matched keywords being exceedingly superficial. Yes, I haven't listed "blob storage", but guess what else I have used but haven't listed: "semicolon", "variable declaration" and "for-loops". Yet in this day and age one seems to be punished for not doing so.

I am very principled in not letting any AI anywhere close to my CV, because I think the usefulness of signal it conveys rests solely on it being addressed to and read by human, hence it has to be fully authored and tailored by human too. But these days this idea has completely flipped. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Standing by principles could lead to literal dying. Personally, I made peace with dying, but I cannot allow my family to go homeless. As such, I don't see it below me to go down the path of mass-blasting heavily over-tailored Resumes. If it bumps my chances from 0.05% to 0.2%, that's a four-fold increase that may be the difference between, literally, life and death. The organic job search with my natural skills and authentic ways of presentation I relied on for twenty years is dead.

[squigz]

> Those are quick scans, well under 4s each on average. We've used 80 minutes of our budget and are down to 600 applications. Of the remainder:

4 seconds each? You are... fast.

[whycome]

It's clear your org is looking specifically at coders/programmers. That's very different from the "academic research" background that the OP suggested. It takes a different type of analysis and vetting.

And different types of jobs require skillsets that aren't adequately conveyed in a traditional resume.

[Scoundreller]

> 1200 real applications are hard to sort through.

Probably not much yield in going through more than a few hundred.

Shuffle them around, start skimming through and throw out the rest once you realize you’re just seeing more of the same.

Pat yourself on the back and mutter “you need to be skilled and lucky to work here”

[aakresearch]

> Pat yourself on the back and mutter “you need to be skilled and lucky to work here”

It would be absolutely amazing if employers and recruiters finally were doing exactly this. We are in this dead end precisely because everyone is under false illusion that their pool of candidates has a hidden gem outshining everybody else in existence, and they absolutely need to sift through the whole pool to find this gem. As a result, all pools are never exhausted and only ever spreading, with more and more desperate people sucked into multiples of them.

[b_e_n_t_o_n]

Would you have found it reasonable for interested candidates to have reached out directly instead of just submitting a resume to the ATS? With the AI spam etc. it feels like the usefulness of these automated systems is quickly diminishing. Hiring feels broken right now.

[staticautomatic]

In theory, sure, but in reality, please god no. 99% of LinkedIn messages you get as a hiring manager are “Hi I applied to your role”, “Hi I applied to your role and I’d be a great fit when can we talk?”, “Hi I’m really interested in learning about your work can we meet for coffee?”, or “Hi I’d be a great fit for your role because <insert enormous AI-written cover letter>.”

[ThrowawayR2]

> "Would you have found it reasonable for interested candidates to have reached out directly..."

If that worked, someone would automate a way to bulk spam that too.

[atoav]

What does "reaching out directly" mean?

[marc_abonce]

I assume that they mean sending either a direct Linkedin message or an email to the recruiter or hiring manager.

When I was recently unemployed I started doing that after months of getting ignored by most companies and, in my experience, the only difference is that I got far more acks ("Hi! Sure, I'll take a look at your resume and reach out!") but I got a similar rate of applications-to-interview compared to applying through the official platforms.

[marcosdumay]

At this point, probably forming a line on the door of the hiring manager.

[jppope]

this means finding a way to directly reach out to the hiring manager. like sending an email, asking a colleague for an introduction, sending a linkedin message, etc

[prawn]

I haven't applied for a job since the 1990s so I'd be out of the loop, but what are the faked resumes trying to achieve? Just get in a role and get paid before being found out? Are they trying to find brief or lazy interviewing processes? Do they only target remote positions?

[marcosdumay]

When the requirements of every single job are impossible, people will lie.

Several people have been recommending candidates to lie for IT-related jobs for a long time now, and honestly, I think the vast majority of positions have such a crazy set of requirements that they only get the lairs.

[bell-cot]

Amusing Idea: Advertise three vaguely-similar positions, only one of them real. Specify impossible-for-honest-humans requirements for the fake two. Then discard all applicants for the real position who also claimed to be qualified for a fake one.

[sfink]

Strict honesty here has always been a losing proposition. The "requirements" section of a job posting has almost never been accurate. It's more of an image they're painting. An honest applicant is one who reads the whole description to understand as best they can what the company is looking for, and sort of holistically matches their own expertise against that picture.

If the job posting lists requirements A-F and you have A, B, D, E, and F, then you'd do both yourself and the company a disservice by disqualifying yourself. Put it in your cover letter if you can't handle the discrepancy.

I'm not going to address either the morality or advisability of being "dishonest" by this standard. I've just seen too many people sell themselves short, when in fact they are exactly what the company is looking for, it's just that the recruiter wasn't able to spell that out in the job description. And it's not necessarily because they were stupid either; if they only put the true minimum necessary criteria into a job post, then (1) they'll get flooded with underqualified candidates who don't even come close to what they need, and (2) they may very well miss out on good candidates because the job looks lame.

Source: I've been on both ends. As a candidate, I mentioned during the interview that I actually had no experience in the required technology X but I had related experience. The interviewer just laughed; it was obvious to both of us that it didn't matter. As someone offering a job (not the hiring manager but sort of), I talked to a couple of people who were hired into other roles in the company and asked why they didn't apply for our position, they seemed perfect for it (to me). Several of them pointed to some specific line item under the requirements that disqualified them. Sometimes it was an item that we'd removed later because we weren't getting enough people in, even though strictly speaking it was part of the job. We would sometimes push the recruiter to add "experience with X, or willing to learn X", but they would push back and honestly I'm not sure I know better than them. They were the ones who had to be the front line filtering through the noise resumes, after all.

[neilv]

I've seen a number of job posts that have a note near the end, encouraging people to apply even if they don't meet all the requirements.

There's also the job posts that distinguish between hard requirements and nice-to-haves, using various language (e.g., "bonus if you...").

[incompatible]

Well, there are people who hate the idea of lying, and can't bring themselves to do it, even it's applying for a job where they don't meet one of the requirements.

Most likely this isn't an attribute that most employers actually want, though.

[nathan_douglas]

My mother always put a really high emphasis on honesty. I wasn't the best kid, and certainly not the most honest (sorry, Mom), but I've always been absolutely forthright in résumés and cover letters. If I don't fully tick C, I mention it and share some quality or experience that I think might compensate. In my experience, it hasn't helped. I still do it, though, just because TBH I'm not 100% qualified for any of the jobs I apply for because I don't want to do the same shit I've already done for the rest of my career. I'm trying to grow, lol.

[hackable_sand]

I have seen several companies lie about the requirements they posted.

[crock_smacker]

> If the job posting lists requirements A-F and you have A, B, D, E, and F, then you'd do both yourself and the company a disservice by disqualifying yourself. Put it in your cover letter if you can't handle the discrepancy.

I’m my experience the problem is that the missing “C” is deep level domain expertise outside of the technical end and that’s just so much more important than the other ones, and importantly, something you can’t really just learn on your own.

[sfink]

Sure, that happens, but that's also pretty clear to the job seeker. Don't try to BS your way past that one.

More commonly, that list of requirements comes from the recruiter quizzing the developers on what they need, and they throw out a bunch of stuff that could describe a person they'd be interested in hiring. But there are many other people who would work too, and the developers are likely to come up with stuff that they're familiar with and end up describing someone much like them with maybe 1 additional skill -- which is actually backwards, because they already have that expertise in the aggregate and what they really need is what they don't already have, but that stuff is harder to think of and value and therefore suggest to the recruiter because, well, it's stuff they're unfamiliar with.

A good recruiter will push back and make them figure out which are actual requirements. But getting it right requires a good recruiter + good developers who will make the time to think it through + good company culture. Most job posts are not coming from such a fortunate place.

On the flip side, the recruiter is hearing from management that they want someone who is perfectly carved out to accomplish a single task X, preferably someone who has already accomplished task X at another company so they can get hired and immediately do X here as well. Sure, they'll also be another body to shut up the whiny developers talking about how they have too much to do, but the position is open because they've been asking for X for months and the developers keep saying they don't have enough bandwidth. So they describe what they want to the recruiter in painful specificity. If their conception of X requires technologies and tools A, B, and C, then their requirements list is something like "Minimum 10 years experience doing X. Expert in A. Expert in B. Expert in C. Must have a PhD from my school or a school I'm envious of."

Maybe I've just had some bad experiences, but this is why I don't take requirements lists too seriously. Sure, if it wants "experience in medical imaging" and you have nothing related, don't apply. But if it gives a laundry list of specific technologies, it's either developers looking for clones or managers looking for someone to do a specific project.

[Viliam1234]

Similar idea: make a list of "required" and "optional but nice to have" skills for the position. Among the optional ones, include experience with a non-existent technology. Discard everyone who claims to have the experience.

[jofer]

I have no idea, but yes, I suspect remote positions are heavily targeted and folks are looking for lazy hiring processes.

But when the job description contains a lot of very general terms (e.g. "scientific computing") and every part of your job history is just parroting a specific term used in the job description with no details it doesn't pass the smell test.

I absolutely respect keyword-heavy job/project descriptions. You kind of have to do it to make it through filtering by most recruiters. But real descriptions are coherent and don't just parrot back terms in ways that makes it clear you don't understand what the are. You find a way to make a coherent keyword soup that still actually describes what you did. That's great! But it's really obvious folks are misrepresenting things when a resume uses all the terms in the job description in ways that don't make sense.

I kinda think we've reach this weird warfare stage of folks submitting uniquely LLM-generated resumes for each position to combat the aggressive LLM-based filtering that recruiting is starting to use. I assume people think they can do well in an interview if they can just get past the automated filtering. I'm sure some are trying to do 3 and 4 remote jobs at once with little real responsibilities, too, but I find it hard to believe that's the majority. I may be very wrong there, though...

[phendrenad2]

This was the problem recruiters were invented to fix, but somehow recruiters have moved on to fixing every problem BUT this one.

[trod1234]

The problem today is AI makes everything worse. Its jamming communications channels, and what you get once those channels are saturated is the equivalent effect that you see in cellular networks culminating in RNA interference.

No binding sites, no matches.

Additionally, if competent people can't find work within 2 short years, they will leave that sector forever and retrain. They may have been rockstars, but that doesn't matter. No work, no food, bad investment. When you have coordinated layoffs across sectors you have a short period of time to scoop up the competent people.

Its not immediately clear, but it seems like you either skipped over the part of filtering properly (and didn't do it?), or just jumped to this other strategy when what worked before no longer works.

Instead of trying to wrangle the data, why didn't you put a physical barrier at the very beginning. A simple validation, this is your CV, you are this person, and you have a valid DL with that name, and then you whittle down from there.

[jjav]

Going through this right now. I hired someone about 8 months ago and the process was still pretty normal. But for the role I opened last week, we are getting a ton of AI-written resumes that are just a rewrite of the job description.

When I look many of these people up in linkedin, they often have jobs listed but completely empty descriptions of each job. I guess this is so they can have AI generate a rewrite of their resume based solely on the job description for every role they apply. This used to be too labor intensive to do, but now with AI it's easy to churn out a hundred of those a day.

(The more careless ones leave their actual job description on linkedin and submit a resume with a wildly different version, which just happens to be a rewrite of our job description. At least those are easy to filter out.)

While I don't like this, I'm finding that I need to find the person on linkedin, it must not be a recently created account and it must have a reasonably detailed description of what they did in each company and it must reasonably closely match the resume.

[user1999919]

> clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic.

Then why would have unrealistic expectations in the ad?

[2ICofafireteam]

>A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic.

In government work programs in British Columbia, we were taught to address every point or requirement in a job listing that we could. Is this tactic clearly distinguishable from clearly faked?

[monkeyelite]

Your use of nepotism is actually reputation.

[tarsinge]

On the hiring side too, and I really don’t understand the fake resume with AI trend. How can they possibly think they’ll pass the interview? Because when I’m hiring I find it very easy to spot someone lying when questioning to go into the details of past experiences. Maybe they are betting on a broken process? Maybe you can pass (dumb) HR filters with lies, but not real interviewers, at least from what I do and have seen.

[dentemple]

It's because they're using AI for the interviews, too.

[user1999919]

> Because when I’m hiring I find it very easy to spot someone lying when questioning to go into the details of past experiences

ain't nobody gonna get past the interview sheriff

[jonkho]

Use hiring brokers. The good ones will vet the candidates and verify them.

Job seekers should also consider seeking representation from top tier brokers.

[harimau777]

Any suggestion on good brokers?

[Avicebron]

Iceberg Slim?

[rubidium]

It’s pretty much always who you know… at least to get a showing. It’s rare in history to find counter examples. And in a LLM fueled world it’s going to be more important.

Companies can improve by ensuring they don’t hire _because_ of whom someone knows. It should only ever let you get in the room to interview.

So practical advice of what to do: be human. Get to know people. Care. Your time to do this is not when you’re looking for a job, but when you’re in a job.

[ivape]

I've never gotten a job from someone I know. I've heard it my whole life but I've always went in solo to a number of jobs big and small. In fact, I personally find it kind of not respectable in some weird way (leaning on others for something I naively still hold onto as a merit-based system. People that break this value break what makes the system good), but I'm obviously biased from having always gone into an interview knowing only myself and what I know.

[endemic]

This is my anecdotal experience too. There's a (non-sequential) human thread that connects all my work experience. Ironically the exception was my very first development job, which was a blind application.

[Retric]

Vetted resumes seem like a real solution here, the issue is incentives.

One possibility for a free and impartial services would be via government funding. Unemployment insurance is paying out a few hundred per week per person, cutting that time down even a little could pay for a decent background check. That doesn’t get you a job specific resume but it should be good enough for an initial screening for most jobs.

[ludicrousdispla]

>> clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic

Can you elaborate on why you consider a close match to the job description to be unrealistic?

[eleveriven]

The fact that even well-meaning hiring managers can't see great candidates because of filtering overload says a lot about how dysfunctional the current system is

[apwell23]

My previous job ( somewhat well known brand) got > 500 resumes within hours for a mid level position. My manager decided to close that job posting and found someone internally

[BobbyTables2]

Been a couple of years since I last was an interviewer, but I’m always amazed at people who blatantly exaggerate in-depth experience while seeking a highly technical position.

Job Requirements: Senior Staff, Deep technical work in X, Y, Z

Resume: 10 years as tech lead in X, Y, Z

Reality: Once walked near someone with experience in X, Y, Z and heard them sneeze loudly. Can spell X correctly.

Why do they even bother?

[ok_dad]

Usually you really don’t need that much experience. There are only a few percent of jobs will need very specialized folks, regardless of that description.

[lovich]

> Why do they even bother?

Because the job requirements on the position are likely to be real as the applicants accomplishments on their resume.

At every company I’ve done hiring at my job descriptions for positions on my team were edited by my boss or hr and read like what was 1-2 levels above the nominal title of the position or had shit like the well worn joke of asking for X years of experience in technology that hadn’t existed for that long.

The entire hiring market for tech at least has devolved into almost 100% noise over the last few years