Ask HN: How do you handle application spam via Who's Hiring?

[lumens]

I'm asking specifically for people who post in the Hacker News "Who's Hiring" thread. But anyone who is a hiring manager dealing with this problem, I'm very curious about your answer as well.

I'm sure most of you have seen, as I have, spam applications skyrocket over the last few years with aid of LLMs.

High-intent people applying to your company should be a great pool and incredible signal. But the low signal-to-noise ratio, given the amount of spam, makes the juice almost not worth the squeeze.

Do you have any mechanisms in place to handle this? If so, what are they?

[nnurmanov]

Nowadays, when I post a job for our openings, I get thousands of applicants, which is much higher than 2–3 years ago. Over 90% are irrelevant. To limit the applicant count, I ask for references. For example, just the other day a candidate reached out directly, I asked if he could provide references, and then heard nothing back. It’s the quickest way to filter out irrelevant candidates. Now I am employing the same tactics and building an ATS where references make you stand out.

[gwbas1c]

Not sure if this will help, but you can try something like:

1: Make an email inbox just for the job opening.

2: Make a silly rule that the applicant must have a specific word in the title. It could even be random characters. For example, you could state "To apply, email applications to [e-mail] with 'ghubv' in the subject."

Then, make a rule that forwards emails with that specific word to your real email box and ignore the rest.

[heldrida]

Can you share some examples of spam you've been getting?