[oblio]

> This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”.

Yeah, but it's now 1000x worse. Before you needed actual skill (or luck) to create a good looking CV, especially for niche positions.

Now you take their job description, the company's "About us" webpage, your old CV and have LLMs generate a CV with pretty solid grammar and most of the verbiage they expect.

In the past the average unqualified person wouldn't even know the right words for a specific niche domain, let alone how to use them.

Oh, and single LLMs are kind of inherently multilingual, this makes it even worse, because you can have people that barely understand the target language generate a reasonable CV in that language.

The CV quality floor has been raised but the candidate floor has fallen through the pits of hell.

[toast0]

> Before you needed actual skill (or luck) to create a good looking CV, especially for niche positions.

Sure, resume writting is a skill, but it's probably not relevant for the position unless the position involves a lot of grant writing or enterprise sales.

[oblio]

Ummm.. my point was that before LLMs an utterly unqualified person would not even be able to write a decent CV.

They wouldn't be in the candidate pool because they would fail at step 0.

Now the village idiot can generate a reasonable CV for very complex jobs.

[watwut]

I have seen flawless CV from people who were bad in practice or in the interview. The interview completely changing which person looked the best was not unusual.

[chongli]

Yes, and those dud candidates waste the company precious time and money, as well as wasting the candidate’s time.

If you have to interview more than a handful of candidates to hire for a non-specialist role then something is seriously broken in either your hiring system or hiring for those positions in general.

[zulux]

We ask for something stupid like "3 years of Pascal experience." If the resume has it, it goes straight to the trash unless it has specific real-world Pascal experience.

[nottorp]

I have Pascal experience :) My first job was a Delphi application...

For that time and task (accounting app), Pascal was great.

[luke5441]

I hope you are clearly marking this as "nice to have".

[vkou]

You'll also filter out people smart enough to know that this is a bullshit keyword matching game and the only way to win it is to put the keywords on their resume.

Because they assume that the job posting was written by a non-technical idiot, and 95% of the time, they'd be correct, and they are just playing the game as the game expects to be played.

Look. If you're looking for 100% integrity and honesty from everyone in their communication, you shouldn't expect find it in a corporation's hiring and HR process. Everyone white-lies (or black-lies) all the time, both up and down the chain. The bones of this interaction do not value, reward, or even want honesty.

[watwut]

Everyone hates on HR here, but I did found them quite good in companies I worked for. They were not the ones who judged technical skills or even picked people. They scheduled interviews and such.

The worst hiring nonsense I have seen came from engineers. Stuff like giving people weird puzzles, rejecting or accepting people on random factoids, "beer test", demanding uber senior experience for an unglamorous boring take jira close jira position. And above all, believing that every good engineer is my copy. It takes an engineer to reject a guy because he reads different blog, has different opinion on programming languages company does not uses anyway.

I heard a hiring manager, an engineer, say that he knows whether he wants the guy or not in first 10 second. It is clear in that first sentence from vibes. I genuinely it is people like him who make hiring process into crap.

[NooneAtAll3]

> Before you needed actual skill (or luck) to create a good looking CV, especially for niche positions.

so useless skill that says nothing about your actual fit for the job was changed for automatic half-skill that still says nothing about your actual fit for the job

oh no, where are my tears?

[oblio]

It's astonishing how many people working in tech don't realize the impact of automation in this regard.

This basically kills any "cold job application". Now it's all back to references and nepotism. I've gotten almost all my past jobs by applying to a job I liked, someone figuring out my CV was decent and then passing interviews.

Now the same people filtering CVs have to wade through so much crap that it's almost impossible to even pass that stage.

> oh no, where are my tears?

Very likely, waiting for you in line in front of the unemployment office, 10 years from now.

[danaris]

Counterexample: I've never gotten a single job through nepotism and references, and I'm in my mid-40s. Indeed, I just got a new job—on a different continent!—this year by applying blind, interviewing well, and impressing them with my actual skills and knowledge. Didn't know a single person here, didn't get recommended or introduced by anyone.

Perhaps it makes difference that my jobs have not been in "the tech industry"—they've all been technical jobs within non-technical organizations (mostly in higher education).

[NooneAtAll3]

> Very likely, waiting for you in line in front of the unemployment office, 10 years from now.

so nothing's changed?

> This basically kills any "cold job application". Now it's all back to references and nepotism. I've gotten almost all my past jobs by applying to a job I liked, someone figuring out my CV was decent and then passing interviews.

and my argument is that THERE WERE NO COLD APPLICATIONS

even you yourself say - you had to pass interviews. Everything is decided by the direct contact with the candidate

now everything will simply skip directly to that stage of skill checks, instead of playing cat-and-mouse game of phrasing, misphrasing and outright lies