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.
Won't that filter out actual sane people who would find Pascal knowledge requirements off-putting? It's like if you said, must have experience with OS/2 Warp to a DevOps guy. Or do you mention somehow that it's an AI canary signal?
Indeed! It's only to filter out people who don't put in details. If you put "I survived Embarcadaro's bullshit and used Kylix to make a Linux version of our app." then YourResume := YourResume + 1;
I've dabbled with Kylix when it was new but in spite of still keeping in touch with my old job they weren't interested in cross platform. Possibly because their customers had no idea what Linux was back then...
At some point they went Oracle backend so maybe they don't care about Embarcadero's bullshit because they have bigger licensing problems to worry about...
This is also why candidates have turned towards the pattern of just putting whatever is necessary on their resume.
There’s no difference between a bait question like that or an ignorant HR employee whose following company policy on minimum number of years on any technology when said technology hasn’t even existed this long.
You put inaccurate information on your job description you shouldn’t be surprised at inaccurate information on the application.
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.
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.