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by celltalk 1 day ago
Two weeks ago, I got 100/100 of a test from a big company for a first screening without using AI. I was pretty confident that I would pass the first round, even hinted few of my friends, but ended up being rejected with an automated mail… The job market is insane at this point and I am not sure what the recruiters are actually looking for. If the candidate uses AI they’re eliminated, if not they’re eliminated. I guess this is one of these times we read on history books: great unemployement.
4 comments

Nowadays more than half of job postings are fake. It's either process to show activity or they already have one to hire but need to follow established process.
Getting through an interview process during a bull market has always had a small random component. I think we all have to understand and accept that in bear hiring markets, almost the entire component is random. Having a perfect skill quiz or hackerrank score and getting rejected should not cause you to try to figure out what you did wrong.
> The job market is insane at this point and I am not sure what the recruiters are actually looking for.

To justify their own jobs.

In theory there's never been a better time to hire on SWE talent. There are lots and lots of candidates who rode high during the COVID hiring wave, took on debt based on a high income, got fired, and now need money.

But hiring isn't picking up. You have a bunch of people in the HR industry who realize that for the most part, the combination of candidate filtering, ML, and a basic tech interview process could probably do their jobs. So they have to make the process as byzantine and difficult as possible to be able to go to the suits and say "look at all of these low-quality candidates we kept out!"

> I guess this is one of these times we read on history books: great unemployement.

The good/bad news is that if this continues, there will be either a regression to the mean or a massive de-stablization of most societies. You can't kick most of the working-age population out of their jobs.

I was just involved in the hiring process for a new rec on a team adjacent to mine, and the HR/screening process was a complete mystery as to candidate filtering for outside applicants. So many AI tools making arbitrary judgments from resume content to psychological profiles of candidates, led us to 0 organic people “qualified” enough to interview for an SRE/Devops role. All we hire now is referrals as they are the only ones to get pass automated screening
Do you have any ability to give feedback to HR on that?

They should be made to know that this is choking out the business' ability to be competitive.

You can do everything right in an interview and still get denied. It is truly a crapshoot in today's job market.