maybe I'm wrong but turning HTML into structured data example by using an LLM is bug prone and lazy.

the real challenge parts are pretty basic as well..

don't get me wrong I am not judging automation, but using LLMs for these trivial tasks is IMO a waste of time as a software engineer.

We use Recruitee, and ironically it doesn't have good automatic ways of filtering out the kind of spam generated by the author. On busy weeks, I spend about an hour per day screening and responding to applications. About half that is wasted on low-effort applications and automated spam generated by people like the author, and a significant part of that are repeat offenders. Nowadays I send one warning, and then I ask Recruitee support to ban the person, which due to implementation reasons on Recruitee's end prevents the person from applying at any company using Recruitee. It's harsh and I often feel bad about it, but after having to deal with this nonsense for multiple years now, I'm so sick of it, and I just ran out of patience.

and runs this script for ten years, even while employed.

- CLI run for every job you want to apply for (this is important)

- JavaScript (Deno) with Puppeteer to run the JS for the page

- Create a directory for all the artefacts <yyyy-mm-dd-ms-pagetitle>

- Save the webpage link (artefact)

- Take a screenshot of the page (artefact)

- Extract the HTML (artefact)

- Convert HTML to Markdown with a CLI (artefact)

- Send Markdown to the Grok API to extract just the Job Description as Markdown (artefact)

- Send Job Description and Autobiography to Grok API to generate a Resume (artefact)

- Send Job Description and Autobiography to Grok API to generate a Cover Letter (artefact)

- Use pandoc to convert the Markdown Resume and Cover Letter into Open Document Format (LibreOffice) (artefacts)

The important differences here are:

- You need to find the job you are interested in. Why automate this?

- Run the CLI `job-hunter https://job.site/jobid` (50sec runtime)

- Open the ODF documents, review, edit, save (human involved is important)

- Use a bash script running LibreOffice CLI to convert ODF documents to PDF

- Review the PDFs

- Manually click the apply button on the site and upload the documents

I also keep a spreadsheet with the details for each job I apply for so I can track interactions, think CRM for job applications and recruiters. This could be automated, however, I got a job so have lost interest.

Points of interest:

- Markdown is a fantastic format in general, but for LLMs as prompts and documents, it's awesome.

- If you just curl the page html, you don't get the recruiters email addresses in most cases, hence the use of Puppeteer.

- Having all the artefacts saved on disk is important for review before and after the application, including adding notes.

- By using an Autobiography that is extreme in detail, the LLM can add anything and everything about you to the documents.

- Use Grok and support Elon. OpenAI can stick their "Open" where it fits.

- I don't end up having to format the documents that are generated as ODF files, they look great.

I can apply for around 10 to 20 jobs in a day if I try hard. Most of the time it is around 5 because I am doing other things. They are only jobs I'm interested in though, and I can customise the documents. Also, If I am applying for a job that includes AI, I add a note at the bottom stating it has been generated by an LLM and customised.

There's probably more interesting points, but you get the idea.

My TODO list includes a CLI switch to only open the page in a Firefox profile so I can authenticate to the page. This removes the stupid "automate auth on ever job site" issue. Simply authenticate and keep the cookie in the hunter profile.

The repo is private for the time being, but I could make it public.

Edit: formatting.

This timeline fucking blows.

The most recent place where I applied and my earlier workplace both asked for a video recording early during the recruitment process. I guess employers will ask for in person interviews next.

Also, one can get falsely accused of using ChatGPT in online interviews, so just don't start if the role doesn't have at least one on-site round. If you get ghosted or falsely accused anyway, report it on Glassdoor at once. Always also report the questions you were asked.

1. Why are there so many fake resumes/applications? Who's "applying"? Is it a foreign actor trying to gum up the works?

2. What are people's salary expecations? Are people still asking for salaries of $250k+?

I couldn't imagine being a manager having to sift through so much garbage just to find a candidate that's worth their salt.

First point: you won't like what they say. You won't like it at all. You'll probably absolutely hate it, and even start to hate him a little in the process.

Second point: you'll have a job in under 6 months.

That is changing every day, and if you are a life long learner, you will master it. I get that domain specific experience matters.

For example I passed the CCIE 10 years ago but today using Aider and LLMs to boost up Network DevOps related developments. I think using LLMs for code generation is a powerfull use case , is not really cheating, but a new way of working. Why would an employer not value this, and hiring managers, why are you not testing candidates in open book format on real world issues, giving candidates access to the latest State of the art LLMs, instead of using good old puzzles?

Today in development and Infra engineering space it might make more sense to ask candidates to build something real instead asking for a motivation letter and if they used Sonnet 3.5 v2 that is just a proof for trying to be effective.

Don't blame us for wanting to pay our bills.

As a recent graduate from a developing country, I am truly grateful for the valuable insights gained.

Talking to a company is mainly to determine if you want to work there so I really don't get why you would want to automate it

And, just to confirm, you got a job?

While I'm partially glad someone put this together and did this, having seen firsthand what an utter shit show that job hunting has been for the past two years with no offers, dismal conversion ratios (x100 -> x10000), and this with a decade of directly applied professional experience in highly regulated sectors, as well as having all my colleagues amazed at the competency of the work and solutions I put out (which has just been going to waste these past two years).

I'm still only partial on this; however, because I don't think this does anything but make the problem anything but much worse in the long run for everyone.

Individuals using this are simply just treading water with assistance while drowning others like them (without), and businesses will adapt to the flood of applications (by not even manually reviewing them) and bad actors will simply increase the noise.

The people left out (those not using AI), will not find any work. No work, no prospects, despite education, investment, and direct experience; this is unacceptable and leads to unrest, and eventually something akin to 1776. Similar jobless conditions were present leading up through the 1760s prior to the American Revolution.

I think it should come as no surprise that this is a hellscape when you depend on work to get food and other life necessities, and businesses that adapt sign themselves up for deflationary spirals of doom (not being able to find qualified applicants). People won't put up with it. You see people turning to crime in California over retail thefts, and then laws being passed making it more draconian, then violence becomes commonplace. Its a vicious cycle and its preventable if one is rational enough to see it.

The process people have been using is not good at qualifying people, and really most of what people are looking in specific jobs is magical thinking that doesn't correspond to their actual requirements. Time is limited; on both sides.

Now what is the underlying problem? It is that the same mechanism used by RNA interference in a cellular network, is being created by AI in a communications network from both sides of the participants creating interference so labor relations is sabotaged and fails from interference. I would not be surprised if many of those ghost jobs out there are actually digitally fabricated by China. They have the most to benefit from destroying the underpinnings of western society and driving people crazy in a pre-war footing setting.

If people are unable to regulate themselves, and this first goes to the producers in an economy, then laws need to be made so that those unintelligent people don't destroy society for everyone else.

Nothing succeeds like success. If you are on n attempt, and you are geared up for what you will do for n+2, usually the problem surrenders its self on n.

Using all the top sites as well that are supposed to make the hiring process easier.

Any slight hint of AI prose could mean a direct No from me, let me explain why.

Our process is fair IMO:

1. one CV (if you apply to jobs you should have that one already)

2. a cover letter that shows that you know how to map your CV to our org and the free position. That cover letter could be text in the email you sent the CV in

3. (if invited) an 30 to 45 minute interview with a roughly 1:10 chance of getting in.

If you think you need to game that fair of a process you are the wrong hire anyways. That means the approx ten people who get invited are invited based on their (vetted!) CV and on their cover letter. That means your cover letter is read by a human who will judge your text.

I am not a fan of artificially driving up the effort canidates need to make when applying. I just want to know they informed themselves about my org and gave a few thoughts about the position they applied for (what job it is, why they like it, why they would do a good job etc.) - thst should not be a high bar to clear, but over 80% of candidates struggle even with answering that.

I always assumed it's because that's where most job seekers would drop off.

It's how I got a job as an HVAC tech without any trade school exp and how I got a software dev job without any college, bootcamp, or professional exp.

Just some advice for any job seekers out there. The more annoying the job application process, the more likely you are to get hired.

That is such a obvious imminent plague upon society, in so many ways, and the only thing I can do is nip the few buds that are within my reach.

Am I too cynical? Yes, because I do not like people who play games with desperate people.

(Now please all HR/HM downvote me because I told your truth).

My advice is to invest heavily in your professional network and when you have one, treat it like the special garden that it is. This takes years to cultivate. I also see people try to come at it from a very transactional unauthentic angle which will always fail. The right way to approach it is honestly quite simple: make friends. Be nice. Help people. Mentor. Etc. Don’t expect anything from it. People remember that stuff. Opportunities find you.

Will be curious to see how many people succeed with this approach. Maybe if everyone does this the sheer volume of shit will at least help realise how broken the current process is on both sides.

I would say the signal-to-noise ratio is so low now, that entry level positions at any firm are impossible for domestic applicants.

* Contract rules in institutions that show your faculty interviewed at minimum 3 external applicants before tabling your preferences

* Corporate youth-employment tax credits that incentivize purging anyone over 32 to save money

* Immigration scams that need to show at least 5 domestic workers don't qualify for the company needs (usually list proprietary internal software and languages the public never hears about...)

* Staffing agencies posting nonexistent positions to run a lead-generation scheme, and legally exclude applicants from their product pool via a contract catch-22

* 10% of your towns population arrived in the past 3 years, and understandably will say/do anything to get their Visa secured

* Cons illegally farming data for their AI/LLM project, and various other scams

We need more investment bankers and CEOs that work for regular wages.

Fun Times =3

If you must nag for subscriptions, you might want to try and find a way that does it without interfering with page interactivity.

And yes, I understand that this automation is but a reaction to the way companies handle applications

Using LLMs to write your applications is a sound idea. But why not have a platform do this for everyone in the equation? I would much rather - as a hiring manager - put my qualifications into a service and have it automatically and intelligently find great candidates, than dig through 1,000 ChatGPT-customized cover letters with yet another LLM cover letter bot…

Seems stupid to not put something in the middle that the employers pay for that automates both sides of the market to everyone’s benefit.

My other consideration is that I'm running on CPU and don't love depending on cloud services, so I've also been mostly getting stuff out of a DOM where I can... but it's occurred to me that there are scoped reasons to consider this, like deeper parsing from job descriptions, and I occasionally toy with it on stuff like HN posts. The prompt format here is a lot more thorough than what I've tried, and I might have to go back and experiment with this some more. I haven't gotten great consistency with this yet myself, and I'm not sure how much that's my prompting and how much it's that I'm using smaller (mostly ~7B) models. Which LLMs are you using for this -- ChatGPT throughout, or are there others?

I've been trying to avoid too much prior art while working on mine, but I'm definitely interested in hearing more about what you've been building around this.

[0] bhmt.dev/blog/scraping (warning: this is 10000 words + code samples, as it goes from browser console to browser automation and covers a few different side projects)

[1] github.com/chaosharmonic/escape-rope

[2] github.com/chaosharmonic/escape-rope-ui

I made a Chrome extension for LinkedIn that would filter out listings to exclude certain keywords, e.g. "Rust" or "Java" and find only listings that applied to me. From there I could manually apply and track my job application status. This saved much more time. I had a few macros to paste information which sped up the process.

There's a big reason why OP was fighting with providers to set up something to what amounts to marketing email without an unsubscribe link...because it's not something you're supposed to do.

I don't think you should automate talking to a recruiter, anyway. At most this system should just generate email body and allow OP to review and send it out manually.

So it isn't automated at all

---

Just wanted to share that I've been working on a schema for job descriptions.

https://jsonresume.org/job-description-schema

I released about 6 months ago, hopefully some of the models use it in their training data. So you can just say "make an example JD, return it in the jsonresume job schema"

---

Just realized I should call it jsonjob or something

It just has zero value. A well written cover letter on the other hand would net you a big plus

Also, a bit too long. Make it shorter.

That's a pessimistic way of looking at it, but I'm not going to claim it's wrong. I think my phrasing made it very clear that in most cases I expect if someone includes something about this their interest is going to be ahem embellished.

All the same look at it from the hiring managers side. Say you have two candidates, who appear to otherwise be equal. One seems to think the job is just like any other. The other actually seems genuinely interested in the details of food brokering, knows of your companies involvement in <big name>'s success and has thoughts on how they can apply their background in data analytics to the challenges you face.

Which candidate do you hire? Or do you really just toss a coin?

Come to think of it, this might be a good way for software unions to get a hold in the US. The Union will have a process to validate the competency if its members, and validate their careers, meanwhile hiring managers who are looking for guaranteed engineering quality will be able to find them, and unemployed engineers will be able to find work quickly, only bye the may benefit from the power of collective bargaining.

Kinda like a recruiting agency, but without for-profit motives and the shareholders will be the union members.

I don't see any downsides, except dkr the usual "corrupt men on top" problem which plagues any hunan organization, though mandating that leaders have extencive industry experience could slightly mitigate that.

But it comes with requirements like 4-year degrees, having worked under a PE, etc.

1) They didn't waste my or their time. Interviews rounds clearly progressed towards a hiring decision.

2) Their version of an AWS-style "loop" was a half day with people I'd be working with directly in various capacities. Questions were directly relevant to work culture and function.

3) After the first couple of rounds (recruiter screen, then first tier) all interviews were in person at their office. Interviews were conversational, open, and honest on both sides.

4) The final interview round with the hiring manager was structured as a round of questions to find possible match among the choices of equivalent openings I was likely qualified for.

5) At offer time, I told them what I'd work for and they told me what they couldn't exceed. We discussed total package and wiggle-room. The final offer they made had both no surprises and was also better than other incoming offers.

The position is not specifically rare in my industry, but I am specifically well qualified for it. None of us had worked together before, but we did have some shared clients so they were able to check my bona fides.

In comparison:

- AWS's process, while highly structured and tries for impartiality, is a massive time suck for all involved and as a result is kind of a mindless assembly line. However, it's kind of a good first interview among many companies since it preps you well for everybody else.

- There's more to this story, but briefly, I had two prior near interviews through a strong internal referral and another recruiter who put me into the wrong funnel then disappeared along with the position.

- There's also more here involving friends and former colleagues but to put it short, Google's process is stupid, disconnected, and broken while being far too self-congratulatory. It's a surprisingly good match for what they appear to be as a company externally, and from what I hear, how they are these days internally.

Then you should also apply some mirroring. I wouldnt overdo it with body language, but mirroring with spoken language can be quite powerful (and is more stealthy). Normally there are many different ways in our language to express an idea. Try to do it in a way that is natural to your counterpart.

Look at what you can infer from the appearance of the interviewer. Maybe you can also find out more about him before the interview. What generation does he belong to? Is he conservative/progressive/whatever? What programming languages is he familiar with? ...

Does he look rather old and conservative? - Maybe dont talk about your love for the newest tech hype. Put an emphasis on your good cs fundamentals.

Is he a Java programmer? - use the word interface

Is he a Haskell programmer? - use the word typeclass

Is he a nice guy? - try to be nice

Is he not a nice guy? - dont be too nice

etc...

and to be honest, I was too nerves to think about if it was risky or taboo.

But I'd like to know, why did you send your application to our company and not one in another industry?

I work for a university data center. Many of my colleagues have a scientific background. If not in academia, they could do coding, R&D, devops, science communication, product management, finance or many other things. They are 'lateral entrants' in any profession.

If people can't answer "why did you apply here specifically", it means one of two things: They don't have a clue what their job would be, and they and we are likely to be dissappointed when they show up. Or: they sent their application to everybody indiscriminately. That signals that they likely aren't a good match for the skills needed, and also that they have a high rejection rate.

Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev that is not open to this technology...

Having an established LinkedIn profile with their simple identity verification tool is such a trivial amount of effort for de-risking your job search that it’s hard to justify boycotting LinkedIn at this point.

If an application looks suspicious for some reason, I’ll look for their LinkedIn profile as the second step. If I can’t find one or if the profile is also questionable, I move on. LinkedIn is far from perfect, but it’s at least some signal in a world where the noise level is rising fast.

Telling facts about yourself is done in the CV, not cover layer

I’m not gonna do that so I’ll just keep my job until layoff, and then panic, automate my applications and belatedly start connecting.

Lol I dipped out of further consideration once they sent me what the interview process was gonna be like. Like 6 rounds, whiteboard coding, leetcode crap, "behavioral" interviews, a talk with some pencil pushers and some extra stuff. I don't know how desperate you have to be to put up with that.

Honestly, I think people vastly overestimate how much hiring managers use AI for filtering. Blaming AI for rejections has become a common coping mechanism because it’s easier to think that a broken AI filter rejected you instead of the company making a valid decision to go with someone else.

> throw 100-200 CVs at a job and see what sticks

If your experience wasn’t good enough the first 10 times, doing another couple hundred rounds of LLM word manipulation isn’t going to make it better.

This is a great way to entrench the recruiter middleman further though, because paying them a 20% cut to bypass the bullshit is already what they sell (and sometimes deliver).

What I have seen on occasion, especially for more senior people, is a carefully constructed charade. We're not interviewing you, that would be so uncouth, we're just having a chat!

What about situations where you were laid off and can’t really wait months to get a new one?

The lesson people should take from this is you need to cultivate your network through your career. Sadly it seems most people would rather complain about how broken the system is.

Enjoy. It's Nobel prize material.

Courting someone, winning someone over. It's done in the offline world. I haven't thought about it much when it comes to online dating. I should've been a bit sharper on that.

When it comes to dating, I always went for the high volume approach. So I really shouldn't be speaking about a targeted approach. I guess I did because I was trying too hard to draw a parallel to applying to jobs.

So my mind just went:

              applying online    online dating
  volume           1                  2
  targeted         3                  4

You'd still need to interview people because there's no license that will tell you who the good/great candidates are

There’s also a rise of “overemployed” people who farm out second and third jobs. Again, they don’t care about anything other than collecting paychecks for a while until they go through the long onboarding, ramp-up, and PIP process, by which time they may have collected $100K for doing barely any work. They use fake backgrounds and resumes as a way to avoid their primary employer getting notified and as a sort of filter for companies who aren’t looking closely at the details. If you can trick them with a fake application, you’ll probably be able to trick them in the interview and then trick them into paying you for a long time too.

On top of that, you have a number of people who are just trying to get hired and perhaps are skilled, but the market is so shitty (in part because of the AI resume slop) that they're resorting to various services to lessen the workload of shotgun resume posting. If you pay a person to send out resumes, you get email notifications that the resumes were submitted, and that person was just asking an LLM to spit out a resume, you'll be hard-pressed to figure out that the resumes are fake (and so on for a variety of other similar reasons, where spray-and-pray resumes are sent out in moderate good-faith but the resumes are BS).

Besides the arms race with AI on both sides to filter/escape being filtered, the other problem is that it’s completely normal these days to use so called “hiring” more as cheap version of advertisement or a growth signal to investors rather than to indicate you are actually hiring.

I would hazard a guess that the average job-seeking application count for individuals has gone up not 2x, not 10x, but like 100x in many fields the last few years, and similarly for the time involved. And this happens without the economy as a whole even being in serious troubles. The only people that win here are the staffing platforms like indeed and linked-in, and the options in that space and in recruitment/staffing generally are decreasing as the industry consolidates with M&A. Brutal

And I know how adversarial the process has become. I have friends looking for jobs plus I try to get to know my candidates. And I have my recent hires and their stories.

I want to make it a better process but I'm so burnt out figuring out how to make it better. Some people talk about professional 3rd party recruiters but I've been burned by those as well. When it comes to dating and hiring, both can be pretty brutal.

Also, it tends to be concentrated in the USA.

However, I see one absolutely perfect contract about every month or two.

Marketing is a skill all in itself.

I know this because it is one which I lack, which in turn is one of two reasons I didn't go down the contracting path.

AI is better at selling itself than at doing the thing.

Who will champion the necessary regulations? In terms of financial incentives, employers can pay lower wages when candidates have a tougher time getting interviews, and individual candidates usually can’t afford lobbyists.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/capn-crunch-whistle

Your comment is like "why use AES256? People can still brute force it." Sure... good luck

On the company side, only some people in the organization are strongly aligned with hiring. The vast majority are indifferent or even somewhat negative as new hires mean more work.

Reminds me of a guy I used to work with. He just made stuff up all the time. Turns out, the answers never actually mattered, people were just bored at their desk and wanted to give the appearance of doing work. I think he's in management at Apple now.

I've been working for nearly 30 years now. This is pretty standard. Talk to your friends who dont work in tech a 3% raise is pretty good.

Just came off a brutal 7 month job search. And that's with a resume good enough, and care enough in jobs I applied to, that I got to the hiring manager with 1 of 10 applications (vs 1:100 or worse which is what I've heard is normal).

I think I interviewed at 50+ companies, which makes 500 or more applications.

Yes, this clearly says something about my interview skills, but there is a difference between interview skills and engineering/software skills-- I've done well in my career without having to heavily interview before (senior IC level) and I came by that strong resume honestly.

So please be careful about generalizing. I'm an example of someone who had to apply to 5x as many jobs as you say would be needed, and it would have been 50x if I didn't have a strong background and work ethic.

Yes, but I think it is overly reductive. As a candidate, you’ve to now apply for a magnitude more of jobs. Tailoring resumes per job takes time, and given how many more I’ve to send, this doesn’t scale.

Additionally, whatever ATS system is being used might auto-reject it because the algorithm decided it’s not a match. If tailored resumes increased hit rate, that would be a different story but that is not the case.

This increases the risk on applicants that their investment on a carefully crafted resume/cover letter is time wasted.

Fake job postings punish the behavior you desire from applicants and incentivize spraying low-effort LLM resumes.

If you do not post fake job postings, I applaud you. If you know a colleague who does this, I ask that you have a conversation with them about the damage they are doing to your industry.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fake-job-listing-ghost-jobs-cbs...

Thanks to the automated systems put in place on the hiring side, you often never see the applications of many of the people genuinely applying because your stupid automated filters determined they weren't qualified.

Less than 1/100th of 1%.

You should also see what I had to say about the history of slavery, and wage slaves, and what anyone can expect from them. The TL;DR is that what you are looking for no longer exists if it ever did, because you have adopted a scorched; salt the earth strategy for finding labor.

What you call lazy, may actually be incredibly hard working (given the current environment) to even get to the point where you see them. Is it their fault you didn't recognize them for the value they could potentially provide? If you pay wages comparable to an office assistant for skilled labor, why do you expect to get anything more than what that first role provides? The economics of things are important.

You need to re-calibrate unreasonable expectations (delusions) back to some more close to reality.

I could be wrong, but I think that might have been a lie.

I've heard it before, too, and I've come to doubt it; I think it too unlikely to be heard with such frequency as I do hear it.

I've also had on three occasions agents call up after a day or two and tell "something about the budget, so the rate is now less than expected".

In two cases I came to know the agency was simply lying, and was keeping the difference for itself, and I expect it to be true also in the third.

I already saw "work" offers where YOU have to pay them their salary. As in, to employer, for the "opportunity"

Who would want to work at such a place? Why would I trust the opinions of people who work at such a place?

ADDED: To be fair, it's probably the fact that, in tech, junior people coming in without any real credentials or otherwise out of the blue at this point probably face a lot of headwinds--especially relative to the last decade or so.

I also limit myself on how many applications I see in a day (no more than 20 on a busy day, 50 on a not so busy day) so that I give every resume a fair read. A team can only do so much in a day. It's disheartening when you see a blatant AI use (and it goes into the trash bin right away).

I feel there is often a bimodal distribution of applicants. Those who can do the job and those who are completely not suited. There is a shortage of workers, so you try to get as many as you can from the first bin. It doesn't matter if they are 10x rockstars or Joe Blub.

You just try to sieve out the ones who apply for a DevOps position and then it turns out they are "good with MS office". Or those who neither speak the local language nor English good enough to communicate with anybody. Or those who show up on day 1 and are clearly not the person who interviewed.

I's a luxury to have more than 4-5 good candidates who you'd have to rank. (But to be honest, I'm in education / public sector and the pay here is not competitive with big tech...)

Not yet!

> but what you are saying is definitely the exception to the common narrative nor does it match what I've seen.

As an anecdote, I posted on who’s hiring here, and we used a separate job requisition for HN, (this was my last job where we went from 2 -> 15 people). We got about 30 applications in the 7 days following that on that req, and of those 30, only one came even remotely close to meeting the requirements on the JD - we were looking for someone with a few years experience in a Java like language, in a Europe/US time zone. Most of the candidates failed both of those criteria, hard. My point being that people who are frustrated with their situation are likely to be more vocal than someone who isn’t.

I’ve spent enough time on HN reading about topics I know a lot about, and seeing people confidently claim how X is easy or if they just Y, and they’re totally wrong. I know a decent amount about working on the hiring side - it’s been a core component of my job for the last 6 years. I’ve worked with recruiters both internal and external, spent far more time with greenhouse than any engineer should ever have to do.

My feeling is that there’s far less sophistication going on, and the dearth of human responses (which is problematic) lets people make up their own reasons as to why it’s not working when the reality is that there’s just a hell of a lot of applicants for every single job.

It's not perfect, but it's far from zero in my experience.

Possibly the single most distracting alert on my phone and pc is my work email. It’s probably prioritised wrong, but if I have 200 candidates for a position, and I get an application that doesn’t meet the tech stack or YOE requirements when I have 20 who do, I’m just going to reject them.

> or late at night ATS let you schedule emails. I used to send mine at 4am EST despite being in the UK

> definitely some companies are using software to filter resumes

I don’t doubt it, but I doubt that it’s rampant to the degree you’d believe on this site. I’d instead that it’s far more likely that the hiring manager, or a recruiter, is spending about 15 seconds looking at “does the tech stack match, how much experience, and how many other candidates are there that I think have an edge”. The people on this site are a small minority of very smart folk, but if you spend any time in a comment section of a topic you are an expert in, you’ll quickly realise that you shouldn’t take everything you read on here as absolute.

Another suggestion - Reach out to two different recruiters and get them to review your resume. (You might need to pay them to do it). You’ll get two totally different responses. Both might work, and neither might work. At the end of the day, a human makes the call, and even if the ATS is automated, a human set those criteria. Honestly, having spent so much of my time hiring over the past 5 years, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was literally no ATS scanning, and everything that was sold to fix that problem was snake oil.

Is it that they are applying to places where you don’t pair program?

Based on what you're saying, the only way to actually fix this is to fix the underlying systematic problem. No idea how you do that, but seems like the only logical way I can think of

Wikipedia isn't a valid historic source, this is consistently repeated in introductory college courses and throughout academia. Any derivations you make on unsound data remains unsound data and nothing more than your own personal opinion, you shouldn't make it out to be less or more than it is.

You neglects quite a lot in an attempt to nullify, discount, and minimize to suit your biased narrative, like the fact that established estimates show roughly 150,000 people were prosecuted, and the fact that confessions of the time were extracted using torture. Many died without ever being formally executed.

Yes there are legal proceedings that did leave paper trails which I have studied, as well as where those paper trails stop being accurate.

The claims were "collapse as a superpower", not what you improperly referenced as a quote.

When you omit important context intentionally to try and put words not said in other people's mouth (as you did here to strawman), its fairly blatant that you are operating from a place of delusion or severe bias, or potentially malign personal hidden agenda.

Portugal/Spain was known for their technology, seafaring, and maps right up until the inquisition.

This is not wild at all, when you have mass migrations of intelligent and educated people wherever they migrate to benefit from their intellect whereas the places they travel from stagnate.

In any case, the fact that you tried to change what was said kills any possible credibility you might have, and there is no impetus or need for me to respond to you any further.

There is no value in unnecessarily giving a platform in the guise of discussion to the delusional or the malevolent. Best of luck to you in correcting that vile behavior, deceitful behavior is not tolerated by rational or intelligent people.

Population levels are not the same, this comparison is without basis.

You also assume the formal documented executions are the only deaths where people were killed and died, they are not.

About 5 minutes of 'proper' research based in method, will establish that you are mistaken and don't know what you are talking about. This is the problem when you try to have an AI think for you, you get it wrong, and potentially become delusional.

The inquisition lasted almost three centuries. At its height, Spain had a population of about 7.5 million people. Many prosecutions occurred, but few executions as part of trials. The majority of people died from maltreatment, torture, and executions (absent trials) and these records are sparse in the historical record, but there are credible records to support more died than were executed.

The mortality rate was also significantly higher than it is today, and the families of the accused individuals often died from poverty as a result of fear from guilt-by-association (if you were to include that, most don't). Additionally, the Spanish inquisition inspired surrounding countries to similar acts of terror, and in the Latin America's as well. We are only talking about Spain here. The full global death count as a result of the inquisition is much much higher.

You can find established historical material linked at: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/39443/what-was-t....

This is the sixth result down on google.

Well, I certainly hope your revival rate is better than your hiring success rate.

Frankly, seriously consider a career change. The ladder has been pulled up for entry-level positions due to AI, interest-rates, etc. This will come back and bite us as an industry, but it’ll be 10 years from now and most people can’t wait that long.

I can’t speak for everyone, but 3000+ applicants for a single opening is typical at my org. The odds of any given individual getting in are essentially zero. Referrals get priority over everyone else, even candidates that are on-paper better qualified.

It sucks for everyone involved, especially for job hunters. But from the hiring side, truthfully, there’s no end in sight.

Written on a piece of paper, yes, but no company is actually going to sue you in court to recover it. It will cost them more than the value of the bonus to do so. And they know you have already spent the money.

> I've never heard of someone getting severance from being fired for cause (performance)

At large tech companies it is standard for people going through the PIP process to get the option of taking a severance and walking away (and waiving their right to sue the company) instead of waiting for their manager and HR to draw up the paperwork to fire them.

You must work in a super specialized industry, then

Hiring fast and firing fast (for lying or misrepresentation) is almost always a better business decision than being ultra defensive in the hiring process.

There's probably some country somewhere where it is easier to fire people than the US, but not sure where would that be.

There are zero requirements to fire people in the US. No reason needed, no notice, no compensation, nothing.

Most (if not all) other countries have varying levels of requirements, notice and compensation required to fire someone. In the US, nothing.

- install this thing that takes over my machine

- 360 camera around to show my surroundings

- no phone/watch/…

One would think by now there’d be two Stanford grads with a SaaS shit taking care of this for $899/hr

Last interview I did it was obvious candidate was cheating. Gave him my cell and told him to call me, no speakerphone or bluetooth and hung up Teams meeting - never got a call :)

They are not a new idea, in fact they are well known, but also prohibited by law in many places because of their widespread abuse.

There’s also a more general idea in competition law that companies shoul, well, compete their fields, and allowing cartel-like behaviour on the labour market is contradictory to this.

I guess that would work in societies where this was legal - not sure if I know of any though.

And it instantly filters out all the spam applicants and chat GPT cheaters.

The fake job applicants are only siphoning resources from the economy at the high expense of all other parties involved. The ones who are getting screwed the most are the applicants, some of whom are concerned about making ends meet and getting auto-rejected constantly despite decades of experience. No one should stand for it.

I genuinely don't understand this requirement. Isn't an interview exactly that? It's a conversation pretending to be about a technical problem/question/challenge but in reality its purpose is to find out whether you click with the person and would want to work with them. If some ChatGPT text can trick you then your process is broken anyway and everybody joining your company can expect colleagues selected by this sub-par process.

Wouldn't you notice a lag between your question and the candidate's answer if the candidate had to type your question into chatGPT?Or does the candidate use some software/tool with transmits your question to chatGPT directly?

As an experienced engineer, I know how to describe what I want which is 90% of getting the right implementation.

Secondly, because I know what I want and how it should work, I tend to know it when I see it. Often it only takes a nudge to get to a solution similar to what I already would have done. Usually it is just a quick comment like: "Do it in a functional style." or "This needs to have double check locking around {something}."

When I am working in the edge of my knowledge I can also lean on the model, but I know when I need to validate approaches that I am not sure satisfy my constraints.

A junior engineer doesn't know what they need most of the time and they usually don't understand which are the important constraints to communicate to the model.

I use an LLM to generate probably 50-60% of my code? Certainly it isn't ALWAYS strictly faster, but sometimes it is way way faster. On of the other things that is an advantage is it requires less detailed thinking at the inception phase which allows my do fire off something to build a class, make a change when I am in a context where I can't devote 100% of my attention to it and then review all the code later, still saving a bunch of time.

For unit tests, it's a godsend. Particularly if you write one unit test, and then it can write another in the style you wrote.

Meanwhile, a sr with an LLM is a straight up superpower!

I'm an industrial engineer who writes software and admittedly not a "senior dev", I guess, but LLMs help me save much more than just a few hours of week when crapping out a bunch of Qt/Python code that would cause my eyes to glaze over if I had to plod through it.

Someone with experience can first think through the problem. Maybe use chatgpt for some resarch and fresh up your memory first.

Then you can break up the problem and let chatgpt implement the stuff instead typing everything. Since you are smart and experience you know what chunks of code it can write (basically nothing new. only stuff you could copy pasta before if you had somehow access to all code in the internet yourself).

TLDR: It is way faster to use it. Especially for experienced programmers. Everything else is just ignorant.

These guys already developed an invisible desktop app to help everyone cheat on remote interviews.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42348147

I’ve hired for 3 companies for engineers from entry level to staff level, and for non technical candidates for other departments. Applicant tracking systems like greenhouse send me an email for every application that comes through, you get the resume and cover letter attached. There’s a reject candidate button where you choose why, and it auto fills in the template for you with the reason you selected (and the email was pre written).

Don’t mistake an automated email for assuming your resume wasn’t looked at.

Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...

Hiring manager here. I don’t like the situation either, but to honest a lot of what you’re seeing is a natural reaction to the shenanigans that applicants are doing.

When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application.

But if that isn't the case, there's no reasonably good safety mechanism to mitigate the massive amount of harm that a determined bad faith actor could cause to the economy.

But making false claims about your work history (as could be the case with the one using ChatGPT to answer questions) is a problem, isn't it? And it's wonderful to see these rebuttals made against a hypothetical something that already happened. https://www.lawdepot.com/resources/business-articles/legal-c...

- I heard its a thing to get n jobs you're not qualified for to get at least the first few month salary "for free" (as an individual or as a pawn from a larger organized fraud). Not sure how common or how much truth there is to it though.

I just brought up certs because back in the day you could not take those test online due to cheating.

Now in the age of AI you can't do any type of testing remote, imo.

I don’t write it to be “read by software engineers” per se. I describe my skillset and things I have worked on. I don’t load it with a million buzzwords of every single noun that I am aware of.

I acknowledge that I probably play the game “wrong”, insofar that there’s any “right” way of doing it, but I don’t have to like the game, and I certainly am allowed to think that it’s very frustrating that I have to fill my resume with SEO spam of synonyms because most recruiters are unwilling to learn anything more than basic keyword matching.

It’s too elaborate of a Rube Goldberg strategy to take very seriously. Companies struggle to achieve simple, clear, short-term goals in tight-knit, well-aligned teams. Ain’t nobody got the skill to pull off that level of conspiracy.

And I say that even while writing this comment in Firefox

For the second use case, I can easily see how effectively prompting a model can boost productivity. A few months ago, I had to work on implementing a Docker registry client and I had no idea where to begin, but prompting a model and then reviewing its code, and asking for corrections (such as missing pagination or parameters) allowed me to get said task done in an hour.

I mean, being a manager is hard, but putting in the time and money to hire and then putting in the time to make sure your team doesn't have a morale drag, it's worth it.

The same is true of those other fields too really - I certainly wouldn't want a newly qualified doctor operating on me, or lawyer defending me, or civil engineer designing a bridge I'm driving over. It's nice to know that someone has been professionally educated and passed some entry level exam, but to be useful in a field it's experience that counts.

“You keep getting the stomach bug. Here take this, it’ll calm your stomach. No no, you can keep eating that expired cheese, it’s all good”

For example, in an interview once I got the typical "design Twitter" whiteboarding question, and it's going fine, until the topic of databases and storage comes up.

I ask "do we want consistency or availability here?"

The interviewer says that he wants both. To which I say "umm, ok, but I thought you said you wanted this to be distributed?", and he said yeah that's what he wants.

So I have to push back and say "well I mean, we all want that, but I'm pretty sure you can't have stuff be distributed or partitionable while also having availability and consistent."

We go back and forth for about another minute (or course eating away at my interview time), until I eventually pull out my phone and pull up the Wikipedia article for CAP theorem, to which the interviewer said that this is "different" somehow. I said "it's actually not different, but lets just use assume that there exists some kind of database X that gives us all these perks".

Now, in fairness to this particular company, they actually did move forward and gave me a (crappy) offer, so credit there, but I've had other interviews that went similarly and I'm declined. I've never done it, but I've sort of wanted to go onto LinkedIn and try and explain that their interview questions either need to change or they need to become better informed about the concepts that they're interviewing for. Not to change anything, not to convince anyone to suddenly give me an offer, but simply to prove my point.

E.g. suddenly some fresh out of college know-it-all sent crap into your function that you weren't expecting. Then he went to management to blame you for writing such shitty code.

Thing is you wrote unit tests around that code and the shitty know-it-all deleted them rather than changing them when he modified the code

This is why management needs to understand code.