If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to land a single interview, then can you blame someone for automating it? I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already found a job!
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.
I don't fill my my resume with a bunch of spam buzzwords for every adjacent technology I've ever used, because certain things are kind of implied by other things. If I put "set up multiple clusters across different Linux systems", I don't also cram in "systemd, bash, upstart, scripting, ls, cp, du, nohup", despite the fact that I know how to use all of those things, because I think they're implied by "me setting up Linux clusters".
A software engineer reading my resume would come away with a decent understanding of what skills I have, but a recruiter who doesn't know anything outside of keyword-matching and hitting the `fwd` button in Outlook (which appears to be most recruiters) will see "HE DOESN'T KNOW BASH, SEE HE DIDN'T PUT IT ON HIS RESUME."
Now, of course, most of this is on me, it's up to me to learn how to play the game, whether or not I like the system doesn't really change anything, but as far as I can tell, the "solution" to this is to turn my resume into a low-quality SEO-spam piece of shit so as to try and satisfy the most incompetent person who might read it.
Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...
A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me. I had people trying to argue that my feedback was wrong, someone stalking me across social media and trying to argue everything there, and eventually someone who threatened to use my feedback as the basis for a discrimination lawsuit.
So now we’re back to simple “we’re proceeding with other candidates” feedback.
If we’re going to play the blame-game, then you have to see the full picture. Many candidates can be awful and even vengeful. Many people do not handle rejection well.
... Legal action on what basis, exactly?
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.
>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.
Awhile ago I applied to an internship at one of the larger, successful startups that most tech workers have heard of (several thousand employees). I got a response from a real person in a day. There's really no excuse for not being decent.
This is one of the few aspects of hiring I feel government employers handle better than private. My state hold monthly events where you can just show up and talk to a representatives and if you pass the vibes check you are virtually guaranteed a proper interview.
We did some spot checks on resumes that were passed on to make sure we were filtering ok and the quality was awful - a significant amount of people were applying for jobs asking for 5 years experience in a Java-like language with no experience, no degree and a half assed cover letter about being a good learner. A decent number were data scientists who had 2 years of python experience, and a surprising number were wildly over-qualified people who I realised after speaking to one or two they were actually trying to sell us their consulting services. That’s before you even get to “are they lying?”
Yes, a candidate is responsible for their own actions. This logic only sounds good until you’re on the hiring side and you see the stark difference between the LLM abuser applications and the people who are genuinely applying.
Those people who have to apply to 100s of jobs are probably in that situation because they’re spraying low-effort LLM resumes around and most hiring managers can see right through this game by now.
> I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already found a job!
Doesn’t work that way, in my experience. The people who game their way through the application process don’t suddenly switch to honest and high performing employees after they start. They continue the process of trying to min-max their effort given to the company, riding the line of finding how little or how low quality work they can get away with.
The mythical lazy applicant who suddenly becomes a brilliant and loyal employee isn’t realistic.
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.
?? 1 in 1500 is 1/15th of 1%, which is more than 1/100th of 1%...
We know from the irrelevant offers that many professionals have automated the processes for casting a net. How it is a problem if individuals do that in reverse?
You're missing the point. The primary people who suffer for this environment isn't hiring companies—they'll eventually work through all the resumes and find someone who will be qualified to fill their open roles, it's just much more expensive—the primary people who suffer for this is qualified employees who now have to work that much harder to stand out from a sea of garbage.
Your odds and my odds of having our resumes thrown out summarily are 100x what they were a few years ago, because time-per-resume has dropped dramatically. That's the fallout from this trend to be concerned about, and we're the real victims of it, not the hiring companies.
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.
Now it’s ATS’s turn to fix its own mess or someone else will. Start creating private benchmarks. Select from problems that LLMs can’t easily answer and use those for screening. Complaining that the genie won’t go back into the bottle isn’t a productive use of time.
If they can bullshit job description to reach more applications why candidates cannot do the same with CV?
The result we are going to is almost every CV now will be a 99% matching to the job description thanks to LLM tools.
And cover letter is even more useless now.