The ones I got through were extremely random. Some rejected me because of money, some just ghosted me after the code challenge. But they have one thing in common - the competition is insane. With the hungry crowd on the market, the companies can pick the best of the best. At one place I got rejected at the final round, they had two screening rounds: code assignments. They told me, that both of these challenges were cleared only by 15% of total applicants. So I imagine it's not easy to get through 15% -> 15%, and then you have a set of the top candidates and you can pick the toppest.
The current situation on the market is extremely demotivating.
That sums the process up pretty well. The advice for "surveying friends and former employers for leads" seems like the best bet (and referrals probably always have been), just a shame no one in my network works anywhere I'm interested in.
95%+ are unqualified and wading through the applications is a nightmare.
But the fact such a high percentage are unqualified leads me to believe a big part of all of this is people are reaching for jobs they cannot actually do creating unnecessary noise.
2. How willing are you to hire someone without the exact background or industry but can adapt and learn quickly due to transferable skills?
3. Do you recognize a bias for "people like you" (nepotism/cronysm, race, nationality, etc.) vs. the rest of the pool? Is this your "fit" criteria without admitting it due to legal reasons?
So 1: very willing 2: Very willing 3: I don't even look at stuff like that
I just hire people that are skilled and capable.
I'm not the person you were responding to, but in my experience most of the candidates aren't even close.
You post a staff position and get dozens of college graduates.
You post a job requiring some C++ or Rust and you'll get 50 people who haven't written anything other than Ruby on Rails or Python.
I'm always open to impressive candidates who don't have exactly the right skills yet, but the majority of the spam applications can't even show that they're impressive candidates. They're just spamming the same resume to every job they see.
AI systems used in employment, workers management and access to self-employment, in particular for the recruitment and selection of persons, for making decisions affecting terms of the work-related relationship, promotion and termination of work-related contractual relationships, for allocating tasks on the basis of individual behaviour, personal traits or characteristics and for monitoring or evaluation of persons in work-related contractual relationships, should also be classified as high-risk, since those systems may have an appreciable impact on future career prospects, livelihoods of those persons and workers’ rights.
“High-risk” in this sense requires:
1. Comprehensive logging (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...)
2. Transparency in how the systems work (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...)
3. Human oversight (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...)
4. A named individual in the EU with responsibility for the system (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...)
I got 2 interviews. One wanted me to be CTO to manage a 50 person team for $180k. I made $200k in 2014 managing a smaller team.
I gave up and do consulting now. It's actually easier to find clients and I can collect 3-5 paychecks. Works much better.
edit: I forgot a recruiter was working with me. I asked him what was going on. He said I was "too senior", "looked expensive", and "no one wants to hire white males right now."
Because of that my pay varies pretty dramatically. Something always seems to come in at the right time, but I still haven't figured out how to reliably find clients, despite how many companies are looking for people out there (I'm an AI expert and lots of companies are interested in my work but they are very hard to find).
Out of curiosity, what chronological age do you "present" as? Ageism I suspect is a factor on top of the overt racism that is seemingly OK as long as it's against a single group.
In recent decades, 100 % of my hire have been recommended by previous staff.
Whenever anyone leaves us ( generally after many years and almost invariably on friendly terms ) we ask them if they have someone they could recommend to take over their role.
We value cultural fit hugely. We have staff of multiple ethnicities ( Norwegian, Filipino, Sicilian etc ), body shapes, ages ( oldest is 70 ). We do value those who are friendly and will fit in with our team.
> He would do anything—filing paperwork, digging trenches—to build his dream career protecting California’s wildlife and public lands
> He applied to 200 jobs. He got rejected 200 times. Actually, he clarified, he “didn’t get rejected 200 times.” A lot of businesses never responded
I'm not sure this has anything to do with AI.
It's hard enough to land an environmental non-profit, state, or federal environmental job. It is doubly difficult to do so when both the Federal [0] and State [1] government are slashing hiring across the board.
This article is just "AI washing" austerity measures and offshoring that is occuring in the US.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_m...
[1] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/california-governor-ai...
At the least the anecdote is not that informative about the effects of AI, given the details.
The author is just conjecturing that AI has had an impact on their job markets, when both are primarily targeting government and government adjacent roles when state and federal governments are in the process of slashing funding.
How the turns have tabled.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jon-s-stevens_the-fact-that-1...
What gives? This is an important topic.
What is this? Dating?! Is this really a thing??
So, yeah, it could really work.
