Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload

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My experience the last few months is that the saying &quot;It&#x27;s who you know, not what you know.&quot; is alive and well. For jobs where I met the hiring manager (referral, networking, etc.) I had 2 out of 3 applications lead to offers. For resumes submitted online I had 1 out of 50 even respond.<p>Obviously there&#x27;s some alignment - I know people working in the area I know best - but from what I&#x27;ve experienced the hiring teams at small companies are struggling almost as much as candidates to figure out this brave new world.

A new problem I&#x27;m facing on the hiring end is an influx of imposters from Asia. Everything they claim is a lie, from their name, citizenship, location, picture, to their job history. They even set up fake company sites. And of course they use LLMs to help them pass the interview. I assume it&#x27;s so they can bilk gullible companies and perhaps do some corporate espionage. I don&#x27;t know. I haven&#x27;t encountered anyone try to deepfake their voice and appearance but I assume it&#x27;s a question of time.<p>Telltale signs: stilted English, poor internet connection, lack of LinkedIn connections, and an inability to drill down on their fake histories. One claimed to have contributed to an open source BI project while working at Facebook, so I pulled up its GitHub repo and said &quot;Let&#x27;s see your code&quot;. &quot;It&#x27;s on Gitlab!&quot; he protested. No, it&#x27;s not; I&#x27;m staring at it on GitHub. Another claimed to have worked as a front-end engineer at Netflix. Great, I have friends there. Which team? &quot;The front-end team&quot;. I understood that you were a front-end engineer, but which team? Again: &quot;The front-end team!&quot;<p>In that instant I recalled the scene in <i>Coming to America</i> where Eddie Murphy&#x27;s character is asked about his education and he confidently replies that he&#x27;s attended &quot;The University of the United States&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getyarn.io&#x2F;yarn-clip&#x2F;4378beae-fdfb-4e6b-a7a9-667f365613bc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getyarn.io&#x2F;yarn-clip&#x2F;4378beae-fdfb-4e6b-a7a9-667f365...</a>

My partner has been searching for an SDE job for 8 months and recently received an email requesting her to do a recruiter screen. She responded and got a call instantly where the “recruiter was a text-to-speech AI.<p>Presumably the entire process was automated; I’m assuming if they’re using text-to-speech, the selection and initial email was all AI.<p>It’s an arms race on both sides.

The interesting thing to me reading this is that it&#x27;s basically saying how much <i>recruiters and hiring managers</i> dislike&#x2F;are wary of this AI-infused job application process. On the flip side, I&#x27;ve heard tons of complaints on the other side from job seekers: not just that job hunting is hard in a down market, but that the reign of modern ATSes means that it&#x27;s a constant &quot;battle against the algorithm&quot; to even get noticed, tons of fake or outdated job postings, and rarely even an acknowledgement about the state of the application.<p>I mention this because this seems like an area where lots of people wanted to throw AI at the problem, but I have a tough time finding anyone, on either side, that thinks that automation and AI improves the process in any way.

Serves them right. Employers have been using AI and algorithms to weed out resumes&#x2F;applications for years. To the point that the only way to get seen by an actual human is the game the system.

&gt; …in one case when the person moved on to the next interview, they couldn’t answer questions about the task. “Not only have they wasted their time, but they wasted my time,” says the recruiter. “It’s really frustrating.”<p>I’m on the prospective employee’s side here. If I had to do a complex task for every application I’d be driven mad. That’s a waste of the applicant’s time.<p>Plus, the employee you should want to hire is the employee that can do tasks in the most creative low effort way. Why should I hire the employee who takes 8 hours to grind through a task when the employee who uses ChatGPT to bust it out in 1 hour gets the same correct output?<p>Company recruiters have had the leg up on applicants for years with ATS systems. I’m glad the applicants have flipped the script and forced the recruiters to actually do work to find good candidates.

&gt; So far, over 3,000 people have applied to one open data science vacancy at a US health tech company this year. The top candidates are given a lengthy and difficult task assessment, which very few pass<p>Obviously the company should select one large project, break it down (with the help of AI) into 1500 steps, and farm it out to candidates as &quot;task assessments&quot; that can be cross-checked and then folded together into an app.

This problem is exasperated by the fact that recruiters are often the ones getting laid off first in a downturn or cost effiency initiative. So there’s even less humans filtering through applications.<p>Even though it’s an issue I really don’t see companies spending a ton of time and energy fixing it. As mentioned in the article, they could simply stop posting jobs on LinkedIn or rely only on inbound candidates. It’s not rocket science. Just like dating, if you get bombarded with peoole knocking on your door, simply stop putting yourself out there.

This has long seemed like the obvious solution, to me, for publications that saw an untenable spike in submissions for the same reason.<p>Just make ‘em print and send a it in the mail. Instant reduction by 95+%, most of the best stuff still comes in.

I think this is conflating some things,<p>I’ve had interviews where AI use was encouraged. I’ve used a coderpad screenshare that had an LLM tab you could write with.<p>so in this article, where they mention some of the respondents disclosed using AI, it doesnt say if that was a “good” or “bad” thing <i>for that company</i><p>its not accurate to assume, despite the article reinforcing a bias towards it being a problem

I&#x27;ve participated in a coaching and resume review program for many years. Most college students always struggled to write resumes, but at least they were aware of their shortcomings and reached out for help.<p>Something about ChatGPT has convinced a lot of them that they don&#x27;t need help or even to put much effort into the process. They hate writing resumes, so they just dump some words into a ChatGPT prompt and copy-paste into a resumse.<p>To the inexperienced, the ChatGPT structure feels like brilliant, polished content magically appearing on their screen. They aren&#x27;t looking at the content, but rather the structure, which ChatGPT can formulaically provide.<p>Then recruiters get their resumes and instantly recognize ChatGPT garbage, because it&#x27;s their job to read resumes and they&#x27;ve become good at recognizing low signal to noise ratio ChatGPT output.<p>One of our local college programs had a company reach out and ask to be removed from their referral pipeline because the majority of the resumes submitted by their students were clearly ChatGPT drivel. It was a real blow to the people who had been working hard to set up these relationships and give the students opportunities to apply for.

Attention is all you need. This is the success formula. You can get attention via referrals or some other hacks.

Please let this become a trend elsewhere as well.

&gt; <i>That came after LinkedIn began rolling out a new set of generative AI tools for recruiters to source candidates in October. With the sourcing tool, recruiters can search a phrase like “I want to hire engineers in Texas,” and profiles of people that may meet those criteria appear, as do other specific skills that may be related to the role. They can also send messages written with generative AI and set automatic follow-up messages.</i><p>What are better alternatives to LinkedIn, for people who want to get that rare serendipitous message from a recruiter?<p>(Not just another company that wants to behave like LinkedIn when they can get away with it, but that wants to be and is a lot better.)

still waiting for the LLM driven 3d avatar robot voice during my 10th hr zoom interview &quot;can you eve scale bro? Can you even AWS firehose kafka kubernetes bro? Good! now show me how the minimum subsequence of this array in Ologn&quot;

Dead Internet Theory in a nutshell

Recruiters are the problem =)

Is it possible to waste a recruiters time?

To summarize the article though: Online hiring continues to be overwhelmed by huge numbers of low quality applications, now with some extra AI tools that make it easier to lie about your experience.<p>Same issue as before, now wrapped up in OpenAI API calls.

To dang, is this a bug? This was posted 8 minutes ago with 8 points yet has 40+ comments

If they use recruiters, I&#x27;m out. They are part of the problem.

Fo any other professions have thse challenges?<p>Our lack of basic professional certifications has just led to nonsense in every corner of the hiring and job seeking process.