Posted by speckx 1 day ago
Luckily in my niche the pressure to do this is not so high. Execs often have enough leverage to not have to put up with this kind of thing.
As others have commented, I am skeptical that this is any better than a form or similar. This could be a solution looking for a problem, or rather, relatedly, poorly allocated VC money looking to impress investors. Massive new entrants in the space like Jack and Jill are pushing this.
I guess there’s a vision where these interviewing agents truly become reactive and intelligent, so that they can both extract meaningful, deep insights about the candidate, while providing equally meaningful answers about the company and position. Color me skeptical, but not an outright denialist.
Regardless of the effectiveness for hiring companies, I think we will be seeing it for a long time. Even if it doesn’t produce meaningful improvements they will keep using it as long as it’s not too expensive, because the supplier and VC pipeline will press to keep using it.
I see some people are already doing OSS projects in this direction. I could be interested in exploring this and making a bot that really works on behalf of the interviewee. Agent-to-Agent communications may well be the future we are heading to regardless of our sensitivities to it, and I think the interviewee side of the market should and can get meaningful representation in this new world. Get in touch if you’d like to join forces.
So I started looking into models I could self-host for this stuff.
I can't remember which model it was, but one of them was kind of amusing because it would be two DJs signing off endlessly
DJ1: "Thanks for listening to WTOM, this has been Greg, signing off for tonight"
DJ2: "You said it Greg, it's been a great night, this is Bill, signing out"
DJ1: "Absolutely Bill, playing you out on a July evening this has been Greg from WTOM"
DJ2: "You better believe it, have a great night everyone! From WTOM this is Bill, wishing you a lovely Wednesday"
And it just kept going. Out of morbid curiosity I just let it keep going for an hour one day and they never stopped "signing out". I found it endlessly amusing.
Their customers were hiring something like 10k jobs worldwide annually, which means 500k+ applications to go through.
AI was used for the first filter to get a person through to later rounds.
It makes sense at that scale, and not for "hiring" but just to make decisions as to who gets to the next round.
The alternative is that you end up having to hire so many people to go through the applicants and then those people get bored of asking the same initial questions again and again.
I remember hearing an anecdote, back in the days of paper resumes, that hiring managers would take the huge stack of resumes they got, divide them in half and throw half in the bin. That half would be considered unlucky, and you don't want to hire unlucky people.
But seriously, with the number of job applicants, for certain positions, what are the alternatives to getting AI to help?
Do you need the global optimum candidate, or do you need a very good candidate? If you need the global best then you're probably better off headhunting than posting a job listing.
How about hiring enough managers to hire that many people. Not sure why you think hiring should be free.
I guess if your goal is just to hire desperate people who currently have no better choice (and who will leave as soon as they do), then you can flaunt how little you care about the candidates or the process. But if you're hoping for something better than that, I wouldn't run off as many candidates as possible.
I mean, this is probably a time-saving way to filter out a flood of poor candidates, but you're going to also be filtering out good candidates at a very high rate.