Posted by ChrisArchitect 2 hours ago
This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”.
I can remember a few interviews where I asked candidates about something I read on their resume (which I study before every call) and they corrected me to explain that they did something different. Then I held up their resume and pointed to their exact words and they turned bright red while they tried to come up with a new explanation.
That was rare, though. You could catch a lot of little cases of stretching the truth, but it wasn’t common to feel like you were reading a resume that didn’t match the candidate.
What has changed in the age of AI is that more people are feeling more brazen about letting the AI speak for them. These situations are happening more frequently. You get the feeling that people are less shy about trying to cheat and manipulate because it feels like the AI is doing the cheating and writing the words, so it’s done at arm’s length.
I spend some time helping with resume reviews occasionally. It’s getting sad to see in the general discussion of the group when people go from elated that they got an interview for their dream job to embarrassed when the interviewers saw right through their AI written resume and ended the hiring cycle. I wonder if we’re seeing a peak in AI resume junk while everyone tries it out, but before it becomes common knowledge that an AI junk resume is a way to shoot yourself in the foot when applying to companies you actually want to work for.
Which itself is a symptom of companies getting drowned in AI generated resumes. It's becoming more common for people to use AI tools that will operate browsers to mass-submit resumes for them. When you receive 1000 resumes you have to start filtering somewhere.
What I'm worried about now is that we're moving to a situation where some level of proof-of-work that an AI can't easily do is going to become necessary to have some filtering. I don't know what that looks like, but I don't like it.
> Quite odd this is all happening when ostensibly the unemployment rate is very low, which should make it an employee's market.
Unemployment rate is not evenly distributed. If you were a licensed electrician or qualified as a home healthcare aid then you could walk from one job to another in many cities.
If you're trying to get a $200K or more tech job, then you're competing with everyone else for a shrinking pool of openings.
Yeah, but it's now 1000x worse. Before you needed actual skill (or luck) to create a good looking CV, especially for niche positions.
Now you take their job description, the company's "About us" webpage, your old CV and have LLMs generate a CV with pretty solid grammar and most of the verbiage they expect.
In the past the average unqualified person wouldn't even know the right words for a specific niche domain, let alone how to use them.
Oh, and single LLMs are kind of inherently multilingual, this makes it even worse, because you can have people that barely understand the target language generate a reasonable CV in that language.
The CV quality floor has been raised but the candidate floor has fallen through the pits of hell.
Sure, resume writting is a skill, but it's probably not relevant for the position unless the position involves a lot of grant writing or enterprise sales.
Asking because my business is growing and we've gotten lucky with our hires so far, but I'd like to add my discipline to hiring well.
Bill Gurley has a great line about this:
"I use LinkedIn like this:
If Person A reaches out to me and there is a Person B that is a common connection between A and myself, I want to be able to call Person B and have 100% confidence in their evaluation. That's the bar I set to connect with someone on LinkedIn."
From:
Or is this something you came up with?
As requested by the original poster, it doesn’t scale.
It's both hard and doesn't scale.
Previously we’ve sourced candidates via a reputable recruiter from an in-town firm that our manager can routinely sit down with and build a relationship over the years. This had a good rate with only one bad placement. We ultimately traded time cost for money cost in that one, but I liked it.
The worst outcomes we’ve had were via LinkedIn jobs posts. By the time our in-house full-time recruiter would give us resumes half would be obvious frauds with most of the remainder being subtle frauds. I blame this in good part to having non-technical staff as the first filter in our pipeline.
Unfortunately the firm makes money hand over fist year on year so we are no longer a lean mean operation but a burgeoning beauracracy with room to hide, rest, and vest.
It makes me wonder why so many otherwise successful companies let HR bungle the hiring process.
I’ve interviewed hundreds of people over the last few years as a peer, hiring manager, and as a “bar raiser”, and it’s just a lot of work no matter who does it…
FOMO will keep them doing this in perpetuity until you find a way to make them feel the pain.
"What does bad recruiting cost us?" is very hard number to quantify because it's just sand that gets thrown into so many gears, but cost of that sand is across a ton of departments and so measuring for it is very difficult.
Biases are a strange thing. “High performers” aren’t one homogenous group; take a staff engineer at a FAANG and plop them in a role at a startup or vice versa and you’ll find very quickly that high performers are a product of environment (IME). The people you need to ship something at a big company will sink your startup, and the people who will lead a startup to unicorn levels of success will flounder in frustration in a big corp.
Finding high performers is really hard, as you said it’s a filtering problem, and it’s very much based on vibes and feelings. Leetcode, take home tests, on site tests, discussions about projects all filter for specific things - some or many of which aren’t related to the job at hand. If we removed the “risk of leaving current job element” the only way to do it would be to give someone a 3 month trial and see if they’re a fit. Honestly you probably know in your gut by week 2 if it’s going to work or not.
The problem with trials is that people often have a current job of some sort and having things not work out puts them in a difficult situation. May happen anyway but, generally, a new job is assumed to be at least a somewhat stable situation.
Totally, and I’d never say “hey I think you might be a fit, let’s try it out for 3 months”. But if we interview someone I’m just doing my best to try and figure out do they get on with the team, do they have the right skill set match for the gap we’re trying to fill and will their working style work in the org. Everything after that is (unfortunately) up to how it goes when we’re working together.
Hiring is exactly the same thing, even when trying to do it on merit, people are simply poor judges of character, ability and the rest.
Most of society is governed by people who simply kept getting lucky and kept doubling down because their ego demanded it and their last roll of the dice didn't drive them to poverty or happiness.
Isn't this already easily faked with an ordinary general-purpose consumer $20/month AI tool?
> Cultivate a culture of intellectual honesty over polished perfection.
This is one good idea I saw in the advertorial. Or, better yet, start with honesty at all.
But you have to understand and believe in it, or it will immediately be twisted into yet another gamed performative bit of interview theatre, like most other aspects that emerge from big-corporate mentality of herding worker drones.
(Perhaps the authors, coming from Meta and Microsoft, appreciate that reality.)
Hiring has always been broken. May be not completely at the FAANG level, but below that, and more importantly across the globe it's seriously broken, and there's a high variance when it comes to hiring consultants quality.
The widespread use of AI vy applicants is very likely surfacing how comfortable consultants were doing the bare minimum when hiring.
Source: I've been working for 10+ years for a company that has an ATS for mostly European clients.
I know for a fact how crappy work around hiring is.
P.S.: the article focuses mostly on one direction of hiring. The opposite direction is also suffering from this (briefly explained in the article about AI fueled hiring bias). In my opinion, that is an even greater problem.
Isn't "performing the hiring process" theatre what Big Tech hiring has been demanding for ~20 years?
And gifted to most smaller companies? (Because people already knew Google frat-hazing student style interviews, from their own interview prep, to try to get into a FAANG, so they mimicked that when they went elsewhere?)
I will say that I'm not surprised by this at all. I think a ton of people have been convinced that basically all languages are more or less the same, so they are confident putting languages they barely know on their resumes. "I know python and Java, how hard can C++ be?". This isn't a new problem, or even a "coding bootcamp problem"
I studied computer science at a small university in 2006, several of my friends went to a much larger university and studied Software Engineering
They didn't learn pointers back then either. They learned Uncle Bob Java and that was basically it.