The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

https://hbr.org/2026/06/ai-has-broken-hiring-heres-how-to-fix-it

113 210 1 month ago

Hiring was broken long before ai

ghaff8• 1 month ago

Much of it has been based on networking for a good 20+ years. Yes, there was a certain if you have a pulse era in tech at at a lot of companies--leet code notwithstanding though that was an issue--that has largely passed and a lot of people are reacting to tech hiring becoming a more normal multi-month process.

buffer_overlord4• 1 month ago

I told the last recruiter who had a six week interview process “I’m not waiting that long when I can literally clone your product in a weekend for $50

metalspot• 1 month ago

AI and remote interviewing have definitely exacerbated the problems that existed before though.

Leetcode was always weak, but now that it is easy to cheat on it is a negative selector, because the cheaters do best. Leetcode was originally supposed to be done in-person on a whiteboard to assess a candidate's collaborative problem solving skills, but with remote interviewing it has evolved into writing passing code with minimal or no feedback.

The real problem is that engineering departments are now filled with leetcode grinders and cheaters, who all live in permanent fear of being replaced by AI, and so any candidate who doesn't fit that paradigm is a threat that must be eliminated at all costs.

nobodywillobsrv2• 1 month ago

Yes. People are gatekeeping. They are not interviewing with the aim of having an interesting conversation. They are trying to block hiring.

maximinus_thrax• 1 month ago

There's a spectrum of 'broken' and AI made it worse

cryo32• 1 month ago

Yes they just automated the broken now.

ungreased0675• 1 month ago

Good hiring almost certainly has to be a significant competitive advantage.

It makes me wonder why so many otherwise successful companies let HR bungle the hiring process.

stackskipton• 1 month ago

Because like a lot of things, metric of "What does recruiting cost us?" is very easy number to quantify so companies will attempt to reduce it.

"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.

dasil0032• 1 month ago

Huh? Hiring being broken has nothing to do with cost, it's a filtering problem. Even when there's no HR or bean counter in sight it's still hard. There's fundamentally limited signal you can extract from interviews, so there's very loose correlation to on-the-job performance. Saying it's a cost-cutting problem would just encourage more and longer interviews, which could actually work against you because high performers tend to have more options and will not jump through infinite hoops.

cyanydeez3• 1 month ago

Here's the secret: it's still just gambling. Elon musk isn't a trillionaire because he brought something special to the table; it's because he was able to perform the martigale enough times and he arbitrarily reached the top.

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.

cyanydeez3• 1 month ago

People really want _their_ position to be meritocracy because their ego can't handle alternatives of a chaotic world.

prepend4• 1 month ago

There’s certainly luck involved, but it’s not random.

Why aren’t there more Elon Musks? It’s not like the universe just picks a rando every 1000 years and it’s Elon Musk now and Mansa Musa last time.

I think similarly, there are random elements but hiring is not random. People aren’t randomly successful or not. There are many factors, most based on individual decisions and group alignments, I think.

maccard11• 1 month ago

I’ve worked with places that have had HR bungle the hiring and places that haven’t. The only difference is whether it’s HR or Engineering bungling the hiring. Writing a job description that actually matches what you want is hard work. Sifting through 300 applicants that don’t meet the requirements or lie on the application form is hard work. Doing 10 30 minute intro calls is hard work. Desigining “standard” questions for comparison is hard work. Wrangling 2 rounds of interviews per candidate, dealing with people who are too busy with work for hiring is hard work. Chasing people for interview feedback that isn’t just “yeah seems fine” is hard work. And then getting the group to stop saying “we want to speak to more people” is harder than any of the previous steps.

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…

gopher_space• 1 month ago

And then getting the group to stop saying “we want to speak to more people” is harder than any of the previous steps.

FOMO will keep them doing this in perpetuity until you find a way to make them feel the pain.

BuyMyBitcoins2• 1 month ago

”Writing a job description that actually matches what you want is hard work.”

My employer embarked on a yearlong effort to standardize job title, roles, and responsibilities.

The first problem was that every manager inserted responsibilities specific to their own teams into the expectations intended for the entire organization.

The result is that no one is realistically expected to fulfill this laundry list of duties, but, this extensive list can now be weaponized if they want to PIP or fire someone. We also suspect that this will be used against us when asking for raises or promotions. All bullet points are weighted equally. I may get called out for not mentoring junior developers, even though there are none on my team.

Second, the entire job description itself is far too flowery - even accounting for corporate puffery. It reads like a wishlist.

Corporate is thrilled, but I sense nothing valuable came from the effort.

SpicyLemonZest2• 1 month ago

The best hiring is generally expected to happen through referrals, so there's not a ton of pressure to improve the public application pipeline beyond the minimum required to keep it functional.

ghaff8• 1 month ago

One problem with referrals is that referral bonuses tend to encourage referring people they barely know and never really worked with. But actual networking often works.

thesumofall• 1 month ago

Because it is really hard to reliably hire good people. Almost all typical signals & methods (CVs, experience based interviews, …) have very low reliability. An IQ test has the highest reliability according to studies but would be illegal in most jurisdictions. Plus, hiring managers frequently don’t know what they want or they believe they want something that they actually don’t

prepend4• 1 month ago

Where is an IQ test illegal? I remember taking one for my first job in Florida, but the company stopped because it wasn’t a useful signal.

IQ is correlated to many things (eg, income) but I’m not sure about job performance. Maybe for some industries. I was working for a software company and it seemed pretty useless for hiring or selecting project team members.

tptacek2• 1 month ago

IQ tests in employment are not illegal. This is an Internet myth. Several large corporations (with deep pockets for employment lawyers to go after) openly use them.

The reason more companies don't use IQ tests in candidate qualification is that they don't work well.

dan-robertson2• 1 month ago

I think being successful makes hiring easier because you can source better candidates, and being big makes hiring easier because candidates are more likely to know people at the firm who can use referrals to work around otherwise broken systems.

It’s perhaps also worth noting that lots of companies used to copy how Microsoft did interviews and later they copied how google did interviews so clearly there were some ideas that those companies were good at hiring. (I’m not sure this strategy was that good. The problem for the Microsoft or google type companies is filtering out acceptable hires from a deluge of applicants with acceptably low errors and costs; the challenge for less desirable firms is sourcing candidates who are both high quality and not about to be hired by Microsoft or Google)

One company that comes to mind when I think about being good at hiring was one that recruited a bunch from my university around when I was graduating. Their particular specialty was hiring illegible graduates with a lot of potential (eg classicists, science students without little programming, etc), training them well, and effectively underpaying them a bit for how skilled they were (which only worked out because the UK has a pretty shit job market for tech and because those people liked working there). I think it was more effective for them than trying to hire the same computer science graduates as everyone else would have been.

jerlendds• 1 month ago

https://archive.ph/Pfl79

josefrichter• 1 month ago

It wasn't broken before?

Aurornis5• 1 month ago

“There is a growing gap between the candidate’s written persona and their live presence. I’ll see a cover letter that is poetic and a résumé that is flawlessly structured, but then the person on the video call struggles to explain their own bullet points.

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.

binary132• 1 month ago

The bigger issue is the screening filters are flooded now (and also largely AI “enhanced”) so getting real signal through the noise is becoming basically impossible.

sivalus• 1 month ago

I think we'll just end up going back to referrals. It might generate more nepotism, but at least the company will feel like it's doing a better job and not cause it to overly focus on hiring to the detriment of its current employees.

somenameforme2• 1 month ago

It goes the other way as well though. Companies are increasingly filtering resumes/candidates in a sufficiently aggressive fashion to the point that they're strongly incentivizing, if not actively selecting for, people that are gaming the system in some way or another. Quite odd this is all happening when ostensibly the unemployment rate is very low, which should make it an employee's market.

Aurornis5• 1 month ago

Companies are increasingly filtering resumes/candidates in a sufficiently aggressive fashion to the point that they're strongly incentivizing, if not actively selecting for, people that are gaming the system in some way or another.

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.

II2II• 1 month ago

Companies are increasingly filtering resumes/candidates in a sufficiently aggressive fashion to the point that they're strongly incentivizing, if not actively selecting for, people that are gaming the system in some way or another.

The gaming of the system has been happening for a very long time. When I was a teen looking for my first job, companies were being flooded by resumes due to cheap laser printing (either custom to the employer, or simply duplicated en mass). A few years after that, it was being flooded by online applications or applications via email. Each time businesses had to take a more aggressive stance at filtering since they had more applicants per opening than before.

I suspect that we are going to have to go back to the bad old days of relying on real social networks (not the imaginary ones people create build around finding work) or applicants walking door to do with printed resumes in hand (simply because it is going to be easier to vet someone who walk in the door than false positives from software that filters applicants out).

madarco• 1 month ago

It had already been like this long before widespread LLM adoption: quality hiring was only really possible through manual candidate scouting on LinkedIn, at conferences, through word of mouth, and so on.

Sending a CV had already become mostly useless 3–4 years ago because of the huge amount of noise: candidates applying from all over the world, often even spoofing their actual location, FAANGs firing, flooding the market with (in theory) great candidates with great resumes.

The solution is the same one that has been successfully used forever: a trial period.

Luckily, a video interview with a senior developer is still enough to spot a good candidate.

Go through real code: add a bug to a branch of your codebase, have the candidate share their screen on TeamViewer, and let them debug and fix the issue. Ask questions live to understand how they reason about the system, how they would test whether the change works, and so on.

This will filter out 99% of candidates. But it is still possible to get lucky, which is why the trial period matters.

I’ve never had major issues and have always hired very strong engineers. I only had to terminate someone after the trial period twice.

jjav• 1 month ago

Companies are increasingly filtering resumes/candidates in a sufficiently aggressive fashion

Last open position I hired, about eight months ago, received about 1000 resumes/day for the first few days. For my whole career I've made it a point to read every resume sent for a job. If someone took the time to write I will at least take the time to read it. Sadly, that's no longer possible.

Most of the resumes were a clear case of people giving AI the posted job description and their actual resume, with a prompt of "Rewrite my resume so it sounds as much as possible as the job description, fill in any gaps with vague experience claims". Spot checking some of these against their linkedin profiles, showed vastly different job history descriptions.

I'm sure some qualified people did the same, but no way tell.

oblio3• 1 month 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”.

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.

zulux2• 1 month ago

We ask for something stupid like "3 years of Pascal experience." If the resume has it, it goes straight to the trash unless it has specific real-world Pascal experience.

toast0• 1 month ago

Before you needed actual skill (or luck) to create a good looking CV, especially for niche positions.

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.

NooneAtAll33• 1 month ago

Before you needed actual skill (or luck) to create a good looking CV, especially for niche positions.

so useless skill that says nothing about your actual fit for the job was changed for automatic half-skill that still says nothing about your actual fit for the job

oh no, where are my tears?

uberdru• 1 month ago

Honestly the problem is hiring teams -- they have created this whole issue. They ask for a resume and cover letter. Fine. But don't make applicants put in the work if you're not even going to provide a response, or any sort of feedback -- even when the position stays open for months. The result is that people looking for jobs have to submit huge numbers of custom cover letters, and tweaked resumes, with no feedback, all within a vacuum. Hence the feeling that they need to "pump up" their resume, just to get over the initial gate.

maccard11• 1 month ago

Hiring manager here - the last job I posted was open for 6 weeks. We waited 2 weeks for initial applications, and it took 4 weeks to schedule interviews with our shortlist and get to an offer, including a very unfortunate 2 week holiday from someone that allowed us down.

We got 350 applications for it. We listed in the JD that remote was ok but needed to be in specific countries for us to hire. I’d guess 90% of the applicants were outside those countries. Of the remained the problem is that most of them all have the skills we’re looking for. One thing is for sure, I read every single cover letter that came through, and I’d say that the vast majority of ones that made an actual effort we interviewed.

bee_rider• 1 month ago

I have one project on my resume that I have trouble remembering some details of. It feels weird to drop it off (it was an internship at a sort of well known company), but it was a while ago. Is “can’t remember details” still a huge red flag from the employer’s point of view, even if the explanation is legitimate?

It’s not exactly the crown jewel of my resume anyway, so I guess I could cut it, it just adds to my backstory.

jghn3• 1 month ago

People understand that memories get foggy over time. Well, at least most people will.

As an interviewer I allow for a sliding scale of inability to drill in on details based on how much time elapsed. Also, you'll find that people are typically pretty consistent in what they retain. Like they'll remember the big picture, key challenges, and outcomes. but they may not remember a specific technique used or other day to day decisions.

For my own resume I do a similar adjustment. As things start to age out a bit I intentionally provide fewer specifics. Again, people understand what signals like this mean.

tayo422• 1 month ago

Resumes are written for hr

Ideally we submit 2 resumes one for the non technical people that need to be involved and one for managers.

Instead were attempting to write for two audiences (or 3?automated filters) and the less knowledgeable one will reject without talking to you

zombot2• 1 month ago

Devil's advocate: In a culture where lying and cheating is venerated once you get rich enough doing it, don't these candidates just demonstrate how they've deeply understood and internalized the most important rules? Fake it till you make it. Naturally, getting busted by follow-up questions reveals them to be bloody greenhorns who didn't rehearse enough.

watwut3• 1 month ago

The premise of "flawless prose in cover letter and resume used to show work-quality of candidate rather their ability fine tune prose on resume" is dubious.

fzeroracer• 1 month ago

I'm thinking back to a recent interview I had. It was one of those online coding tests; after spending about an hour and a half on it I sent it back to the recruiter and they came back to me saying I didn't pass because I 'only' got an 80% despite passing all criteria in the worst working environment possible. This was a no-AI test too so I unfortunately respected the criteria.

So many interviews still demand absolute perfection so they just optimize for people that are dishonest and get away with it.

btrettel• 1 month ago

I had a similar experience before [1]. I fully agree that too many interview tests select for dishonest people.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35496976

jeffrallen• 1 month ago

I'm recruiting for apprentices right now. By definition, they have almost nothing to put on their CVs, and thus their CVs are more or less identical, or rather all of them have almost zero signal.

We took a chance on a flash recruiting session our canton organized. 35 interviews in 2 hr 15 mins. Crazy. But excellent signal, because if you are looking for it, and give the candidate a hint to show it ("tell me a story about how you solved a computer problem for your self/friend/family/club"), you can find the candidates with a spark. And I would not have detected it from their CVs or cover letter alone.

More human connection. Less machines. There, I fixed it for you.

nobodywillobsrv2• 1 month ago

Interviews, all of them, should be working on problem with and agent and a human interviewer.

Just had a "guess the teachers password" moment at some interview as a senior and the interviewer didn't understand my answer and didn't ask questions.

The problem is incentives. A lot of people probably need to be fired who are gate keeping by blocking hiring.

All interviews should be bilateral win win recommendation chats.

They should not end because one person didn't understand the other or someone who was not yet interested in the job did g remember some weird detail of something.

Our memories are getting worse with AI and augmentation.

We need to judge marginal add and make recommendations.

Ozzie-D• 1 month ago

Principle: Problem created by X are also solvable by X. (where X = railways, internet, mobile phones, now AI)

In practical terms Problem: AI made "skill-fishing" easy, and previous signals like good cover letters, well-crafted CV, even correct answers in interviews now don't have their old signalling power - because anyone can do it.

Solution: If this is the case, a) now recruiters need to assess AI skills (exactly what I'm working on - but won't link as it's flagged anytime I link it - but you can search for "aisa test")

b) we need to move on to a system where we accept it's agents talking to each other. CV is for human-human communication but now agent writes, another agent reads. If THAT'S THE CASE - we need an updated protocol for representative agents of each party to contact. (this is the product I'd be working on if I wasn't working on the former)

ElProlactin3• 1 month ago

Google, McKinsey, and other companies have responded by reintroducing in-person interviews for some candidates, a meaningful step backward in efficiency (due to travel time and costs) that signals how seriously they are treating this problem.

Maybe the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" at all costs has broken the world?

I remember when I applied for my first job. I got dressed up and my mom drove me to the interview because I didn't have a driver's license or car at the time. It wasn't "efficient" for me and I suppose it wasn't "efficient" for the company but much to my surprise, I got an offer and that was my first "tech job"...before tech jobs were cool.

It's very strange that the authors talk about how "making a bad hire is terribly expensive" but then call out "travel time and costs". Well, if B < A for each role filled, is it really so bad?

And yeah, I get that huge companies like Google and Facebook hire from around the world and not everyone is located in close proximity to Mountain View and Palo Alto, but that speaks more to the oligopolistic world we're living in than anything else.

If a small number of companies weren't distorting the labor markets, this might matter less.

tracerbulletx• 1 month ago

In the not too distant past (like 10 years ago) flying people to a final in person round was standard practice.

DonsDiscountGas2• 1 month ago

Standard and expensive (in terms of time and money) for both the company and the applicant

Aurornis5• 1 month ago

In my anecdotal experience talking to people applying for jobs right now, this practice has come back in full force. You can expect final round interviews to be on-site unless otherwise specified. The days of getting hired entirely remotely are over.

A friends' company has even ended remote hiring altogether after auditing their remote hires and discovering a lot of connections from countries they didn't expect.

There's even a growing scam where people get recruited to lend their identities and bank accounts to someone else to get the job. Then they're asked to install some software on the company laptop and leave it open and powered on during the workday so someone can operate it remotely. Remote work is wild right now.

AznHisoka• 1 month ago

Maybe companies should say “Wanna apply for a job? Come to our office during these hours for a pre-screening and to drop off your resume” you can’t email or apply online anymore

Aurornis5• 1 month ago

It's very strange that the authors talk about how "making a bad hire is terribly expensive" but then call out "travel time and costs". Well, if B < A for each role filled, is it really so bad?

The cost of a bad hire they're referring to includes things like opportunity cost of not having a good hire in that position, damage they've done to the product (codebase, design, etc.), and second-order effects like demoralizing the rest of the team.

The actual hiring costs of a bad hire are a rounding error compared to the damage they can do.

Have you ever been on a team that was great until they hired one wrong person who made every work week a miserable slog? Attrition goes up as the good employees start to leave. The codebase starts accumulating a lot of tech debt. Even after they're gone it can take a long time to recover.

This is why it's so important to be able to fire fast, but that's another topic rife with difficulties.

ElProlactin3• 1 month ago

But that's the point.

If the cost of a bad hire is huge (which I agree it is), why is the hiring process optimized, in part, around reducing the travel costs? It would seem that these costs are modest in comparison.

coffeefirst• 1 month ago

Absolutely. It turns out friction is important in the right places.

SpicyLemonZest2• 1 month ago

It's just how you have to structure a large organization to spend responsibly. You assign a budget to each function, you tell people to do the best they can within the budget, and if they come back and say "actually I'd like to spend even more money" you ask them to generate an explanation for why that's in the best interests of the business. And generating that explanation is kinda the whole purpose of the source article: the Harvard Business Review exists for managers and executives to discuss amongst each other as arguments for why their proposals and budget requests should be approved.

jmyeet• 1 month ago

I have what I think is a good analogy for this problem.

In the Olden Days [tm], jobs were advertised through recruiters, physical media (eg the paper) and connections. You had to review applications and conduct interviews. The cost of applying was relatively high, your reach was relatively low and the investment per applicant was relatively high. So imagine that there were enough jobs for everyone in a simplified model. 10 people applied for 10 jobs. It's not the same 10 people for each job. But there was a decent ROI on effort. It kinda just worked.

Fast forward to now and the cost of applying is essentially zero in terms of registering interest and submitting a CV. And you apply for a lot more jobs so instead of 10 applicants for 10 jobs, you have 200 applicants for 200 jobs. Still the same applicant to job ratio but way more inefficient for everyone involved. Applicants can't put in the same effort for 200 applications that they did for 10 and employers can't review 200 applications the same way they did 10.

So what happens? Employers, who have the power in this relationship, put up roadblocks in the name of efficiency. Now you have to survive ATS before ever going in front of a human. That ATS uses inscrutable logic that may filter you out for not including enough keywords or some other specious reason. You now have hiring assignments.

The net effect is that an applicant puts in 200 applications, get automatically filtered out from 180 of them and then has to do upwards of 20 take home assignments.

Plus there are more and more layers added. More rounds of interviews. Phone screens. Remote interviews then on-site interviews. All of this wastes time and, like you allude to, I don't think it's effective. But it's a natural response to the illusion of choice.

Let me give an online dating analogy. In years gone by, you'd rely on meeting people in person. Now, less so. And speaking in a strictly heteronormative sense, how it tends to go is that women on average have hundreds of choices and men have on average far fewer. A gender imbalance plays into this.

So what does a woman in this scenario do? They start adding filters to just make the numbers more manageable. Height, salary, location, same interests and so on. So the net effect is that that a lot of people are indepndently applying filters and filtering down to a pool with a lot of crossover. Conventionally attractive men, for example, will tend have far more options.

So I think the same happens with hiring. If you're a Big Tech company, you start adding filters. Did this person go to a top school? What internships did they have? Do these things matter for on-the-job performance? Barely (IMHO). But what you'll probably find is that a handful of people have a ton of options while others struggle. And it's simply the product of employers trying to make their applicant pool manageable but they're all doing it in very similar ways.

And I honestly don't know what the solution is.

dweinus• 1 month ago

"The conversational interview, long considered the ultimate, unhackable test of a candidate’s authenticity"

Lol. I'm not sure this person has ever given an interview before

paulbgd2• 1 month ago

As an engineer working on my company’s top of funnel it’s tough. Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call. Async technical challenges are obviously gamed but you’d be surprised at how few people both cheat + take longer than 3m to submit the solution

clates• 1 month ago

Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call.

Funny because I do the same; I don't commit to doing any work/assessments before at least an honest interview round. Businesses have to understand that _they_ are the ones who have to solve for the filtering problem. Most great candidates that you are hoping to snipe are already in a stable job and do not _have_ to jump through hoops to get past a filter.

ralferoo7• 1 month ago

I have done programming assessments, but I've probably only done 3 in the last 20 years, and those I strictly limited to 1 hour and told the recruiters that I wouldn't spend any longer than that.

I've also flat out refused to proceed with least 5 jobs when recruiters have contacted me, tried to tempt me with a job and then sent through a 3 hour coding test. I've got better things to do with my free time than toy programming puzzles.

paulbgd2• 30 days ago

We’ll skip it based off other signals (referrals notably) of course, but if we offered an interview to every candidate based off their resume we’d never get around to interviewing the good candidates. I don’t like the idea of a technical challenge at the start, but as someone who was discovered way back via skills and not a fancy resume I want to continue offering others the same chance as me.

jgafni3• 28 days ago

Are you picking a problem candidates can easily cheat on? Could Claude produce the answer in 30 seconds? If so, what's the test actually measuring?

The setups I've seen produce the strongest signal aren't the ones where the candidate can't see the answer that AI produces easily. They're the ones where there is no single answer. Architecture decisions. How you would investigate an outage. How you would tradeoff one constraint against another. The candidate can spend an hour with Claude on it beforehand and it doesn't matter, because the test isn't "did you get the answer," it's "can you talk through the reasoning" and "can I trust your judgement."

Hearing someone explain their thinking on an open problem is a much harder thing to fake. Even if they used an assistant to structure their initial pass, the live unpacking reveals where the thinking is theirs and where it isn't.

Simulacra• 1 month ago

I have very little sympathy for companies grappling with this. They use AI to reject applicants within seconds, and make people jump through so many hoops (not to mention ghost jobs) that it's almost a humiliation ritual.

maccard11• 1 month ago

Nobody is using AI to auto reject candidates. ATS’s are “scoring” candidates but I don’t know of any that are sending rejections on application.

As a hiring manager, all the applications come to my inbox (even if it’s 300 in a day), and I’m definitely guilty of screening during non-working hours when I get a notification.

cocoto• 1 month ago

I'm responsible for hiring junior C++ developers in a small company (first role). Let met tell you that almost all candidates are stating "medium" level in C++ in their resume but don't even know how to work with pointers or references, they don't even have the level of someone studying the language for half a day. And I don't even think it's related to AI. Whatever the reason, it's very easy to assert a candidate competency with a 30 minutes to an hour interview in person.

bluefirebrand• 1 month ago

Lying on resumes is very common, so is lying on job postings. It's a really weird arms race where no one is getting what they want.

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.

klibertp• 1 month ago

When I first tried to get a job, I listed three categories of skills: the ones I'm very confident in, the ones I have some experience with, and the niche ones I only dabbled in. The overwhelming advice, from everyone around me, was to never-ever admit that I'm not perfect at something. I found it perplexing, but after a decade or so, I started having to read resumes, and, indeed, I found almost nobody ever admitting they're not an absolute wizard at everything they put on their resumes. Before starting work at a company, I had this naive idea that HR and candidates are there to help each other, and that approaching it with honesty and goodwill is how it should work. Needless to say, it doesn't work that way at all - on both ends. I'm honestly frightened that I will maybe have to go through the hiring process again at some point, especially since my career turned adult and now my "years of experience" are a dead weight of "you're just old"... The whole process is so antagonistic, so brutal and stressful, that I can see myself going full YOLO and just spamming AI-slop resumes until I get an interview, in which - I want to believe - I'll be able to actually say something about myself and, hopefully, convince the interviewer that I can do the job. I know that would have made the whole situation a bit worse (and I'm sorry if I end up resorting to strategies like that), but the emotional burden of dealing with the "hiring process" before an actual face-to-face talk is so great I don't think I could bear it for long.

Whatever the reason, it's very easy to assert a candidate competency with a 30 minutes to an hour interview in person.

It's not always that easy. Yes; there's a fraction of programmers who cannot code, and yes, it's usually possible to tell them apart with a FizzBuzz-style question. However, the vast majority will have some skill, and testing the limits of that skill (again, assuming we can't just expect the candidate to ever say "no, I'm weak in this-or-that area") in a limited time of an interview is hard at least on two counts: misunderstandings/communication problems instead of skill problems, and the need to wrap the obviously confrontational (instead of cooperative; it would be the latter if we could be honest with each other, but that's a pipe dream) process into something that doesn't look confrontational on the surface. It's indeed a "hiring theatre", and you need pretty solid acting skills and some psychology to pull it off as an interviewer. Of course, very few interviewers have the required combination of knowledge and skill; in effect, over the past year, I was able to form an opinion (good or bad, but at least an informed one) about the candidate's skills maybe half the time. In the other 50% of cases, I just couldn't pry any info about the actual skills from a candidate. It's like they're saying: "hire me if you want to see my cards" - and honestly, I can't even blame them too much! We're not exactly perfectly honest from our side, either, in the end...

Basically, I dread the possibility of being subjected to what has become the prevailing model of hiring in tech; I don't think I have it in me to either game the system or get good at using it, so the only thing I can count on is just dumb luck: that, at the exact time I will need it, some company will show up and either come to me directly, or will have both the process and people staffing it compatible with me by chance. If not that, I don't see myself ever getting hired again.

kevin_thibedeau• 1 month ago

We had a process where C or C++ competence was acceptable and they would need to do some simple list creation tasks without STL. One guy was adamant about using C++ despite being assured C would be fine. It didn't look good when he new'ed an array and forgot to delete[] it when free() would have been mistake proof.

thrill• 1 month ago

Hiring has always been broken.

12_throw_away• 1 month ago

Dunno, the old school "we'll get you started in the mailroom, and you can work your way up by gaining knowledge about the organization while demonstrating competence and professionalism" sounds like a pretty solid hiring strategy.

Although tbf I kind of doubt if this was ever really the case - probably this is imagined nostalgia for idealized bygone times. And given that this is a strategy that requires, y'know, long-term investment and planning, it's not like it's going to start happening anytime in the near future

itronitron3• 1 month ago

The old school strategy was to hire a student as a summer intern and if it's recognized as a good fit by the end of the summer then ask them to apply after graduating. The second step (for people past that stage) is to trust but verify the work experience they list on their resumes. The difficulty these days is that companies want candidates to be a perfect match for the company's current tech stack.

skeledrew• 1 month ago

None of that stuff done during hiring should matter as long as the one hired can satisfactorily perform their duties, regardless of their actual knowledge/skills and the tools they use. Break firing as well so it's easy to get rid of those who underperform. Problem solved.

mrmarket• 1 month ago

hard to be sympathetic here when the candidate experience has been such a mess in tech for years now. i appreciate that remotely and efficiently judging future success based on a resume is now basically a wash, that sucks. but no one seemed to treat it like an emergency that perfectly qualified candidates have been getting filtered out after tripping various invisible wires for years (due to ATS systems but also not having word-for-word experience across the board, or not having big enough logos on your resume, which in turn makes it harder to get bigger logos in the future, etc.) and that's to say nothing of the rampant ghost postings, which someone else mentioned here, which STILL happens all the time. it's cruelty.

ericol• 1 month ago

What is means is that now hiring is symmetrically broken.

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.

late2part• 1 month ago

Here's how you fix hiring... Have them demonstrate competency.

It's really easy to screen out people when you say "Hey - login to this VM and show me how to import raw data into postgres and run a report."

Or do whatever you're going to do.

My favorite story is from a particular sean who had a candidate that said they'd been using VM for 20 years, and when he went into a document the candidate hit j 200 times to go line 200.

prepend4• 1 month ago

Comically I only know about 10 commands in vim and I’ve been using it for 30+ years. Qwxdypa$0 will get you pretty far in life.

I don’t use it as an IDE, I use it 5-10/year to read or edit a random file.

I probably wouldn’t remember “g” or whatever the goto command is. And hitting j 200 times isn’t the end of the world.

dude250711• 1 month ago

"For the C-suite, this is no longer just an HR headache, it is a critical strategic risk."

I have seen this phrase structure before.

dlcarrier• 1 month ago

HR/legal departments broke hiring. AI is just revealing how broken it is.

neilv2• 1 month ago

When the earliest filters in your hiring process stop working, your organization begins to systematically select for candidates who are best at performing the hiring process, rather than those best equipped to do the job.

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?)

titanomachy2• 1 month ago

I thought Google interviews were kind of fun, back in the days when they were done in-person. Most of my interviewers were engaged and helpful, and seemed genuinely excited when I got on the right track. They would get up and write on the whiteboard with me.

The experience really made me want to work there, because I’d never encountered coworkers like that before. I didn’t get hired the first time but went back for a redo as soon as I was allowed.

Online interviews are a lot less fun, but still seemed more or less fine until the recent cheating epidemic.

lokar2• 1 month ago

I had fun on both sides of that process. As both a candidate and interviewer I prefer the in person whiteboard because it makes it more clear this is about ideas, not exact syntax.

cleandreams• 1 month ago

I was walking through a startup neighborhood in San Francisco the other day and I encountered several telephone poles which were posted with advertisements for software engineering jobs. These were not generic or scam advertisements. This was a particular startup, looking for software engineers. What is old is new again.

neilv2• 1 month ago

The era of the standard behavioral interview (“Tell me about a time…”) is over; those answers are easily scripted by live-assist tools. Instead, organizations should introduce dynamic friction: sudden constraints, changes in project scope, or prompts that require candidates to defend a counterintuitive tradeoff.

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.)

adamtaylor_13• 1 month ago

Are there any battle-tested strategies for hiring that are generally known to be good, but aren't often used because it's hard or doesn't scale?

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.

Bjartr• 1 month ago

Apprenticeship? Actually spend time working with them on real work.

It's both hard and doesn't scale.

vkou3• 1 month ago

The problem is that you have 100 applicants and one apprentice slot.

alexpotato• 1 month ago

Recommendation from a trusted 3rd party.

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmYekD6-PZ8

addaon4• 1 month ago

Ask the best people you’ve ever worked with who the best people they’ve worked with are. Recurse. When names start repeating through different graph paths, make those people an offer they can’t refuse. Once they join, ask them to do the same, and give them the budget and role to make it happen.

thih9• 1 month ago

Is this really battle-tested, as in: did you see this work in practice or do you have a reliable source?

Or is this something you came up with?

sanderjd• 1 month ago

The best people I've ever worked with and the best people they've worked with all have good jobs at all times. You have to have a mechanism for matching with people who are actually interested in a new job.

cloche3• 1 month ago

Unless you're hiring for rare roles that require niche skills, it's unlikely that you'll get people that are in overlapping networks. If you do, you might be encountering the problem where Company A has a bunch of people that used to work at Company B. Now Company A is just an "old boys club" from Company B and is biased towards their old colleagues.

If you ask for single referrals, how do you combat the problem of people just recommended people based on friendships and not actually work quality?

antonymoose• 1 month ago

We source our intern-to-Junior pipeline from a good state school from which we have a few graduates. We have about an 80% placement rate for the interns. We’ve yet to have any abusive or bad hires, this being a fully remote company. For Senior hires, a prior employee founded a Java User Group and sourced several high quality engineers from the pool of visitors. So, build a pipeline and play the long game?

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.

dan-robertson2• 1 month ago

I think various ‘longer interview’ processes can be good by reducing the chance of particularly regretted hires. This could be internships (but note this goes two ways and you want interns to accept offers and recommend the programme to their friends even if they are not hired) or work sample tests. Both have the downside that they are more work for the candidate (especially internships or some other short-term-to-possibly-long-term position) and so experienced candidates who feel they have better options and less need to prove themselves typically won’t take part (this depends a bit on how much they want to work at your specific company of course). Potentially this isn’t so bad – competing to hire the same people as everyone else is going to be more expensive – or potentially it is bad – maybe there’s a reason those candidates are in high demand and you will suffer from only getting a look at people who didn’t fit the typical pattern. I think it’s going to depend a bunch on how good you are at sourcing candidates and how hot your firm is.

jppope2• 1 month ago

Yes. Figure out who your top performers are ask them for referrals. Some people will recommend "meh" people, but more often than not your top performers hang out with other top performers because they appreciate the same things.

edoceo• 1 month ago

I do quick interviews, then hire hourly for a single scoped task. Then see how they play, communication skills, code exploring all that happens on the task. Only works when candidate is not otherwise engaged, has never worked for non-coding/sysadmin roles.

jgafni3• 28 days ago

I like the other comment regarding asking people you know or have hired for referrals. But there's a separate question about what to do when you don't have any referrals to rely on.

In the past, the answer was to rely on recruiting experts and your own experience to analyze resumes, and to hope that some fraction of your time interviewing was well spent. But as others in this thread have pointed out, the quality of resumes as a signal is rapidly decreasing with AI. So now the question is what the new signal should be.

The purpose of hiring is really just to understand three things: (1) can the person do the job, (2) will I and the rest of the team want to work with them for the foreseeable future, and (3) are there any red flags. The latter two are assessed in interviews or backchanneling. But the first, "can this person do the job," is the one that has gotten much harder to tell from the resume alone.

What does "can the person do the job" even mean in the era of AI? For SWE, a lot of teams are still leaning on outdated coding challenges that test the ability to write code by hand (quality, organization, efficiency, speed) and the direct knowledge held in someone's head (vocabulary, concepts, tools). But what we actually need to test for is much more nebulous: thought process, judgment, knowing what questions to ask, taste, context switching, and how the candidate does all of this with AI effectively. Traditional coding challenges (where you prohibit cheating as much as possible) get at some of this, but they're no longer the optimal solution. They're an old comfortable solution being applied to a more modern, complicated problem.

I said this in another comment in this thread, but the best thing to do is offer an open-ended question. One that doesn't have a concrete answer, and one they're free to answer however they wish. Like a Turing test, 5 minutes at most is enough. Want to use AI? Great. Want to curate your answer? Great. Ask them to architect something. Describe a bug and ask if it should be fixed. If they think it should, ask how they'd approach debugging. Or ask about a technical decision they've made that they're not sure was right, and have them make the case for the other choice.

The same approach works in other domains. For sales, have them sell to someone in a specific scenario. For marketing, ask about a campaign they didn't like and what they would have done differently. For accounting, ask about the most common problems they've run into with clients and internal stakeholders, and how they handled those situations.

The goal is to get them talking on video for 2 to 5 minutes about something real that matters to the role. And whenever they put in the effort to do this, give them transparency. Let them know you've personally received it and will watch it. Follow up with an actual response out of respect for their time, even if the answer is no.

To anyone worried about the time this takes: (1) it immediately weeds out low-interest candidates, (2) I'd rather watch a few-minute video than do a 30-minute phone screen based on a resume alone for someone who's obviously not a fit, and (3) multiple stakeholders can watch the same video and form a baseline for their own follow-up interviews. It makes the rest of the process better, not worse.

peab• 1 month ago

Anecdotally At the moment, about half of our inbound applicants are fake profiles

itronitron3• 1 month ago

How do you make the determination that an applicant is fake?

vanuatu4• 1 month ago

as someone who has done 100+ first round interviews for SWE, including new grad

zero signal: resume & cover letter. applicants will mass-apply with ai-tuned resumes that happen to perfectly match our listing

medium signal: top 15 school / top N internship experience / built something with paying users

highest signal: personal referrals

tayo422• 1 month ago

Refferal make sense, but all of mine ended with rejections. Clearly I'm not a moron since I'm getting reffered by ex coworkers and still ill even get an automated rejection...

kajman• 1 month ago

zero signal: resume & cover letter. applicants will mass-apply with ai-tuned resumes that happen to perfectly match our listing

How often do you interview candidates with bad or mediocre resumes, though? My impression is that a perfectly tuned (and almost certainly dishonest) resume is just table stakes now.

vanuatu4• 1 month ago

not very often which is why its zero signal

in rare occasions it might go the other way around, like someone who has so much experience they dont need a pretty resume because their work speaks for itself

New grads are the biggest offenders of the resume slop

jgafni3• 28 days ago

Could you be overlooking great candidates who didn't go to top school or have a personal referral, yet have the skills and would be great to work with? I've worked with many engineers who fit that category.

Both of those signals reflect prior selection by someone else. Admissions committees, your network's hiring choices. Those signals also correlate with class, geography, and network access.

I'm not saying that referrals and schools don't predict. They do. But no referrals and no top school doesn't necessarily mean a candidate isn't a fit. The more AI advances, the greater the need for a new signal.

vanuatu4• 26 days ago

100%, if someone from a no name school does well on the interview I’ll happily recommend them to be hired. However idk how HR filters resumes, and they likely use certain heuristics to try and minimize false positives

tedggh• 1 month ago

“…live video interviews are now easily gamed by real-time assistance tools.”

I am not too sure about that. Possible, yes. Easily? only if the interviewer sucks at interviewing. If are “gamed” during live interviews, you probably should not be interviewing.

j-bos• 1 month ago

Most interviewers at big cos do in fact, suck. Very by the book, do you know this or that pattern/tool by name. Can you write this or that under time pressure with none of your tool stack.

gojibary• 1 month ago

Sure, and? Generally, someone has to be an interviewer. People dedicated to it are expensive and tend to become useless, results are also not properly measurable so whether one improves at it has nothing to do with whether one thinks one is improving at it.

apwheele• 1 month ago

An AI written article writing about AI resumes and AI interviewers -- https://www.pangram.com/history/38790b9f-dda1-4ea9-9b6c-3858....

recursivedoubts• 1 month ago

To modify the old russian saying: "we pretend to have expertise and they pretend to be interested in hiring us"

cloche3• 1 month ago

I don't understand why tech companies are so reluctant to go back to in-person interviews. This used to be the norm before COVID and it would solve most of these issues. It's also ironic that the authors are from Microsoft/Amazon and Meta which have very structured interviews that tend to be about just hitting the right keywords during the interview itself. None of these places even really care about what you've done previously, for better or worse.

bartread2• 1 month ago

I don't understand why tech companies are so reluctant to go back to in-person interviews.

Tech companies probably aren’t that reluctant, but I’d bet a lot of job applicants are.

ghaff8• 1 month ago

I do understand there are job applicants who don't want to travel and/or don't want to do an in-person interview. But <shrug>. I also do think that (mostly) post-COVID I mostly want to meet with a candidate in person.

khuey2• 1 month ago

Applicants did this routinely ten years ago.

lokar2• 1 month ago

There were phone screens before Covid

beej712• 1 month ago

One thing is that it costs money to fly people out and that's a big investment when the person might arrive and not know jack.

fragmede• 1 month ago

$2,000 to fly a candidate out and put them up for a day and stuff is a tiny investment for a company the size of Google.

lazyant• 1 month ago

you still need filter phone/remote interviews to select which candidates to have for on-site interviews, and this article centers on this initial interview being broken

IshKebab• 1 month ago

Pretty much all of their suggestions sound like things that should already be being done (and mostly are in my experience). I was asked a "tell me about a time" question for a job interview recently and it really took me by surprised because nobody asks those questions in tech anymore! They literally asked me what my strengths and weaknesses are. Wtf.

I didn't get that job but it was a blessing in disguise - I got a MUCH better job a few months later.

titanomachy2• 1 month ago

Just ask them to break into a server, their AI tool will refuse to help and you’ll get an honest representation of their abilities.

not_the_fda• 1 month ago

Tech hiring has been broken for decades. AI just makes it so obvious how broken it is.

AaronAPU• 1 month ago

I wonder how much talent is out there who, like me, simply isn’t interested in debasing themselves to go through the interview process so just nopes out of employment. It’s all such an absurd joke at this point.

Valodim• 1 month ago

In my experience, networking also helps sidestep a lot of that stuff.

esaym• 1 month ago

Me right now

colesantiago• 1 month ago

There is are loads.

They do not apply on the job application as they know of the AI screener will just filter them out.

It is no wonder why HR and businesses cry "Hiring is hard" and in reality, the talented people are:

+ Making their own startups / businesses.

+ Joined a much more attractive company and they don't bother go through the process.

+ Networks their way through other people.

+ They are fed up of the interview process and they check out of the job market altogether.

Also lastly, these people do not want to talk to HR, it wastes their time and creates friction.

exabrial• 1 month ago

My favorite "funnel" so far was applying for certain company in Colorado. It twas I think 10:45p in the evening, and I got a reply about 15mins later indicating that I was invited for an "interview". Scratching my head, I mean who was up working at this time, I looked into it...

It wasn't an interview, even though they insisted it was. It was a completely automated skill assessment "interview" with an AI. Or put better... it's a CAPTCHA that takes roughly 60mins to complete. If you just happen to pass their CAPTCHA, you might get to then talk to a real person.

I laughed and of course did not continue. This is the biggest honkin piece of baloney I've seen yet. It puts 100% of the burden on the candidates, so the HR department at the company can go back to trimming their hangnails or whatever they do.

lovich4• 1 month ago

I recently took a “one way interview”(I’ve had multiple recruiters use that term) where I had to be on camera, and talk to a machine that interpreted responses completely incorrectly causing me to have to try and negotiate with a fucking clanker that when I said I could work in the US I actually meant I could work in the US.

2 days later they replied back that I hadn’t had a long enough tenure in my career and couldn’t trust me enough to hire.

I don’t know what companies plans are because they are creating an environment where even the people they do end up hiring are going to resent them from day one based on the dehumanizing treatment they are applying to the interview process.

jghn3• 1 month ago

A policy I started to adhere to a while back was never take a job somewhere that doesn't invest at least as much time & energy into interviewing you than you are with them. If they expect me to put in a bunch of effort and they're putting in 0, that's a hard no.

daft_pink• 1 month ago

If I were looking for a job right now. I would scrape all the LinkedIn profiles at the target company to understand what skills they valued and tailor my resume with ai based on those profiles and the initial job posting and my skills.

I think you just have to go a step or two above what most other candidates are doing. In my experience, that works really really well.

zombot2• 1 month ago

your organization begins to systematically select for candidates who are best at performing the hiring process, rather than those best equipped to do the job.

I submit that this is nothing new. There just may be one more way to fulfill that criterion. But I don't see how the outcome would be worse than before.

codethief• 1 month ago

To everyone saying that this has always been a problem: The issue is the scale of the problem. Deleting the occasional spam email by hand is not a big deal but once you're getting flooded with spam emails, you better have a good spam filter in place.

In the same vein, the early hiring funnel discussed in TFA did work in many if not most cases or otherwise people wouldn't have used it. This no longer seems to be the case.

runamuck• 1 month ago

I asked Candidates (who claimed to work at site) to describe the parking at their office, Garage or Flat? Some of them couldn't answer that question. If they did answer, I would ask the name and purpose of the organization (accounting, HR, tech etc.) they supported and screened some more that way. I got some people who mentioned an Acronym (the project they supported "for years") and asked them to define it, and they couldn't. A lot of fraud in the candidate pool.

thomascgalvin• 1 month ago

I got some people who mentioned an Acronym (the project they supported "for years") and asked them to define it, and they couldn't.

That could be a valid test, but I do a lot of government contracting, and that industry is absolutely rife with acronyms nobody knows the expansion of, as well as names that were chosen because somebody thought they were cool but aren't acronyms, but everyone else assumes are acronyms, so they get the capslock treatment.

ralferoo7• 1 month ago

Haha, I get what you're saying but I've worked on several projects for many years where nobody knew what several key acronyms meant. We could guess what they might mean, but nobody actively working on the project knew what the original programmers thought they meant.

One example was a file extension called .phtm - the best I could guess it meant (and how I thought of it) was "parsed HTML", but that's kind of stupid because every HTML file is parsed. Maybe it meant "proto HTML" because not all of HTML was supported. Maybe it meant "Phil's HTML" or "perhaps HTML". Nobody had any idea. There wasn't an obvious P that related in any way to the business needs or function of the file format.

As a programmer, do you need to know what XML, SOAP or REST mean to be able to use them? Not really. And to give another example, back in the days when I also did sysadmin work and had to deal with both IDE drives and SCSI drives, I wouldn't have remembered what the initials meant, nor would I probably know what the e in NVMe is if I hadn't just googled it even though I've used them for years.

pukarkhanal• 1 month ago

I have built something similar, its in a really early phase but we have cracked candidate user acquisition, checkout at ResumeAI(cvai.dev)

The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

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