> “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.
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.
> 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.
What if you don’t filter at all? What if you just interviewed 10 random people? They’re probably all smart enough on some level.
I'm pretty sure filtering resume by beauty was a problem long before ai, and stems from hiring people rushing this part of the job as "useless" or smth
>Which itself is a symptom of companies getting drowned in AI generated resumes.
I would say that it is the exact opposite. IME, it is a tsunami of companies using AI as the gatekeepers as a cost-saving tool, instead of a human in HR, forcing applicants to use AI to get past AI.
It’s an arms race by the greedy looking to save a few pennies of payroll, against those whose CVs are just sufficiently non-standard, and so are culled in nearly 100% of AI filtering, so they have no choice but to use AI to write their CVs.
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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.
It is a great model, but many HR departments will not let you do this. Every termination becomes an exercise in endless documentation, including what you thought was an open-and-shut, by the numbers trial period.
That seems like a self-inflicted HR problem.
In the UK, employment law is strongly on the side of the employee, and so I'd understand HR departments trying to do everything they can to protect the employer. But having a (typically 3-month) probation period is common in almost every company, and it's not uncommon for people to be let go in the third month when they haven't been up to standard. Everybody knows it happens, and in fact you can see people's attitudes shift - for the first 3 months, every new employee is tiptoeing around very gentle, trying not to offend anyone, going above and beyond so that they are seen to be making a positive impact. After the probation period ends, most people revert to a "normal" working attitude, everything's a bit more relaxed, you'd push back on unreasonable demands, etc.
In somewhere like the US, where the laws strongly favour the employers, I'm surprised that HR departments make it so hard to fire people in a trial period. If you can fire people for any reason, underperformance in a trial period seems the most safe reason possible for dismissal.
The opposite extreme is France where employment law favours employees so much, many companies are reticent to hire at all because it's so hard to fire someone once hired.
In US it is at-will employment. What would be the difference really between a trial period and just letting an employee go 2 months or 4 months of 7.83 months down the road. I mean, in at-will employment trial period sounds just like an artificial gimmick that the employer forces onto the employee's mental state.
At-will (or not) employment is only relevant in the absence of a contract. Most/all tech employment has contracts with terms of dismissal. And in my experience this is generally a good thing for everybody. I've lived/worked in countries with for-cause employment and it's overwhelmingly more common for it to be used for abuse than protection - somebody gets fired for very good reason, but then sues just because it's generally cheaper/quicker/better PR to settle than litigate. Montana probably has the best idea of a global probation - 12 months at will, and then the employee can only be dismissed for cause after that.
> 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).
Kind of reminiscent of the online dating market, at least for hetero relationships: From the man's point of view, he is flooding the field, swiping yes on every woman on the site, because there's a 0.0001% chance that he's matched. Consequently, from the woman's point of view, she is flooded with an absolutely huge deluge of "applicants" with nothing but blunt tools to hopelessly try to filter the garbage out. Neither side is satisfied, yet there appears to be no systematic way to improve the market. The status quo probably optimizes only the dating site's revenue at the expense of everything else being dysfunctional.
The main difference, of course, is that in the employment market people are generally taken out of the market when they get a job (although fully remote has driven a huge rise in moonlighting).
In the dating market, women are inundated with matches from hundreds of guys, so they just pick the hottest guy, have a short term fling, and the guy ditches her after a couple of dates and continues working through the rest of the women (often in parallel). So, the hottest guys are never taken off the market, meaning the middle tier guys get few chances, and women complain that "men are all the same" and only want ONS not a relationship.
I’ve worked with HR in order to assist at a job fair. I don’t think people truly appreciate how inundated with resumes HR can be once a position is announced. About a fifth of the way through the pile I started zoning out because they all seemed to blend together.
We wound up trudging through the stack. In order to lighten the mood I told I joke I heard from somewhere else:
“We should shuffle the pile and throw half of them in the trash. I don’t want to hire unlucky employees”
> We should shuffle the pile and throw half of them in the trash. I don’t want to hire unlucky employees
Modern filtering using "AI" and ATS of all kinds is such a loaded dice that I believe an honest randomizing like you described would be a significant improvement for both ends of the funnel. Beyond jokes.
People don't trust people they just met anymore. The person who walked up could be a murderer. They would rather filter them through ai first or common networks.
> 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.
>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.
The reason why you are so discouraged is because you are a unicorn.
Companies have been looking to automate the application process for a long time, now. AI is just the latest dehumanizing tool employed to seprarate wheat from chaff long before any human needs to look at the results. And the reason why people are using AI to rewrite their CVs is precisely because companies are using AI to do the filtering. It is an arms war, started by companies, in which applicants have NO CHOICE but to use AI or remain unknown and unseen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I once casted volunteer actors for short movies. It costed me literally nothing to write: "Deadline for application is $DATE, you will hear from us within X days. You will either get a rejection or an invitation to a casting on $CASTINGDATE1 or $CASTINGDATE2."
And on the casting I personally guaranteed for a date when they will get a result. Rejections included feedback that helped candidates understand our decision and improve their craft.
This is in my opinion how you do things when you have a shred of respect for the people on the other side. Actors greatly valued how we did things.
If you can't live with the insecurity of knowing whether you're able to keep those dates, just make a pessimistic guess and add a few days on top. It is really not that hard.
The problem is - that’s unlikely to be true. If we make a miss, or the candidate(s) pull out we don’t want to re-list and re-funnel. So we keep the job open while we’re hiring. Usually we close it out once we have anyone at the final stages of 5-6 people in the interview loop.
But every job posting I’ve set up, I’ve configured an auto response template. It’s just a generic “sorry we decided to proceed with someone else” but it’s at least closure. We used to provide a few templates until someone demanded (including multiple emails to the hiring manager directly) looking for more information after we had send them a “sorry but we didn’t think your skills were a good match to the role”. It’s not perfect but at least everyone gets an answer from me.
Six months into a new role, started getting rejections from applications nearly a year ago. It feels like not a single norm from 2019 has persisted.
I hope of those 5-6, 4-5 are at least told something like "we are intending to proceed with another candidate, but we were impressed by your interview and may contact you again in the future".
That at least gives them an understanding that they are probably not going to get the job, but there's a slim chance they may be offered it in the future (although as I've said before, I'd rather be a different company's first choice than their second), rather than continuing to make them keep their life on pause because they don't know if you've already offered the job to someone else or whether you're still deliberating.
I’m not in the businesd of keeping tethers out just in case. The way we do it is leave the role open for 1-2 weeks, choose our top 10 or so, and start proceeding through initial screen, hiring manager call, panel, director call, and done. If we get to a few people at panel level, we stop reviewing new applicants, but we continue with everyone who is at panel level.
We’re open with candidates saying that we’re interviewing multiple people and that we’ll keep them updated. It’s usually 5-6 weeks _in total_ so realistically you’ll have had maximum 2 weeks where we will have said “we’ve got three candidates at the panel level, we’re speaking to next week. We’ll make a decision by friday the 31st April”. If I could wave a scheduling magic wand and get everything wrapped in a Fortnite I would.
I guess I misunderstood what you were saying. The post I replied to sounded like you told most of the candidates no, but kept the other 5-6 waiting until your chosen hire had accepted.
But this clarification makes it sound like you do actually do what I was suggesting - telling those others they weren't successful as soon as you've actually chosen one.
If you haven't finished making your selection yet, you obviously wouldn't tell the people still in the running either way. I was specifically talking about once you have made the decision and informed the successful candidate - because many companies don't bother telling the other candidates at that point just in case the candidate you chose doesn't accept the job, they still want to keep those other people live. I think it's better to tell them that you've offered the job to someone else and will only contact them again if that person doesn't acecpt.
I like your practice there but productions are known to be on a schedule in a way that many job postings are not. If you apply for positions with more turnover (e.g. manufacturing line) you’ll see more predictably timed communication.
It’s not worth a lawsuit for the reason to turn someone down. It’s also not worth hearing them argue back “yah I know JS you just asked bad question XYZ”… just not worth it
Hiring teams don’t actually have to interview every single applicant. I was a “hiring manager”(quotes because I effectively wasn’t due to my director involving himself in every decision) for a team that took 8 months to fill a role.
It wasn’t for lack of applicants but because the company as an org was acting like maybe there was an even better option amongst the remaining applicants despite finding people perfectly suited for the role.
I compared it to the family guy skit where Peter chose a mystery box over a boat saying “the mystery box could be anything, it could even be a boat!” to managers in my social circle in other companies and it resonated with them so it didn’t appear to be a rare situation.
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
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.
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.
Companies will open source software just for the express purpose of finding people and having a place to screen hires securely via contract work.
> 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.
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.
Won't that filter out actual sane people who would find Pascal knowledge requirements off-putting? It's like if you said, must have experience with OS/2 Warp to a DevOps guy. Or do you mention somehow that it's an AI canary signal?
I have Pascal experience :) My first job was a Delphi application...
For that time and task (accounting app), Pascal was great.
Indeed! It's only to filter out people who don't put in details. If you put "I survived Embarcadaro's bullshit and used Kylix to make a Linux version of our app." then YourResume := YourResume + 1;
I've dabbled with Kylix when it was new but in spite of still keeping in touch with my old job they weren't interested in cross platform. Possibly because their customers had no idea what Linux was back then...
At some point they went Oracle backend so maybe they don't care about Embarcadero's bullshit because they have bigger licensing problems to worry about...
This is also why candidates have turned towards the pattern of just putting whatever is necessary on their resume.
There’s no difference between a bait question like that or an ignorant HR employee whose following company policy on minimum number of years on any technology when said technology hasn’t even existed this long.
You put inaccurate information on your job description you shouldn’t be surprised at inaccurate information on the application.
You'll also filter out people smart enough to know that this is a bullshit keyword matching game and the only way to win it is to put the keywords on their resume.
Because they assume that the job posting was written by a non-technical idiot, and 95% of the time, they'd be correct, and they are just playing the game as the game expects to be played.
Look. If you're looking for 100% integrity and honesty from everyone in their communication, you shouldn't expect find it in a corporation's hiring and HR process. Everyone white-lies (or black-lies) all the time, both up and down the chain. The bones of this interaction do not value, reward, or even want honesty.
Everyone hates on HR here, but I did found them quite good in companies I worked for. They were not the ones who judged technical skills or even picked people. They scheduled interviews and such.
The worst hiring nonsense I have seen came from engineers. Stuff like giving people weird puzzles, rejecting or accepting people on random factoids, "beer test", demanding uber senior experience for an unglamorous boring take jira close jira position. And above all, believing that every good engineer is my copy. It takes an engineer to reject a guy because he reads different blog, has different opinion on programming languages company does not uses anyway.
I heard a hiring manager, an engineer, say that he knows whether he wants the guy or not in first 10 second. It is clear in that first sentence from vibes. I genuinely it is people like him who make hiring process into crap.
I hope you are clearly marking this as "nice to have".
> 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.
Ummm.. my point was that before LLMs an utterly unqualified person would not even be able to write a decent CV.
They wouldn't be in the candidate pool because they would fail at step 0.
Now the village idiot can generate a reasonable CV for very complex jobs.
I have seen flawless CV from people who were bad in practice or in the interview. The interview completely changing which person looked the best was not unusual.
Yes, and those dud candidates waste the company precious time and money, as well as wasting the candidate’s time.
If you have to interview more than a handful of candidates to hire for a non-specialist role then something is seriously broken in either your hiring system or hiring for those positions in general.
> 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?
It's astonishing how many people working in tech don't realize the impact of automation in this regard.
This basically kills any "cold job application". Now it's all back to references and nepotism. I've gotten almost all my past jobs by applying to a job I liked, someone figuring out my CV was decent and then passing interviews.
Now the same people filtering CVs have to wade through so much crap that it's almost impossible to even pass that stage.
> oh no, where are my tears?
Very likely, waiting for you in line in front of the unemployment office, 10 years from now.
> Very likely, waiting for you in line in front of the unemployment office, 10 years from now.
so nothing's changed?
> This basically kills any "cold job application". Now it's all back to references and nepotism. I've gotten almost all my past jobs by applying to a job I liked, someone figuring out my CV was decent and then passing interviews.
and my argument is that THERE WERE NO COLD APPLICATIONS
even you yourself say - you had to pass interviews. Everything is decided by the direct contact with the candidate
now everything will simply skip directly to that stage of skill checks, instead of playing cat-and-mouse game of phrasing, misphrasing and outright lies
A cold application just means that the candidate applied directly with no referral or introduction. It’s always been the case that both warm and cold applications went though the same interview processes, maybe just with a different first conversation. The argument is that there’s no way to get to a first conversation without already knowing someone who can provide the warm introduction.
Counterexample: I've never gotten a single job through nepotism and references, and I'm in my mid-40s. Indeed, I just got a new job—on a different continent!—this year by applying blind, interviewing well, and impressing them with my actual skills and knowledge. Didn't know a single person here, didn't get recommended or introduced by anyone.
Perhaps it makes difference that my jobs have not been in "the tech industry"—they've all been technical jobs within non-technical organizations (mostly in higher education).
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.
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