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.