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.
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.
I think the point is that people have different preferences: those didn’t matter before COVID but they do matter now.
There are at least a couple of trade offs here.
1. Companies compete for applicants, and applicants - even good applicants - will often prefer companies with less arduous hiring processes except where they specifically want to work at that company.
2. Filtering out applicants who don’t want, or for whom it will be impractical, to attend in person interviews will meaning losing out on good applicants, but also reduces the applicant pool (e.g., to a geographic region).
I could see a world where we’re slowly forced in this direction though simply because I can see that even the kind of dynamic reasoning interview recommended in TFA will become gameable by AI before too much more time passes.
> “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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
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).
> 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
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.
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’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…
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.
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.
> High performers tend to have more options and will not jump through infinite hoops.
Biases are a strange thing. “High performers” aren’t one homogenous group; take a staff engineer at a FAANG and plop them in a role at a startup or vice versa and you’ll find very quickly that high performers are a product of environment (IME). The people you need to ship something at a big company will sink your startup, and the people who will lead a startup to unicorn levels of success will flounder in frustration in a big corp.
Finding high performers is really hard, as you said it’s a filtering problem, and it’s very much based on vibes and feelings. Leetcode, take home tests, on site tests, discussions about projects all filter for specific things - some or many of which aren’t related to the job at hand. If we removed the “risk of leaving current job element” the only way to do it would be to give someone a 3 month trial and see if they’re a fit. Honestly you probably know in your gut by week 2 if it’s going to work or not.
It doesn't even need to be startups versus FANNG. I've seen first-hand how people hired into various roles aren't a great fit for roles as a company grows and changes. Of course, they can adapt to various degrees but they'd probably never have been hired for the roles they're now in.
The problem with trials is that people often have a current job of some sort and having things not work out puts them in a difficult situation. May happen anyway but, generally, a new job is assumed to be at least a somewhat stable situation.
> The problem with trials is that people often have a current job of some sort and having things not work out puts them in a difficult situation. May happen anyway but, generally, a new job is assumed to be at least a somewhat stable situation.
Totally, and I’d never say “hey I think you might be a fit, let’s try it out for 3 months”. But if we interview someone I’m just doing my best to try and figure out do they get on with the team, do they have the right skill set match for the gap we’re trying to fill and will their working style work in the org. Everything after that is (unfortunately) up to how it goes when we’re working together.
Yeah, probationary periods are one thing. But, if I leave a job and, especially if I relocate, I want a pretty good implicit guarantee however informal that, absent a real mis-meeting of the minds I'm not going to be on the streets in three months.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine you have a coin-flipping tournament with a large number of people - perhaps even billions. 2 people face off in rounds and the winner advances. By the end someone will have won all their rounds. Is this person skilled or lucky?
> 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.)
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.
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.
No, this is 100% battle tested. I can't drop numbers but we just did a study at work comparing referrals to non-referrals... its night and day. Referrals are out performing across the board. the only problem is that eventually you run out of referrals
I expect a lot of that is due to the referral being familiar with an already ensconced employee, as well as the referrer being incentivized to ensure the referral's success.
I am aware of several startups that started this way, and have been involved in some. The quality of the results depends on who you seed the graph with, of course; but I’ve seen it work well.
As requested by the original poster, it doesn’t scale.
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?
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."
You don’t have 100 candidates though - you likely have 90 applicants that just fail to meet the basic criteria. I hire for games and every single job posting we make for programmers we get about 10% of applicants who have literally never programmed before, even for lead level roles .
Well, these days you'll have 1000 candidates, you drop the 900 that fail to meet the basic criteria, and you're left with 100 that you can't immediately tell are frauds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
“…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.
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.
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.
> 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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
FYI companies should be reimbursing travel expenses for this travel. As a candidate it's worth clarifying to confirm so you don't get some oddball startup trying to force candidates to pay their own travel, but every big company travel interview will be expenses paid down to your travel to/from the airport and the meals you eat along the way.
The time commitment is real, but on-site travel is almost always reserved for the last round on-site. Often as a final pass verification, or when the company is down to a couple of final candidates. Companies aren't flying every applicant out for all of the interviews. If you get to that point, you're close to the job.
If the cost of hiring the wrong person is huge, the cost (in terms of time and money) of conducting on-site interviews is almost certainly lower.
Also, in terms of the costs to the applicants, this touches on the oligopolistic nature of so many industries today, which has resulted in high concentrations of the most desirable jobs in places with the highest costs of living.
Basically, unless you already have a FAANG job or are independently wealthy, it's not easy to up and move to Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc. and job hunt.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
There were phone screens before Covid
> 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.
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.
I think the point is that people have different preferences: those didn’t matter before COVID but they do matter now.
There are at least a couple of trade offs here.
1. Companies compete for applicants, and applicants - even good applicants - will often prefer companies with less arduous hiring processes except where they specifically want to work at that company.
2. Filtering out applicants who don’t want, or for whom it will be impractical, to attend in person interviews will meaning losing out on good applicants, but also reduces the applicant pool (e.g., to a geographic region).
I could see a world where we’re slowly forced in this direction though simply because I can see that even the kind of dynamic reasoning interview recommended in TFA will become gameable by AI before too much more time passes.
> “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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
> 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
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.
I have Pascal experience :) My first job was a Delphi application...
For that time and task (accounting app), Pascal was great.
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.
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.
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…
> 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.
IME the only way to make them feel the pain is have them responsible. Panel gets yes/no and hiring manager makes final decision. It’s not a consensus.
Eh. I've been on hiring committees and have been sort of eh and then they're the one. Let's do it.
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.
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.
> High performers tend to have more options and will not jump through infinite hoops.
Biases are a strange thing. “High performers” aren’t one homogenous group; take a staff engineer at a FAANG and plop them in a role at a startup or vice versa and you’ll find very quickly that high performers are a product of environment (IME). The people you need to ship something at a big company will sink your startup, and the people who will lead a startup to unicorn levels of success will flounder in frustration in a big corp.
Finding high performers is really hard, as you said it’s a filtering problem, and it’s very much based on vibes and feelings. Leetcode, take home tests, on site tests, discussions about projects all filter for specific things - some or many of which aren’t related to the job at hand. If we removed the “risk of leaving current job element” the only way to do it would be to give someone a 3 month trial and see if they’re a fit. Honestly you probably know in your gut by week 2 if it’s going to work or not.
It doesn't even need to be startups versus FANNG. I've seen first-hand how people hired into various roles aren't a great fit for roles as a company grows and changes. Of course, they can adapt to various degrees but they'd probably never have been hired for the roles they're now in.
The problem with trials is that people often have a current job of some sort and having things not work out puts them in a difficult situation. May happen anyway but, generally, a new job is assumed to be at least a somewhat stable situation.
> The problem with trials is that people often have a current job of some sort and having things not work out puts them in a difficult situation. May happen anyway but, generally, a new job is assumed to be at least a somewhat stable situation.
Totally, and I’d never say “hey I think you might be a fit, let’s try it out for 3 months”. But if we interview someone I’m just doing my best to try and figure out do they get on with the team, do they have the right skill set match for the gap we’re trying to fill and will their working style work in the org. Everything after that is (unfortunately) up to how it goes when we’re working together.
Yeah, probationary periods are one thing. But, if I leave a job and, especially if I relocate, I want a pretty good implicit guarantee however informal that, absent a real mis-meeting of the minds I'm not going to be on the streets in three months.
Yeah id never actually hire like that in real life. People’s lives are at play, and it’s more important that we don’t wreck someone’s life IMO.
Agreed, that's why I said used the phrasing "tend to". There's no silver bullet.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine you have a coin-flipping tournament with a large number of people - perhaps even billions. 2 people face off in rounds and the winner advances. By the end someone will have won all their rounds. Is this person skilled or lucky?
People really want _their_ position to be meritocracy because their ego can't handle alternatives of a chaotic world.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
No, this is 100% battle tested. I can't drop numbers but we just did a study at work comparing referrals to non-referrals... its night and day. Referrals are out performing across the board. the only problem is that eventually you run out of referrals
>> Referrals are out performing across the board
I expect a lot of that is due to the referral being familiar with an already ensconced employee, as well as the referrer being incentivized to ensure the referral's success.
I am aware of several startups that started this way, and have been involved in some. The quality of the results depends on who you seed the graph with, of course; but I’ve seen it work well.
As requested by the original poster, it doesn’t scale.
+1, referred candidates at my company perform way better in interviews and on the job compared to cold applicants
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?
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
Apprenticeship? Actually spend time working with them on real work.
It's both hard and doesn't scale.
The problem is that you have 100 applicants and one apprentice slot.
You don’t have 100 candidates though - you likely have 90 applicants that just fail to meet the basic criteria. I hire for games and every single job posting we make for programmers we get about 10% of applicants who have literally never programmed before, even for lead level roles .
Well, these days you'll have 1000 candidates, you drop the 900 that fail to meet the basic criteria, and you're left with 100 that you can't immediately tell are frauds.
I’ve been hiring for remote game programmer jobs. We got 300 applicants in 6 weeks for the last one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To modify the old russian saying: "we pretend to have expertise and they pretend to be interested in hiring us"
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.
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
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
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...
“…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.
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.
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.
> 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?)
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.
Hiring was broken long before ai
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.
Yes. People are gatekeeping. They are not interviewing with the aim of having an interesting conversation. They are trying to block hiring.
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.
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
That's nice. But a lot of people looking for professional jobs may take a year+ to find a position.
Been 3 years for me so far
Yes they just automated the broken now.
There's a spectrum of 'broken' and AI made it worse
Tech hiring has been broken for decades. AI just makes it so obvious how broken it is.
An AI written article writing about AI resumes and AI interviewers -- https://www.pangram.com/history/38790b9f-dda1-4ea9-9b6c-3858....
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
In the not too distant past (like 10 years ago) flying people to a final in person round was standard practice.
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.
Standard and expensive (in terms of time and money) for both the company and the applicant
FYI companies should be reimbursing travel expenses for this travel. As a candidate it's worth clarifying to confirm so you don't get some oddball startup trying to force candidates to pay their own travel, but every big company travel interview will be expenses paid down to your travel to/from the airport and the meals you eat along the way.
The time commitment is real, but on-site travel is almost always reserved for the last round on-site. Often as a final pass verification, or when the company is down to a couple of final candidates. Companies aren't flying every applicant out for all of the interviews. If you get to that point, you're close to the job.
Well, maybe some things should be expensive.
If the cost of hiring the wrong person is huge, the cost (in terms of time and money) of conducting on-site interviews is almost certainly lower.
Also, in terms of the costs to the applicants, this touches on the oligopolistic nature of so many industries today, which has resulted in high concentrations of the most desirable jobs in places with the highest costs of living.
Basically, unless you already have a FAANG job or are independently wealthy, it's not easy to up and move to Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc. and job hunt.
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
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.
Absolutely. It turns out friction is important in the right places.
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.
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.
HR/legal departments broke hiring. AI is just revealing how broken it is.
https://archive.ph/Pfl79
> "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.
Anecdotally At the moment, about half of our inbound applicants are fake profiles
> "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
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.
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.
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.
Hiring has always been broken.
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
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.
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.
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.
It wasn't broken before?
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.
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.
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
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.
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)