back
90 comments
This is the future. Every unemployed person will have an AI scanning all the job listings. They can send off 5k applications a day. Conversely, every open position will receive 100k applications, almost all of which will have fictional resumés and perfectly tailored cover letters. These will be fed into the company AI, which unavoidably has to make hiring decisions.

The actual hire will be someone the hiring manager knows from college.

And the AI will be sending rejection/acceptance emails to the candidate which in return will send an AI/generated response back, which will result in an AI giving an interview to someone who created an AI to do said interview..:
So job interviews will incorporate Voight-Kampff test-style questions?

"The tortoise lies there, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over, but it cannot do so without your help. You are not helping. Why?"

There's quite a common Sci-Fi trope of sending an AI proxy to represent oneself or to triage inboxes etc.; guess the future is now
:D exactly. AI will help one side to decrease the signal to noise ratio and the other side to increase it. The same for the 'content' industry.
But this use case shows that the rate of success is low when using ai. So if anything it would indicate that using ai for job applications is not a good idea. If i see ai spam in a job applicant’s email i am rejecting them instantly.
The rate of success is tremendously high when viewed as a return on time invested compared to the 'normal' method.
AI is just the new spam.
You don't see AI spam. All I have to add to the AI prompt is "use the style of Matt Levine", "patio11", "Hemmingway", "a 10 year old on crack" or "Donald Trump" and the letter looks nothing like what you think AI writing looks like.
It just came to my mind that, for all the talk about cryptocurrency being "funny money", this could actually be an interesting use case for utility tokens.

"Hey, do you want to apply to the position? Tell me how many Vitae (tm) tokens you want to pay for it."

It doesn't need to be worth a lot, it just needs to be something.

Now everyone can set up a job post and receive lots of free Vitae (assuming it can be converted to and from USD) and the job market becomes flooded
Prior to the 18th century reforms, British army commissions (officer jobs) were explicitly bought and sold.

> It doesn't need to be worth a lot, it just needs to be something.

Market pricing, though. I can see the rate for being considered for lucrative tech jobs climbing into tens of thousands of dollars (or one or two paycheques).

Well now you’ve invented Upwork Connects tokens which you buy in order to bid on contracts
Why couldn't you do that directly with USD?
How does this do anything expect perpetuate the already well-off, who can purchase an excess supply of Vitae?
The something awful forums are still out there charging $10 to post in 2023, so…
It’s a pretty grinding process. I’ve been fortunate in the past, staying with 2 companies over the span of 15+ years and I am now having to job hunt for the first time since 2005.

I found a local contracting opportunity that sounded really interesting and something I could probably be a good fit for. It was a small company, 4 people, so I actually emailed the president directly with a well thought out introduction and explaining why I thought I would be a good fit for the position. Radio silence…

So, even the old adage of ‘hit the bricks and knock on doors’ has gone the way of the dodo.

Email isn't knocking on doors.
That is a fair rebuttal.

I was legitimately considering going to their office but it being a small company, in the medical field, and uncertainties about how individuals might react with COVID still present…I opted for a personal email to the owner of the company. Maybe I should have opted for the ‘cold call’ approach and just went to their office but I erred on the side of caution/ decorum.

The price (starting at $99) is a huge turn-off. I don't have that much money to spend at all; I don't have a job, for crying out loud. I'd rather sign a contract to give away the first $250 or so of my income. Hell, even make it $500. Just don't make me pre-pay for the chance to win a job - I cannot afford to gamble on this.
Sounds like a promotional article for the service he used, honestly.
It's a low conversion rate, but given the return on effort is incredible.

This is seems to be a good example of AI enriching/assisting with other processes.

> This is seems to be a good example of AI enriching/assisting with other processes.

It seems to me like a good example of AI making something worse for everyone involved.

HR and applications are already fucking awful.

and I don't care if large corps with automated ATS systems are mildly inconvenienced.

Statistically, most people weren't getting hired anyway with standard, non-AI ATS systems + the Mk1 Human Eyeball.

And of the hires, if you define successful hire as 2+ years in the role, most new hires fail at a rate between 50-80%[1]. Clearly not having AI is a failure. It might create tons of spam, but there is already a ton of spam, and it's miserable for everyone.

[1] https://itworkforce.intersog.com/blog/why-do-50-percent-of-a...

It helped 1 person at the expense of 5000 others who it inflicted spam on.

A legit use of the power of AI might be to scan 5000 listings and present you with the 20 best fits.

Except... you don't need AI for that, search and filtering has been a thing for a long time.
It doesn't really assist because it will just become an arms race between AI applications and AI filtering, which some companies have already started using.

Technology makes it easier to be more anonymous, superficial, and lazy on both sides of the equation. Each side will gain a small temporary advantage with every advance in AI and the end result will be that EVERYONE will be worse off than before.

That's because the job application process will be worse, people will feel more isolated, and you'll still need to spend just as much time as before if not more learning all these arcane tools.

Technology is truly becoming a disease. We've taken something good and used too much of it like sugar. Everything has a happy medium, and technology used with moderation could have been something good, but its use is being pushed to its logical conclusion through these prisoner's dilemma-type situations and is resulting in a degradation of society.

The people that make AI make me sick.

AI only highlights how ridiculous the hiring process is. A program that generates likely word sequences determines whether or not you get the job? What is even the point of that? The company looking for employees would be better off looking for people that are actually good at the job they are supposed to do there. (Unless that job is generating likely word sequences -- then they should buy AI instead of hiring people).

Without AI, such a process favors potential employees that are good at writing likely word sequences themselves, and not those that are good at actually dpoing the job.

> The people that make AI make me sick.

It’s as if suddenly a significant number of ai people are hell bent on spam, ip theft, putting people out of jobs, spreading fear, manipulating and gaslighting folks, and so on. Almost as if after decades of irrelevance and frustration at memes about if then else “ai” attempts they seek revenge.

The tone was set by their thought leaders, in particular sam altman and the openai clique.

Taking a tech that was supposed to be a force for good and turning it into a toxic charade is quite the achievement. But gradually people are starting to push back.

I dunno, if the success rate is only half a percent it's not selling it to me.

Mind you, I've never applied for a job myself, it's all gone through recruiters. This shows that that's going to continue, it's real people knowing real people, networks etc.

I have applied for three jobs in my career of 11 years and got two of them. This is bafflingly ineffectual, comparatively.
As someone approaching 50, coding since the age of 10, started doing side gigs at the age of 14, such success rate is very uncommon.
That is survivorship bias though. Maybe you had like 5 opportunities and got three jobs. If they hadn't worked out, finding the 6th would be way harder.

For those pigeons where there are no holes, it instead seems impossible.

I never had much problem with applications in the last, but in the last job search it was futile. I’m still just now getting rejections from jobs I applied to months ago which seem a perfect fit for my resume.

I even applied to a place I worked a ~5 years ago, which I got via cold application. Apparently I’m not good enough anymore because I couldn’t get past the filters.

I finally found a job through a referral. Oddly, it was working with tech I have basically no experience in and probably had the most awkward interview out of all the ones I ended up doing.

Yeah, for the first time I had to send more than 3 applications this year.

I guess it’s time to bring me to the farm

maybe you aren't stretching far enough. if you apply for jobs you are absolutely qualified for, obviously you'll get them. it's probably worth some effort to get a ~30% more difficult job with 30% more pay for most people.
that's an awful application to interview ratio, jeez
but a fairly good effort to interview ratio :-)

(my main empathy will go at the recruiters, having to filter out massive amounts of auto-generated applicant files!)

I agree, but to some extend that the bed companies made, now they have to lay in it

because it's an arms race, recruiters are also using AI to filter people, just look at the chat GPT hack for resumes

I never expected to see a sentence with 'recruiters' and 'empathy' that didn't include the words 'lack of'.
I found myself in a similar position (unemployed) after I left my cozy (but soul-sucking) corporate job last year and [disclosure: ] I built a somewhat similar tool but I decided against automating the application process.

Instead of focusing on quantity - number of applications - I decided to focus on quality - better resumes that emphasise the candidates skills that align with the job ad.

And instead of applying to all job ads, my service analyses a candidates resume and finds positions that closely match the candidate experience.

I saw some YouTube video, where someone was applying to 500+ jobs per week with some automation in the same fashion. So this is probably already quite common. Makes the need for building ones own network even more important at this point, there's really no way to differentiate yourself from 10k people who apply to a job in the first 5 hours of its being posted, other than a internal reference.
I find interesting that he only got 20 interviews after the ai sent 5k applications and same 20 interviews after applying manually few hundred times. I wonder what "few hundred" means? 200 or 900?

I think I had a similar response rate when looking for work few months ago. I applied to ~40 jobs and I got 3 interviews.

Why even write cover letters anymore?
To show you care enough about this particular job to have your AI read up on it and write a custom cover letter for it.
If you want to waste 3 extra hours per application.
Recently I got an interview for a job after refusing to do the pre-interview PR test. They had received an avalanche of pull requests on that repo that looked suspiciously similar so my impudence made me the most human-sounding candidate.