Instead, the approach that will continue increasing in dominance is hiring referrals and finding jobs through personal networks.
In a world that increasingly resembles The Library of Babel,
- the main way to know what's true is to tune into news sources you trust (monolithic old school media, or personality driven new-school media, social media, etc.),
- the main way to learn what to watch/listen/read is to take recommendations from people you trust, or received through channels you trust,
- the main way to hire or get hired is, increasingly, by exploiting a network of people you trust.
All of this compensates for ambient oversaturation by using the best available (and tunable!) desaturation filter: your trust network.
Social affinity and reputation represent winning strategies that have served humans very well since the dawn of time. It shouldn't be surprising that they continue to be extremely effective even (or perhaps especially) in the age of AI.
Nepotism is because ‘what is the point of doing all this’ - aka passing things on to family.
It also enables a degree of aligned interests between what could otherwise be hard to align parties (trust, like you mention), but that not why someone gets a big name acting slot, or gets put on the board of a friends company.
Nepotism entangles organizational interests with personal interests, in both good and bad ways. It means that someone may hire a friend or family member because they know they're a) competent enough for the job, and b) they actually, personally know them, which significantly reduces a risk of the hire turning out bad, relative to a stranger with equal or better credentials. But it also means that someone may hire a friend or family member because they're trading favors, which is bad for the organization[0].
I suppose in practice the latter might be more common - I'd guess it could be the whole idea has structural dynamics similar to "the market for lemons". I haven't spent much time thinking about it and researching the problem in depth, so I can't say.
--
[0] - And may or may not be bad for the local community. I suppose the larger problem for organizations is simply that they're designed to be focused, and need to maintain alignment of incentives across the org chart. Nepotism is a threat because it attaches new edges to the org chart - edges that lead to much more complex and fuzzy graphs of family and community relationships, breaking the narrow focus that makes organizations work.
>that have served humans very well since the dawn of time.
Except none of this scales in the modern world beyond flat small orgs in homogenous high trust cultures, basically modern tribes.
If you're a large org with diverse people from everywhere and you empower everyone down the ladder to hire the people they trust, they'll just end up gaming the system or hiring their friends and family and the org fails from nepotism, corruption and cronyism.
It's not like we don't have enough examples of this happening everywhere in the world, and why most places have official hiring policies against this behavior, or policies to obfuscate connections from the hiring pipeline to make sure people get in exclusively on merit.
It's also why socialism is only financially viable in small homogeneous communities (like the Amish for example) where everyone adheres to the social contract of contributing to society more than they take out, and is kept accountable by the ingroup to be honest, but fails at a nation level where everyone including the government in charge of managing it tries to defraud it or game the system in their favor taking out more than they contribute, leading to constant budget deficit and ultimately collapse (see EU state pension systems)
But yes, fully eliminating nepotism and cronyism via rules and laws is nearly impossible due to human own-group bias, so networking will always be a huge asset.
Although I might know a solution, hear me out. I have fond memories of being part of this amazing private torrent tracker back in the day, that was 100% invite only, and the way the community was kept honest and accountable to the spirit and the rules, was that every person was responsible for the people they invite, so if their invites would commit a bannable offense, their parent who invited them would also got banned, meaning people would be very selective with their invites, biasing more towards meritocracy rather than nepotism or selling their invites online for cash which was common back then. Feels like something that could scale IRL as well. You hire your friend that turns out to be a shit employee, you're out the door along with him.
Unfortunately these have been bought up by billionaires that use them as play things to get richer.
>from people you trust,
In one particular area where they understand what is going on. I have lawyers I would trust with my life on legal matters, but should not be trusted around any digital device.
>y exploiting a network of people you trust.
agreed, but sucks for people that don't have that.
I'd really like a rejection physical letter back saying thankyou for application but no thanks signed by a human. I put some effort in to applying, they could at least exert some effort coming back, rather than simply ghosting. A reasonable barrier to bots collecting CV's.
>I'd really like a rejection physical letter back saying thankyou for application but no thanks signed by a human
If you want personalized human rejection letters to come back to you, then the hiring process would have to be equally friction based: i.e. mailing in notarized copies of documents and interviewing in person, for it to scale and not overwhelm a company's resources.
>I put some effort in to applying
Yeah but so did hundreds of other people. This worked in the world of 20+ years ago, but it doesn't scale anymore in the era of online applications where every job posting gets hundreds of applications within a week.
It doesn't matter if you put in more work in your application than the other 200 candidates who are doing "spray and pray", it's too much noise for humans to swift through with without some automated screening that might just as well drop you through the net because it can't tell the amount of work you put in, you're just a number in a queue.
Not the same industry but at least one literary agent does this: if you physically print and mail your book proposal, they will respond with a short but polite, physical rejection letter if they reject you.
But I think it's a generational thing. The younger agents I know of just shut down all their submissions when they get overwhelmed, or they start requiring everyone to physically meet them at a conference first.
In Germany it used to be that in some places, not only you were expected to have a proper application folder with various sections for the various kinds of material (CV, application letter, recomendantions, certificates, photo), they would post it back if refused.
This stopped being a thing about 15 years ago though.
I still have some of those applications in a box somewhere.
I like this as an optional "this will be read and considered by a human" guarantee added to a job posting. That way, you can still get the reach of digital submissions but the benefits of this approach.
At this rate we just need the entire system to breakdown so we can rebuild it with some hard standards. I shouldn't need to reenter my information. Period.
After seeing the flood of resumes for application, I do think a small cost to apply wouldn't be a bad thing for either applicants or companies. I also realize that if someone is unemployed, getting them to pay money they don't have to find a new job is counterproductive.
However, when we wanted to hire a new Ops person at work, the flood of obviously not qualified at all applicants we got was insane.
> the flood of obviously not qualified at all applicants we got was insane
From speaking to folks looking for jobs in tech over the past few years, this is a natural result.
1. Companies write requirements on the job posting that are a little beyond reasonable for the role and salary.
2. Applicants learn over time, and start applying to jobs for which they only meet most of the qualifications.
3. Companies adjust and write even more ridiculous requirements.
4. Applicants start applying to jobs for which they only meet some requirements.
5. Repeat.
As evidence that the applicants are, at every stage, correctly reacting to the situation: I have received positive responses (and, later, job offers) by applying to roles for which I am only mostly qualified, and I know many people for whom this is true of jobs they are only barely qualified for.
The last req I opened I closed around 500 applicants. I opened it Thursday afternoon and closed it Tuesday morning.
Over 40% were totally nonqualified. The job was for a rails engineer. In the current market, I wanted exactly what I asked for: a senior rails eng. But as long as the applicant had shipped a web app in a dynamic language -- node, react, vue, svelte, django, flask, phoenix, whatever the php folks use, etc -- it's not unreasonable to apply. That 40% had never shipped a webapp. Another 10% or more completely ignored the senior: many had < 1 year of experience.
I ended up using AI to filter because even 1 minute per is an entire 9 hour day. Engaging for 3 minutes per application is 3x that. And I can't be in a position where I spend effort while the applicant spent none: I assume the bulk of these were just mass applications.
I think it is an anecdote about a trading firm. Something about throwing the CVs to their desk from a few feet away. Only the ones who made it to the desk were considered. After all who wants to hire unlucky traders?
>And I can't be in a position where I spend effort while the applicant spent none
But isn't that literally what you are paid for? Your job is to do the steps needed to hire someone and that includes reading through applicants. Why would the applicants -that are dojng this for free, for a promise of a posibility- need to put more effort than you?
> As evidence that the applicants are, at every stage, correctly reacting to the situation: I have received positive responses (and, later, job offers) by applying to roles for which I am only mostly qualified...
Even fifteen years ago, I was getting advice from grizzled (programming industry) veterans of the form
If you match even half of what they're asking for, apply. Most of the time, those lists are put together by HR; and even if the list is completely accurate, they're never going to find anyone that meets all those requirements. The ad is asking for the *ideal* candidate. The smart companies know they're going to have to settle for less. Let *them* filter *you* out.
I've interviewed a fair bit, both in and out of Silicon Valley. I've had exactly two interviews where the folks hiring knew exactly what they wanted. All the others were like "Well, we need a programmer to do programmer stuff, IDK.".
That's nothing new. From the job applicant perspective it has always been stupid to filter yourself out if you're even slightly qualified. I mean if you're already unemployed then you have plenty of free time to submit applications so there's nothing to lose.
I wish this wasn't true (but know it is from experience), because those of us who are posting job requirements that actually correspond to what we're looking for are left with nonsense applications.
In your process, I understand why step 2 would occur. But what are the companies "adjusting" to in step 3? What's gone out of whack for them that they're trying to correct?
Well, if the majority of candidates are applying to a job where they only meet four out of five of the requirements, if the employer can add a sixth requirement they may naively think then applicants will have five out of six requirements.
Alternatively, if they receive too many applications, a solution is to be more specific so they receive fewer or they can filter out more earlier. Adding additional requirements is one way to do this, even if the requirements are not necessarily connected to a successful candidate (knowing how to write in languages that aren't used in the company, for example); some recruiters don't seem to know that some of those requirements are completely irrelevant to the position.
It’s a Turing pattern generator. Inevitable results.
To fix it, employers could require applicants to include a random variant as part of their application. What parameters? Postage, as is being discussed. Attach a handwritten personal reference letter.
I once designed, built and sent — on my own initiative — a building facade model for an architecture job, but it was with Michael Graves, so I’m sure other applicants sent in entire villages. They were old school enough to send it back with the rejection letter.
If I were a job applicant, I don't know how much I'd pay for an ironclad guarantee that the human hiring manager for the role would open and read my resume. $100? Multiple hundreds?
There are a ton of fake jobs openings out there, or which sort of exist, but they aren't exactly eager to hire and haven't filled the role in nine months.
You'd have to pay with no guarantee anyone will even read it, which even at a fairly low cost rapidly becomes an issue when you might have to apply to a lot of jobs.
Making the employer also pay might help, but I suspect then the employers will just wander over to another jobs site that promises free listings.
They already do this, listen to the radio at off hours and there will be many job ads with instructions to apply via postal mail. Of course the reason isn't to deter LLMs it's to deter Americans so the employer can claim no Americans applied in their visa and green card filings.
As much hate as H1Bs get, I’ve worked at two large companies where the publicly posted salary range for H1B applications were consistently higher than my own. In all humility, I was more qualified and more experienced than required by the position.
Maybe there is a dearth of talent, maybe it’s about control, maybe is someone trying to get a friend hired. I don’t think it’s about the money.
> maybe it’s about control, maybe is someone trying to get a friend hired
Control of the employee is a huge one.
When telling a US citizen they have to work 80s, the citizen can tell you to fuck off and leave for the weekend. The H1B debates the risk of their visa not getting renewed/revoked.
The second issue is a huge problem in some large companies. Instead of a branch being a random assortment of people based on merit it becomes a tight knit group based on loyalty to the person that got them hired with few actual interests in the company itself. These can become serious risks for companies as classism and racism very commonly occur. Also with everyone covering for everyone else fraud and other means of overcoming accounting controls is at higher risk of occurring.
Take a look at the job ads in your local paper's classified section. You'll have to search as classifieds don't have their own section anymore, but it'll be in somewhere.
You'll likely see some listings with very specific and odd instructions to apply. I seem to recall there was a ruling/advisory that requiring application on paper doesn't actually meet the requirements for immigration, but it used to. You would see very detailed and specific requirements, and it would be cumbersome to apply, and the hiring company would be hoping that only the candidate they already knew would apply.
In my last job search, I sent out a few dozen resumes utilizing snail mail. It was from a job board that searched for job descriptions that only accepted applications through physical mail. There were some big tech companies I was able to apply to. Ultimately, I didn't get a role from snail mail but it was an interesting process. I would probably expose myself if I detailed the specific service I used, but you can lookup online tools where you upload a PDF and they print it out and send it to an address for like $1 each (more for certified, priority, etc.) and I confirmed it worked. I even had companies mail me back rejection letters, so that was a first.
For every 1 LLM applicant that this idea would deter, you would also deter 50 humans who simply don't feel like having to send a letter to apply to a job.
At least for me, I'd still rather mail a letter versus input all my personal details and job experience into yet another CRM with a crappy data entry interface.
"Thank you for uploading the PDF with all the information we need. Now, fill all that information in on this page that asks for 2 bits of information at a time and takes a minute to go to the next page. You are on page 1 of 50".
On the company side, you have a new revenue stream. On the ANPL side, you have another product you can securitize. Revenue generation and risk transfer, a win-win!
Well, presumably your business charges something to mail out job applications to companies? Like an application fee, that charge incurs a cost to applicant which will do something (presumably reduce applicant volume).
Plus by making that fee optionally replaced with time spent writing the letter, people who don't have the finances to pay a whole bunch of application fees can still apply for as many jobs as they're willing to put in the time.
The barrier of entry has gone up from nearly nothing to signing up (and presumably paying for) your service. This is a significant increase, which will simnifically decrease BS applications.
Last job I hired for I required short video submission answering some basic questions. If you didn't submit a video you were automatically disqualified. The previous position we hired for had over 1,000 applicants this last position around 500.
It selects for the most telegenic applicants with the best video production (and best coaching, etc.) In-person interviews have analogous issues but are less susceptible to cheating on the questions.
What about doing more to retain employees? Maybe don't layoff employees each time someone on CNBC makes a comment about the company's overhead looking a fraction of a percent too high? Perhaps even train people?
Instead, everyone expects there to be a magical unicorn out there who has decades of experience as a senior at multiple FAANGs but lives in Warm Spit, Missouri and is willing to work for the average Walmart wage in Warm Spit (locality adjustment, surely you understand why we must do this). Shrink your pool to your local area. Even if you allow remote work, require a physical interview at your office. Stop screwing up the process by worrying about edge cases involving unicorns flying across the globe to meet you. Once you stop chasing unicorns, most of the fraud goes away because it's the unicorn chute that's letting the fraudsters into the process.
But seriously, stop getting rid of good employees and stop refusing to build up employees from within. Very few are going to get hired away if you treat them well. The few who do leave will either be treated poorly at their new employer and want to return or be treated well, which means that employer isn't gaining some advantage over you by treating their employees lesser.
Of course, if you're just trying to get a bonus for cutting labor expenses a few percentage points before you parachute off to somewhere else, then you and the company that tolerates this both deserve to suffer. No doubt you'll both be at your congress critter's door to demand access to the global market because you believe skill is based on how little an employee is willing to accept in compensation. In a labor pool of over 150 million, no doubt it's true that you can't find anyone who knows React or Spring Boot.
Surely few people have a printer these days? I do (a color laser printer) but I'm a bit old school. And yes, my handwriting is, and always has been, dreadful.
I think something like an escrowed fee that both the applicant and the employer pay would be a reasonable way to solve the spam and keep both parties honest. If either the applicant or the employer are unhappy with the process (resume doesn't match, employer ghosts) - the fee is sent to charity, otherwise the fee is returned to both parties.
That used the be the trick FAANG used to justify H1B visas. Onerous application requirements like mailed applications to prove there's no Americans wanting the job
And maybe employers/recruiters should be required to include a template (but .doc is not allowed) of what format they expect, disclose if they will be OCR-ing it and with which tool/LLM, will they read it or feed it to an AI etc.
As someone who is currently looking for a job, I don't like this idea.
All this does is increase the effort and barrier to entry to apply for a job. This is not a good thing. Applying to jobs is already time consuming as it is; nobody wants more hoops to jump through.
I understand that recruiters/hiring managers/whatever get a lot of junk applications, but frankly, it is your job to sort through them. You are paid to do this.
Could the hiring/job seeking process be better? Yes, absolutely. Currently, it's terrible, and almost everyone involved is making it worse. But the solution is not mailing job applications.
I don't fully agree. I agree that helping employers find qualified candidates is good for those candidates, but I don't agree that making applications mail-in only would achieve that end. It doesn't solve a lot of the larger problems when it comes to job applications, and just makes things harder for the applicant.
That never seems to happen in practice. The number of jobs I have applied to that required additional effort and that never bothered to reply is just too high.
All sorts. Some make the application process very long, some ask for what is essentially a long cover letter through written questions, some ask you to complete tests, one sent me an IQ test...
> I understand that recruiters/hiring managers/whatever get a lot of junk applications, but frankly, it is your job to sort through them. You are paid to do this.
Recruiters, hiring managers, and whatevers are humans too, with ordinary human limitations. Just because they are paid to do something doesn't mean they gain superhuman capabilities.
Even if I am a recruiter with nothing else to do, if I get 5k applications for a role each week, I won't individually review 5k applications in a week. It's not possible. So I will have to rely on some automated system that filters out most of those applications. Who knows how good that system is.
On the other hand, if I get 100 mail applications for a role each week, that I can review that.
I'm not in love with this proposal, but I definitely see the appeal. Adding a little cost/effort on the applicant side automatically filters out a ton of applicants that have not bothered to learn anything about the role or company.
In the past I've had success with adding things to the job description like: "please include a link to your favorite gif in your email." And that filters out about 95% of applicants who don't read the job description and don't have a gif link in their email. But with LLMs I imagine those kinds of filters work less well than before.
That's a fair point! It is true that recruiters are human and cannot review 5k applications per week.
I don't mean to say that recruiters must/should review all applications, because indeed this is sometimes impossible. I'm just saying that, as a recruiter, your job is to review applications and you should therefore not be making things harder for the applicants.
Asking for someone's favourite GIF to filter out junk applications is a great idea. This does not detriment the applicant, and it makes the recruiter's job easier. This is good. Making all applications mail-in is not good, because it detriments the applicant (by way of costing significantly more time and some money), while also not solving some of the larger problems when it comes to the job application process.
> get a lot of junk applications, but frankly, it is your job to sort through them.
But this isn't their job. Their job is to hire someone who passes the hiring bar. If they can do that without ever looking at a random resume everyone at the company is happy.
An unstated thesis of the article is that several years from now people who want to accomplish that job just won't look at resumes submitted online - whatever anyone's feelings about it.
This is beneficial to both parties, it's not just to throw spikes on the road for applicants without care.
The less nonsensical applications they get, the more time they can give your application.
> I understand that recruiters/hiring managers/whatever get a lot of junk applications, but frankly, it is your job to sort through them. You are paid to do this.
Indeed they are, and that is what they're doing by asking for a written application.
Introducing JobbyPasta, the service that will hand-complete and mail in job applications for a small fee of $9.99 per application. Add on a transcription of your cover letter for an additional $4.99, or have us generate one (with your approval) and transcribe it for $7.99.
Have a lot of applications to send out? Subscribe to us monthly for $34.99/mo (billed annually).
I feel like this is already addressed in the "Aha! But you see..." section. There is nothing that one can't poke holes in, but if the holes are not big enough, the proposal is still sound.
And before the in-person interview, the applicant is required to produce a handwriting sample in front of the interviewer of random text, which is then compared against the mailed documents.
While time consuming, I would gladly use my otherwise underused but decent enough handwriting to carefully write out job applications. Can get really good pens to do it too. However, given my own network, that's probably not necessary anymore either way.
My mother had insanely superb handwriting, in part because her mother pushed good penmanship on her. While I can be sloppy, it was for me a challenge when I was young to copy her perfect handwriting (not for forging signatures though!) Handwriting is influenced by which hand is dominant. I am left, she was right handed... so not exactly close :)
Reminds me of how it was common in France until pretty recently for employers to use graphology (pseudoscience) analysis of candidate's handwritten letters to assess personality traits etc. When I was looking for work there I was lucky that the tech sector was already a abandoning the practice.
You can submit an application online, and require a printed QR code be mailed via post with a handwritten cover letter, achieving the personal intent, inconvenience tax, and cost, while still providing the convenience of digital resumes and applications. The mailed QR serves as a CAPTCHA.
Site appears to have been hugged to death. Here's a link to an archived version:
https://archive.ph/iTJTI
Instead, the approach that will continue increasing in dominance is hiring referrals and finding jobs through personal networks.
In a world that increasingly resembles The Library of Babel,
- the main way to know what's true is to tune into news sources you trust (monolithic old school media, or personality driven new-school media, social media, etc.),
- the main way to learn what to watch/listen/read is to take recommendations from people you trust, or received through channels you trust,
- the main way to hire or get hired is, increasingly, by exploiting a network of people you trust.
All of this compensates for ambient oversaturation by using the best available (and tunable!) desaturation filter: your trust network.
Social affinity and reputation represent winning strategies that have served humans very well since the dawn of time. It shouldn't be surprising that they continue to be extremely effective even (or perhaps especially) in the age of AI.
That's why "nepotism" still thrives, in spite of (at least here in the West) several generations being taught that it's bad, evil and unfair.
That isn’t why nepotism exists.
Nepotism is because ‘what is the point of doing all this’ - aka passing things on to family.
It also enables a degree of aligned interests between what could otherwise be hard to align parties (trust, like you mention), but that not why someone gets a big name acting slot, or gets put on the board of a friends company.
It's part of it.
Nepotism entangles organizational interests with personal interests, in both good and bad ways. It means that someone may hire a friend or family member because they know they're a) competent enough for the job, and b) they actually, personally know them, which significantly reduces a risk of the hire turning out bad, relative to a stranger with equal or better credentials. But it also means that someone may hire a friend or family member because they're trading favors, which is bad for the organization[0].
I suppose in practice the latter might be more common - I'd guess it could be the whole idea has structural dynamics similar to "the market for lemons". I haven't spent much time thinking about it and researching the problem in depth, so I can't say.
--
[0] - And may or may not be bad for the local community. I suppose the larger problem for organizations is simply that they're designed to be focused, and need to maintain alignment of incentives across the org chart. Nepotism is a threat because it attaches new edges to the org chart - edges that lead to much more complex and fuzzy graphs of family and community relationships, breaking the narrow focus that makes organizations work.
>that have served humans very well since the dawn of time.
Except none of this scales in the modern world beyond flat small orgs in homogenous high trust cultures, basically modern tribes.
If you're a large org with diverse people from everywhere and you empower everyone down the ladder to hire the people they trust, they'll just end up gaming the system or hiring their friends and family and the org fails from nepotism, corruption and cronyism.
It's not like we don't have enough examples of this happening everywhere in the world, and why most places have official hiring policies against this behavior, or policies to obfuscate connections from the hiring pipeline to make sure people get in exclusively on merit.
It's also why socialism is only financially viable in small homogeneous communities (like the Amish for example) where everyone adheres to the social contract of contributing to society more than they take out, and is kept accountable by the ingroup to be honest, but fails at a nation level where everyone including the government in charge of managing it tries to defraud it or game the system in their favor taking out more than they contribute, leading to constant budget deficit and ultimately collapse (see EU state pension systems)
But yes, fully eliminating nepotism and cronyism via rules and laws is nearly impossible due to human own-group bias, so networking will always be a huge asset.
Although I might know a solution, hear me out. I have fond memories of being part of this amazing private torrent tracker back in the day, that was 100% invite only, and the way the community was kept honest and accountable to the spirit and the rules, was that every person was responsible for the people they invite, so if their invites would commit a bannable offense, their parent who invited them would also got banned, meaning people would be very selective with their invites, biasing more towards meritocracy rather than nepotism or selling their invites online for cash which was common back then. Feels like something that could scale IRL as well. You hire your friend that turns out to be a shit employee, you're out the door along with him.
>monolithic old school media,
Unfortunately these have been bought up by billionaires that use them as play things to get richer.
>from people you trust,
In one particular area where they understand what is going on. I have lawyers I would trust with my life on legal matters, but should not be trusted around any digital device.
>y exploiting a network of people you trust.
agreed, but sucks for people that don't have that.
"wildly misplaced trust" is a subcategory of "trust", which is exactly how i meant it
I'd really like a rejection physical letter back saying thankyou for application but no thanks signed by a human. I put some effort in to applying, they could at least exert some effort coming back, rather than simply ghosting. A reasonable barrier to bots collecting CV's.
>I'd really like a rejection physical letter back saying thankyou for application but no thanks signed by a human
If you want personalized human rejection letters to come back to you, then the hiring process would have to be equally friction based: i.e. mailing in notarized copies of documents and interviewing in person, for it to scale and not overwhelm a company's resources.
>I put some effort in to applying
Yeah but so did hundreds of other people. This worked in the world of 20+ years ago, but it doesn't scale anymore in the era of online applications where every job posting gets hundreds of applications within a week.
It doesn't matter if you put in more work in your application than the other 200 candidates who are doing "spray and pray", it's too much noise for humans to swift through with without some automated screening that might just as well drop you through the net because it can't tell the amount of work you put in, you're just a number in a queue.
Not the same industry but at least one literary agent does this: if you physically print and mail your book proposal, they will respond with a short but polite, physical rejection letter if they reject you.
But I think it's a generational thing. The younger agents I know of just shut down all their submissions when they get overwhelmed, or they start requiring everyone to physically meet them at a conference first.
In Germany it used to be that in some places, not only you were expected to have a proper application folder with various sections for the various kinds of material (CV, application letter, recomendantions, certificates, photo), they would post it back if refused.
This stopped being a thing about 15 years ago though.
I still have some of those applications in a box somewhere.
I like this as an optional "this will be read and considered by a human" guarantee added to a job posting. That way, you can still get the reach of digital submissions but the benefits of this approach.
At this rate we just need the entire system to breakdown so we can rebuild it with some hard standards. I shouldn't need to reenter my information. Period.
After seeing the flood of resumes for application, I do think a small cost to apply wouldn't be a bad thing for either applicants or companies. I also realize that if someone is unemployed, getting them to pay money they don't have to find a new job is counterproductive.
However, when we wanted to hire a new Ops person at work, the flood of obviously not qualified at all applicants we got was insane.
> the flood of obviously not qualified at all applicants we got was insane
From speaking to folks looking for jobs in tech over the past few years, this is a natural result.
1. Companies write requirements on the job posting that are a little beyond reasonable for the role and salary.
2. Applicants learn over time, and start applying to jobs for which they only meet most of the qualifications.
3. Companies adjust and write even more ridiculous requirements.
4. Applicants start applying to jobs for which they only meet some requirements.
5. Repeat.
As evidence that the applicants are, at every stage, correctly reacting to the situation: I have received positive responses (and, later, job offers) by applying to roles for which I am only mostly qualified, and I know many people for whom this is true of jobs they are only barely qualified for.
The last req I opened I closed around 500 applicants. I opened it Thursday afternoon and closed it Tuesday morning.
Over 40% were totally nonqualified. The job was for a rails engineer. In the current market, I wanted exactly what I asked for: a senior rails eng. But as long as the applicant had shipped a web app in a dynamic language -- node, react, vue, svelte, django, flask, phoenix, whatever the php folks use, etc -- it's not unreasonable to apply. That 40% had never shipped a webapp. Another 10% or more completely ignored the senior: many had < 1 year of experience.
I ended up using AI to filter because even 1 minute per is an entire 9 hour day. Engaging for 3 minutes per application is 3x that. And I can't be in a position where I spend effort while the applicant spent none: I assume the bulk of these were just mass applications.
Reminds me of the joke:
A hiring manager throws away half the applications without looking at them. They don’t want to hire “unlucky” people.
I think it is an anecdote about a trading firm. Something about throwing the CVs to their desk from a few feet away. Only the ones who made it to the desk were considered. After all who wants to hire unlucky traders?
>And I can't be in a position where I spend effort while the applicant spent none
But isn't that literally what you are paid for? Your job is to do the steps needed to hire someone and that includes reading through applicants. Why would the applicants -that are dojng this for free, for a promise of a posibility- need to put more effort than you?
> And I can't be in a position where I spend effort while the applicant spent none
Looks like the root point of the arms race.
I have never met a single recruiter that even understood the job requirements or the nature of the work.
What are we even doing here?
> As evidence that the applicants are, at every stage, correctly reacting to the situation: I have received positive responses (and, later, job offers) by applying to roles for which I am only mostly qualified...
Even fifteen years ago, I was getting advice from grizzled (programming industry) veterans of the form
I've interviewed a fair bit, both in and out of Silicon Valley. I've had exactly two interviews where the folks hiring knew exactly what they wanted. All the others were like "Well, we need a programmer to do programmer stuff, IDK.".That's nothing new. From the job applicant perspective it has always been stupid to filter yourself out if you're even slightly qualified. I mean if you're already unemployed then you have plenty of free time to submit applications so there's nothing to lose.
I wish this wasn't true (but know it is from experience), because those of us who are posting job requirements that actually correspond to what we're looking for are left with nonsense applications.
In your process, I understand why step 2 would occur. But what are the companies "adjusting" to in step 3? What's gone out of whack for them that they're trying to correct?
They get too many supposedly unqualified applications.
How is raising the stated qualifications going to help with that?
Well, if the majority of candidates are applying to a job where they only meet four out of five of the requirements, if the employer can add a sixth requirement they may naively think then applicants will have five out of six requirements. Alternatively, if they receive too many applications, a solution is to be more specific so they receive fewer or they can filter out more earlier. Adding additional requirements is one way to do this, even if the requirements are not necessarily connected to a successful candidate (knowing how to write in languages that aren't used in the company, for example); some recruiters don't seem to know that some of those requirements are completely irrelevant to the position.
Activator / inhibitor
It’s a Turing pattern generator. Inevitable results.
To fix it, employers could require applicants to include a random variant as part of their application. What parameters? Postage, as is being discussed. Attach a handwritten personal reference letter.
I once designed, built and sent — on my own initiative — a building facade model for an architecture job, but it was with Michael Graves, so I’m sure other applicants sent in entire villages. They were old school enough to send it back with the rejection letter.
I'd gladly pay the 78 cents for a stamp if it meant my application was opened and read by an actual human.
If I were a job applicant, I don't know how much I'd pay for an ironclad guarantee that the human hiring manager for the role would open and read my resume. $100? Multiple hundreds?
Sad that things have gotten to this point.
Thats when you work with the a 3P recruiter that has a vested interest in putting you in front of the hiring manager
There are a ton of fake jobs openings out there, or which sort of exist, but they aren't exactly eager to hire and haven't filled the role in nine months.
You'd have to pay with no guarantee anyone will even read it, which even at a fairly low cost rapidly becomes an issue when you might have to apply to a lot of jobs.
Making the employer also pay might help, but I suspect then the employers will just wander over to another jobs site that promises free listings.
In many jurisdictions (the UK, in particular) charging people to apply for work is specifically illegal.
I do think this is going to be part of the solution to a lot of AI slop is adding small fees to do a thing
They already do this, listen to the radio at off hours and there will be many job ads with instructions to apply via postal mail. Of course the reason isn't to deter LLMs it's to deter Americans so the employer can claim no Americans applied in their visa and green card filings.
As much hate as H1Bs get, I’ve worked at two large companies where the publicly posted salary range for H1B applications were consistently higher than my own. In all humility, I was more qualified and more experienced than required by the position.
Maybe there is a dearth of talent, maybe it’s about control, maybe is someone trying to get a friend hired. I don’t think it’s about the money.
> maybe it’s about control, maybe is someone trying to get a friend hired
Control of the employee is a huge one.
When telling a US citizen they have to work 80s, the citizen can tell you to fuck off and leave for the weekend. The H1B debates the risk of their visa not getting renewed/revoked.
The second issue is a huge problem in some large companies. Instead of a branch being a random assortment of people based on merit it becomes a tight knit group based on loyalty to the person that got them hired with few actual interests in the company itself. These can become serious risks for companies as classism and racism very commonly occur. Also with everyone covering for everyone else fraud and other means of overcoming accounting controls is at higher risk of occurring.
Do FAANG, FAANG wannabes, or startups do this for software development roles? I've never heard of that.
Take a look at the job ads in your local paper's classified section. You'll have to search as classifieds don't have their own section anymore, but it'll be in somewhere.
You'll likely see some listings with very specific and odd instructions to apply. I seem to recall there was a ruling/advisory that requiring application on paper doesn't actually meet the requirements for immigration, but it used to. You would see very detailed and specific requirements, and it would be cumbersome to apply, and the hiring company would be hoping that only the candidate they already knew would apply.
Yes.
https://www.newsweek.com/h1b-job-ads-green-cards-targeted-im...
https://www.jobs.now/
Remember when they would put some minor text in the dev console with some sort of challenge? That was an interesting approach.
The one where the google results page would open up and show an application to apply was cool.
In my last job search, I sent out a few dozen resumes utilizing snail mail. It was from a job board that searched for job descriptions that only accepted applications through physical mail. There were some big tech companies I was able to apply to. Ultimately, I didn't get a role from snail mail but it was an interesting process. I would probably expose myself if I detailed the specific service I used, but you can lookup online tools where you upload a PDF and they print it out and send it to an address for like $1 each (more for certified, priority, etc.) and I confirmed it worked. I even had companies mail me back rejection letters, so that was a first.
When was it?
> Requiring a handwritten cover-letter greatly raises cost for poor/fraudulent submissions, imposes a comparitively smaller cost for genuine ones
I find handwriting physically painful and people feel the same about reading it.
For every 1 LLM applicant that this idea would deter, you would also deter 50 humans who simply don't feel like having to send a letter to apply to a job.
Valid point if your ratio is correct, but I suspect it's the other way around.
At least for me, I'd still rather mail a letter versus input all my personal details and job experience into yet another CRM with a crappy data entry interface.
Oh no, you still have to do that too.
"Thank you for uploading the PDF with all the information we need. Now, fill all that information in on this page that asks for 2 bits of information at a time and takes a minute to go to the next page. You are on page 1 of 50".
But surely there’s also a downside somewhere.
2D plotters are what, $100? That's basically no cost for someone wanting to spam "handwritten" letters
Two students built their own https://makezine.com/article/technology/robotics/homework-ma...
The EMSL Axidraw launched in 2016...
That's not what OP is suggesting we defend against.
Read the whole thing.
This does nothing.
I'll just start a business that mails letters to companies for you.
Now, an APPLICATION FEE, that's interesting. Hmm.
This does nothing.
I'll just start a business that lends money to job applicants. Apply now, pay later (ANPL).
If you continue to get mountains of slop applications after introducing an application fee, then at least you have a new revenue stream.
On the company side, you have a new revenue stream. On the ANPL side, you have another product you can securitize. Revenue generation and risk transfer, a win-win!
Well, presumably your business charges something to mail out job applications to companies? Like an application fee, that charge incurs a cost to applicant which will do something (presumably reduce applicant volume).
Plus by making that fee optionally replaced with time spent writing the letter, people who don't have the finances to pay a whole bunch of application fees can still apply for as many jobs as they're willing to put in the time.
The barrier of entry has gone up from nearly nothing to signing up (and presumably paying for) your service. This is a significant increase, which will simnifically decrease BS applications.
So www.postgrid.com?
Last job I hired for I required short video submission answering some basic questions. If you didn't submit a video you were automatically disqualified. The previous position we hired for had over 1,000 applicants this last position around 500.
Doesn't that open the door to discrimination? At least now you have to guess the sex and ethnicity from the name.
It selects for the most telegenic applicants with the best video production (and best coaching, etc.) In-person interviews have analogous issues but are less susceptible to cheating on the questions.
I did this once for an AI training data management company in 2022. I assumed I just generated training data.
What about doing more to retain employees? Maybe don't layoff employees each time someone on CNBC makes a comment about the company's overhead looking a fraction of a percent too high? Perhaps even train people?
Instead, everyone expects there to be a magical unicorn out there who has decades of experience as a senior at multiple FAANGs but lives in Warm Spit, Missouri and is willing to work for the average Walmart wage in Warm Spit (locality adjustment, surely you understand why we must do this). Shrink your pool to your local area. Even if you allow remote work, require a physical interview at your office. Stop screwing up the process by worrying about edge cases involving unicorns flying across the globe to meet you. Once you stop chasing unicorns, most of the fraud goes away because it's the unicorn chute that's letting the fraudsters into the process.
But seriously, stop getting rid of good employees and stop refusing to build up employees from within. Very few are going to get hired away if you treat them well. The few who do leave will either be treated poorly at their new employer and want to return or be treated well, which means that employer isn't gaining some advantage over you by treating their employees lesser.
Of course, if you're just trying to get a bonus for cutting labor expenses a few percentage points before you parachute off to somewhere else, then you and the company that tolerates this both deserve to suffer. No doubt you'll both be at your congress critter's door to demand access to the global market because you believe skill is based on how little an employee is willing to accept in compensation. In a labor pool of over 150 million, no doubt it's true that you can't find anyone who knows React or Spring Boot.
Surely few people have a printer these days? I do (a color laser printer) but I'm a bit old school. And yes, my handwriting is, and always has been, dreadful.
As long as you have a FedEx or library nearby, you can print things there
I think something like an escrowed fee that both the applicant and the employer pay would be a reasonable way to solve the spam and keep both parties honest. If either the applicant or the employer are unhappy with the process (resume doesn't match, employer ghosts) - the fee is sent to charity, otherwise the fee is returned to both parties.
> Handwriting is unique- if you're skeptical that an applicant wrote/sent the original letter, witness them write something else and compare
I like this suggestion, but please don't practice some equivalent of phrenology to deny me a job.
Rubut will write you letter https://shop.elephantrobotics.com/collections/ultraarm/produ...
Has anyone tried this from the applicant side? Just send in a cover letter and resume, old-school?
That used the be the trick FAANG used to justify H1B visas. Onerous application requirements like mailed applications to prove there's no Americans wanting the job
And maybe employers/recruiters should be required to include a template (but .doc is not allowed) of what format they expect, disclose if they will be OCR-ing it and with which tool/LLM, will they read it or feed it to an AI etc.
As someone who is currently looking for a job, I don't like this idea.
All this does is increase the effort and barrier to entry to apply for a job. This is not a good thing. Applying to jobs is already time consuming as it is; nobody wants more hoops to jump through.
I understand that recruiters/hiring managers/whatever get a lot of junk applications, but frankly, it is your job to sort through them. You are paid to do this.
Could the hiring/job seeking process be better? Yes, absolutely. Currently, it's terrible, and almost everyone involved is making it worse. But the solution is not mailing job applications.
I think you are ignoring the advantage for the applicant.
The reduction in what are essentially spam applications means your genuine application will stand out and be more likely to be considered.
Things that help employers find qualified candidates also help those qualified candidates.
I don't fully agree. I agree that helping employers find qualified candidates is good for those candidates, but I don't agree that making applications mail-in only would achieve that end. It doesn't solve a lot of the larger problems when it comes to job applications, and just makes things harder for the applicant.
That never seems to happen in practice. The number of jobs I have applied to that required additional effort and that never bothered to reply is just too high.
What was the "additional effort" you've had to do before?
All sorts. Some make the application process very long, some ask for what is essentially a long cover letter through written questions, some ask you to complete tests, one sent me an IQ test...
Filling out an application form by hand.
> I understand that recruiters/hiring managers/whatever get a lot of junk applications, but frankly, it is your job to sort through them. You are paid to do this.
Recruiters, hiring managers, and whatevers are humans too, with ordinary human limitations. Just because they are paid to do something doesn't mean they gain superhuman capabilities.
Even if I am a recruiter with nothing else to do, if I get 5k applications for a role each week, I won't individually review 5k applications in a week. It's not possible. So I will have to rely on some automated system that filters out most of those applications. Who knows how good that system is.
On the other hand, if I get 100 mail applications for a role each week, that I can review that.
I'm not in love with this proposal, but I definitely see the appeal. Adding a little cost/effort on the applicant side automatically filters out a ton of applicants that have not bothered to learn anything about the role or company.
In the past I've had success with adding things to the job description like: "please include a link to your favorite gif in your email." And that filters out about 95% of applicants who don't read the job description and don't have a gif link in their email. But with LLMs I imagine those kinds of filters work less well than before.
That's a fair point! It is true that recruiters are human and cannot review 5k applications per week.
I don't mean to say that recruiters must/should review all applications, because indeed this is sometimes impossible. I'm just saying that, as a recruiter, your job is to review applications and you should therefore not be making things harder for the applicants.
Asking for someone's favourite GIF to filter out junk applications is a great idea. This does not detriment the applicant, and it makes the recruiter's job easier. This is good. Making all applications mail-in is not good, because it detriments the applicant (by way of costing significantly more time and some money), while also not solving some of the larger problems when it comes to the job application process.
> get a lot of junk applications, but frankly, it is your job to sort through them.
But this isn't their job. Their job is to hire someone who passes the hiring bar. If they can do that without ever looking at a random resume everyone at the company is happy.
An unstated thesis of the article is that several years from now people who want to accomplish that job just won't look at resumes submitted online - whatever anyone's feelings about it.
Applying by mail sounds easier than the usual online form nonsense.
This is beneficial to both parties, it's not just to throw spikes on the road for applicants without care.
The less nonsensical applications they get, the more time they can give your application.
> I understand that recruiters/hiring managers/whatever get a lot of junk applications, but frankly, it is your job to sort through them. You are paid to do this.
Indeed they are, and that is what they're doing by asking for a written application.
Introducing JobbyPasta, the service that will hand-complete and mail in job applications for a small fee of $9.99 per application. Add on a transcription of your cover letter for an additional $4.99, or have us generate one (with your approval) and transcribe it for $7.99.
Have a lot of applications to send out? Subscribe to us monthly for $34.99/mo (billed annually).
We just found ourselves a new industry to contribute to GDP growth
I feel like this is already addressed in the "Aha! But you see..." section. There is nothing that one can't poke holes in, but if the holes are not big enough, the proposal is still sound.
I mean if people had to pay $9.99 per application that would drastically reduce spam applications. So the mail proposal still has a good effect here.
And before the in-person interview, the applicant is required to produce a handwriting sample in front of the interviewer of random text, which is then compared against the mailed documents.
While time consuming, I would gladly use my otherwise underused but decent enough handwriting to carefully write out job applications. Can get really good pens to do it too. However, given my own network, that's probably not necessary anymore either way.
My mother had insanely superb handwriting, in part because her mother pushed good penmanship on her. While I can be sloppy, it was for me a challenge when I was young to copy her perfect handwriting (not for forging signatures though!) Handwriting is influenced by which hand is dominant. I am left, she was right handed... so not exactly close :)
Perhaps we just need Tinder for employee-employer relationships?
Its all in the profile - and we can all just swipe left/right instead.
Dysfunctional FAANG seeks 10X prompt engineer in hyderabad
Reminds me of how it was common in France until pretty recently for employers to use graphology (pseudoscience) analysis of candidate's handwritten letters to assess personality traits etc. When I was looking for work there I was lucky that the tech sector was already a abandoning the practice.
Kids today barely even learn how to write!
You can submit an application online, and require a printed QR code be mailed via post with a handwritten cover letter, achieving the personal intent, inconvenience tax, and cost, while still providing the convenience of digital resumes and applications. The mailed QR serves as a CAPTCHA.
Brought to you by the same people who think that it should be possible to sack an employee without cause and without notice.
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