I’ve hired for 3 companies for engineers from entry level to staff level, and for non technical candidates for other departments. Applicant tracking systems like greenhouse send me an email for every application that comes through, you get the resume and cover letter attached. There’s a reject candidate button where you choose why, and it auto fills in the template for you with the reason you selected (and the email was pre written).
Don’t mistake an automated email for assuming your resume wasn’t looked at.
The same is true of those other fields too really - I certainly wouldn't want a newly qualified doctor operating on me, or lawyer defending me, or civil engineer designing a bridge I'm driving over. It's nice to know that someone has been professionally educated and passed some entry level exam, but to be useful in a field it's experience that counts.
I don't fill my my resume with a bunch of spam buzzwords for every adjacent technology I've ever used, because certain things are kind of implied by other things. If I put "set up multiple clusters across different Linux systems", I don't also cram in "systemd, bash, upstart, scripting, ls, cp, du, nohup", despite the fact that I know how to use all of those things, because I think they're implied by "me setting up Linux clusters".
A software engineer reading my resume would come away with a decent understanding of what skills I have, but a recruiter who doesn't know anything outside of keyword-matching and hitting the `fwd` button in Outlook (which appears to be most recruiters) will see "HE DOESN'T KNOW BASH, SEE HE DIDN'T PUT IT ON HIS RESUME."
Now, of course, most of this is on me, it's up to me to learn how to play the game, whether or not I like the system doesn't really change anything, but as far as I can tell, the "solution" to this is to turn my resume into a low-quality SEO-spam piece of shit so as to try and satisfy the most incompetent person who might read it.
If a posting gets 500 applications (which is about how many apps the last 4 roles I’ve listed got before we closed them) and we have an engineer spend 5 minutes per resume reading through each resume, that’s a full week of engineer time spent on screening alone. That’s not a good use of time when most of the resumes are a straight no.
I’m assuming your writing style is different in professional environments, but if it’s not, and I saw even like 10% of the snark you’ve put here, I’d instantly dismiss you unless we were hiring for a principal into fellowship IC role and you were a 100% match.
If you’re writing your resume to be read by software engineers or sysadmins, you’re writing for the wrong audience. That’s not their fault for being “incompetent”, it’s yours.
I don’t write it to be “read by software engineers” per se. I describe my skillset and things I have worked on. I don’t load it with a million buzzwords of every single noun that I am aware of.
I acknowledge that I probably play the game “wrong”, insofar that there’s any “right” way of doing it, but I don’t have to like the game, and I certainly am allowed to think that it’s very frustrating that I have to fill my resume with SEO spam of synonyms because most recruiters are unwilling to learn anything more than basic keyword matching.
Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...
A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me. I had people trying to argue that my feedback was wrong, someone stalking me across social media and trying to argue everything there, and eventually someone who threatened to use my feedback as the basis for a discrimination lawsuit.
So now we’re back to simple “we’re proceeding with other candidates” feedback.
If we’re going to play the blame-game, then you have to see the full picture. Many candidates can be awful and even vengeful. Many people do not handle rejection well.
The line is between saying something brief and saying nothing.
Somehow, it has become standard to say absolutely nothing instead of telling people a simple no.
I've even had situations where people said they wanted to keep talking to me, and then went completely silent.
The sad truth of the situation is that all the incentives for a company point in the direction of giving no feedback at all. This isn’t because hiring managers are sociopaths.
It's just common decency. "Sorry, we're not continuing" is not going to get you sued.
The time to send the "Sorry, not continuing" email is as soon as the company has decided that, and if that really is 1-2 months later, you may as well have just ghosted the candidate.
This happened to one of my bosses. As a result, I've never attempted it.
Except once, a candidate realized at the end of a technical screen they had done poorly and demanded feedback. I gave an initial bit (shouldn't have, my mistake) and instantly turned it around on me.
Hell if companies would even do that - I've spent a lot of time (7+ hours) interviewing with some known companies including meeting with the VP of engineering and then they just stop messaging and ghost you (looking at you Glassdoor..)
For example, in an interview once I got the typical "design Twitter" whiteboarding question, and it's going fine, until the topic of databases and storage comes up.
I ask "do we want consistency or availability here?"
The interviewer says that he wants both. To which I say "umm, ok, but I thought you said you wanted this to be distributed?", and he said yeah that's what he wants.
So I have to push back and say "well I mean, we all want that, but I'm pretty sure you can't have stuff be distributed or partitionable while also having availability and consistent."
We go back and forth for about another minute (or course eating away at my interview time), until I eventually pull out my phone and pull up the Wikipedia article for CAP theorem, to which the interviewer said that this is "different" somehow. I said "it's actually not different, but lets just use assume that there exists some kind of database X that gives us all these perks".
Now, in fairness to this particular company, they actually did move forward and gave me a (crappy) offer, so credit there, but I've had other interviews that went similarly and I'm declined. I've never done it, but I've sort of wanted to go onto LinkedIn and try and explain that their interview questions either need to change or they need to become better informed about the concepts that they're interviewing for. Not to change anything, not to convince anyone to suddenly give me an offer, but simply to prove my point.
And I say that even while writing this comment in Firefox
... Legal action on what basis, exactly?
Dumb example, say you didn't hire someone because they wore a Marilyn Manson Antichrist Superstar shirt to an interview and you think that's not appropriate attire for an interview, and suppose you put that into your feedback for the rejection letter.
Now the candidate has a specific "I was rejected for this shirt". They might come back and say "Actually I'm a satanist and this shirt is part of my religion, so I'm going to sue you for religious discrimination". Suddenly you have a lawsuit on your hands, simply because you thought they were dressing unprofessionally.
Obviously this is a hyperbolic example and I doubt that there are a ton of Marilyn Manson fans trying this [1], but it's just to show my point: It's much safer to simply leave it vague with something generic like "while we were impressed with your qualifications, we've decided to pursue other candidates" email. They can maintain plausible deniability about the reasons they rejected you, and you don't really have fodder to sue them over that.
That said, I absolutely hate how normalized ghosting is in the job world. A candidate isn't entitled to a job, but I do think they're entitled to a response, even if it's just a blanket form rejection.
Hiring manager here. I don’t like the situation either, but to honest a lot of what you’re seeing is a natural reaction to the shenanigans that applicants are doing.
When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application.
This is one of the few aspects of hiring I feel government employers handle better than private. My state hold monthly events where you can just show up and talk to a representatives and if you pass the vibes check you are virtually guaranteed a proper interview.
>When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application.
Awhile ago I applied to an internship at one of the larger, successful startups that most tech workers have heard of (several thousand employees). I got a response from a real person in a day. There's really no excuse for not being decent.
We did some spot checks on resumes that were passed on to make sure we were filtering ok and the quality was awful - a significant amount of people were applying for jobs asking for 5 years experience in a Java-like language with no experience, no degree and a half assed cover letter about being a good learner. A decent number were data scientists who had 2 years of python experience, and a surprising number were wildly over-qualified people who I realised after speaking to one or two they were actually trying to sell us their consulting services. That’s before you even get to “are they lying?”
Possibly the single most distracting alert on my phone and pc is my work email. It’s probably prioritised wrong, but if I have 200 candidates for a position, and I get an application that doesn’t meet the tech stack or YOE requirements when I have 20 who do, I’m just going to reject them.
> or late at night ATS let you schedule emails. I used to send mine at 4am EST despite being in the UK
> definitely some companies are using software to filter resumes
I don’t doubt it, but I doubt that it’s rampant to the degree you’d believe on this site. I’d instead that it’s far more likely that the hiring manager, or a recruiter, is spending about 15 seconds looking at “does the tech stack match, how much experience, and how many other candidates are there that I think have an edge”. The people on this site are a small minority of very smart folk, but if you spend any time in a comment section of a topic you are an expert in, you’ll quickly realise that you shouldn’t take everything you read on here as absolute.
Another suggestion - Reach out to two different recruiters and get them to review your resume. (You might need to pay them to do it). You’ll get two totally different responses. Both might work, and neither might work. At the end of the day, a human makes the call, and even if the ATS is automated, a human set those criteria. Honestly, having spent so much of my time hiring over the past 5 years, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was literally no ATS scanning, and everything that was sold to fix that problem was snake oil.
Of course my guess could be way off, but what you are saying is definitely the exception to the common narrative nor does it match what I've seen.
> AI screening
There's been aggressive keyword filtering since long before LLMs exploded.
> but what you are saying is definitely the exception to the common narrative nor does it match what I've seen.
As an anecdote, I posted on who’s hiring here, and we used a separate job requisition for HN, (this was my last job where we went from 2 -> 15 people). We got about 30 applications in the 7 days following that on that req, and of those 30, only one came even remotely close to meeting the requirements on the JD - we were looking for someone with a few years experience in a Java like language, in a Europe/US time zone. Most of the candidates failed both of those criteria, hard. My point being that people who are frustrated with their situation are likely to be more vocal than someone who isn’t.
I’ve spent enough time on HN reading about topics I know a lot about, and seeing people confidently claim how X is easy or if they just Y, and they’re totally wrong. I know a decent amount about working on the hiring side - it’s been a core component of my job for the last 6 years. I’ve worked with recruiters both internal and external, spent far more time with greenhouse than any engineer should ever have to do.
My feeling is that there’s far less sophistication going on, and the dearth of human responses (which is problematic) lets people make up their own reasons as to why it’s not working when the reality is that there’s just a hell of a lot of applicants for every single job.
Yes, a candidate is responsible for their own actions. This logic only sounds good until you’re on the hiring side and you see the stark difference between the LLM abuser applications and the people who are genuinely applying.
Those people who have to apply to 100s of jobs are probably in that situation because they’re spraying low-effort LLM resumes around and most hiring managers can see right through this game by now.
> I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already found a job!
Doesn’t work that way, in my experience. The people who game their way through the application process don’t suddenly switch to honest and high performing employees after they start. They continue the process of trying to min-max their effort given to the company, riding the line of finding how little or how low quality work they can get away with.
The mythical lazy applicant who suddenly becomes a brilliant and loyal employee isn’t realistic.
Yes, but I think it is overly reductive. As a candidate, you’ve to now apply for a magnitude more of jobs. Tailoring resumes per job takes time, and given how many more I’ve to send, this doesn’t scale.
Additionally, whatever ATS system is being used might auto-reject it because the algorithm decided it’s not a match. If tailored resumes increased hit rate, that would be a different story but that is not the case.
Thanks to the automated systems put in place on the hiring side, you often never see the applications of many of the people genuinely applying because your stupid automated filters determined they weren't qualified.
Less than 1/100th of 1%.
You should also see what I had to say about the history of slavery, and wage slaves, and what anyone can expect from them. The TL;DR is that what you are looking for no longer exists if it ever did, because you have adopted a scorched; salt the earth strategy for finding labor.
What you call lazy, may actually be incredibly hard working (given the current environment) to even get to the point where you see them. Is it their fault you didn't recognize them for the value they could potentially provide? If you pay wages comparable to an office assistant for skilled labor, why do you expect to get anything more than what that first role provides? The economics of things are important.
You need to re-calibrate unreasonable expectations (delusions) back to some more close to reality.
?? 1 in 1500 is 1/15th of 1%, which is more than 1/100th of 1%...
Just came off a brutal 7 month job search. And that's with a resume good enough, and care enough in jobs I applied to, that I got to the hiring manager with 1 of 10 applications (vs 1:100 or worse which is what I've heard is normal).
I think I interviewed at 50+ companies, which makes 500 or more applications.
Yes, this clearly says something about my interview skills, but there is a difference between interview skills and engineering/software skills-- I've done well in my career without having to heavily interview before (senior IC level) and I came by that strong resume honestly.
So please be careful about generalizing. I'm an example of someone who had to apply to 5x as many jobs as you say would be needed, and it would have been 50x if I didn't have a strong background and work ethic.
This increases the risk on applicants that their investment on a carefully crafted resume/cover letter is time wasted.
Fake job postings punish the behavior you desire from applicants and incentivize spraying low-effort LLM resumes.
If you do not post fake job postings, I applaud you. If you know a colleague who does this, I ask that you have a conversation with them about the damage they are doing to your industry.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fake-job-listing-ghost-jobs-cbs...
You're missing the point. The primary people who suffer for this environment isn't hiring companies—they'll eventually work through all the resumes and find someone who will be qualified to fill their open roles, it's just much more expensive—the primary people who suffer for this is qualified employees who now have to work that much harder to stand out from a sea of garbage.
Your odds and my odds of having our resumes thrown out summarily are 100x what they were a few years ago, because time-per-resume has dropped dramatically. That's the fallout from this trend to be concerned about, and we're the real victims of it, not the hiring companies.
Who will champion the necessary regulations? In terms of financial incentives, employers can pay lower wages when candidates have a tougher time getting interviews, and individual candidates usually can’t afford lobbyists.
We know from the irrelevant offers that many professionals have automated the processes for casting a net. How it is a problem if individuals do that in reverse?
If they can bullshit job description to reach more applications why candidates cannot do the same with CV?
The result we are going to is almost every CV now will be a 99% matching to the job description thanks to LLM tools.
And cover letter is even more useless now.
Now it’s ATS’s turn to fix its own mess or someone else will. Start creating private benchmarks. Select from problems that LLMs can’t easily answer and use those for screening. Complaining that the genie won’t go back into the bottle isn’t a productive use of time.
If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to land a single interview, then can you blame someone for automating it? I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already found a job!