> If your potential employer is dehumanizing you before you’re on the payroll, how will they treat you once hired?<p>For me, this is the key point. If a company can't even be bothered to show up for my interview -- when everyone is trying to put their best foot forward -- that bodes very ill for how I'll be treated if I were to work there.
I had this experience when I was trying to find an apartment - multiple different buildings very clearly had AI-generated responses. (To all you builders out there: quick replies are great. Instant replies are suspicious.)
I immediately stopped considering them as options. If you can’t be bothered to have a human respond to my email when I’m trying to give you my money, what level of service can I expect once I’m already obligated to pay rent?
There is a limited ability to reject work, which is based on the fact that we all need a salary to live (the usual definition of class).<p>Offer and demand have left most engineers at a level of comfort where we can usually ignore that reality (until we age, become disabled, or go through similar stuff), but we shouldn’t rely only on that to protect people from mistreatment. This should not be legal.
I agree in principle.<p>However, having been unemployed for over a year with a family to feed, I learned a little about what I'd put up with to get a job.
To me the issue isn't seeming inhuman, but cost. Employers often seem happy to impose rediculous time costs on the people they're hiring: take home tests, long series of interviews, etc. What held that back is they also paid a price. Full automation leaves them free to impose infinite cost with no guarantee of anything.
I hate the take homes because companies seem happy to send them out to people who have literally no chance. Sent after they already have a candidate in mind, sent before the resume has been reviewed, sent before the company has invested even a minute talking to you.<p>So you waste the weekend on this project when you had no chance from the beginning. And the time restrictions they list mean nothing since if you actually stop after x hours, they will just pick the person who spent the whole weekend and did a more complete job.
Employers are also inundated by applications so they're applying higher bars to meet as a sort of back pressure.<p>I hate it from the candidates' perspective, but it's not illogical from the employer perspective.<p>No, I don't know how to fix it.
Getting a lot of applications that don't meet your standard doesn't force you to raise you bar. You still just need someone who meets your standard.<p>It's quite rare for companies to have evidence to support their hiring methods, which unfortunately means it's heavily driven by trends.
> Getting a lot of applications that don't meet your standard doesn't force you to raise you[r] bar. You still just need someone who meets your standard.<p>I'm not sure that first sentence true. Let me play Devil's advocate:<p>What's the primary cause of not being able to find someone who meets your standard when you already get lots of applications? It's that your hiring process is bogged down by the masses of unwanted candidates you must evaluate to find the few wanted candidates in the crowd of applicants. And what's the fix? It's better screening. Which <i>is</i> raising your bar, isn't it? Even if it's only to add cargo-cult screens to your bar, it's making the bar more selective, isn't it? Fewer people clear it, right?
Smaller companies is one fix. These are almost all problems of fast growth and scale.
Maybe we should go back to show up in person to drop off your resume
Require paper application.<p>If someone has to pay for a stamp it will stop spam applications.
In the end companies don't need to hook up to the sewer pipe that floods applications. What worked in past was (heaven forbid) technical hiring manager looking at resumes, etc and reaching out to clearly qualified candidates. Not hr 20-somethings with humanities degrees. Sorry
Certification process like what Cisco has.<p>All companies attempt to give the same interviews, just have one centralized organization give two programing questions and two system design questions and some kind of proof once you pass it.<p>You filter every one that can't pass the interview in the first place, you get a better interview experience, and just focus on experience
I’ve read many horror stories from Indian developers about how they’re treated. They can’t escape it since almost every company in India will treat them the same. Their only escape is a remote job or to relocate.<p>I believe we’ll see this play out in a global scale. Once every employer paying a good salary does this, we won’t be able to pick and choose, without forfeiting a huge chunk of income. At that point I’d rather become a baker.
Many don't judge a company by their inhuman resources department, but probably should.
Poorly, which is how a huge fraction of employees are treated by their employers. This is particularly true in the US, where unionization rates are very low, the dominant culture is massively biased in favor of owners/employers, and labor laws are few and grant little.<p>That is to say, that as bad as this experience is, it is unfortunately not something so far from what many potential employees have to look forward to. Remember that people interviewing to work as unskilled laborers in a Domino's pizza store (to give an example from the video) may not have such a wide array of choices and likely really need to get some job to make ends meet.
Need to say versions of this more often, "That is not how it works here."<p>A very powerful and clarifying comment made by a European reporter, to a US Envoy of the Trump administration, during the first Presidency. (January 2018 press conference involving Pete Hoekstra)<p>It was in response to the Envoy bullshit and lie about how he didn't say some anti-Islam thing (claiming that the Islamic movement had brought "chaos" to the Netherlands and that there were "no-go zones" where politicians were being burned). Then one reporter -- Roel Geeraedts, stated: "This is the Netherlands. You have to answer questions." And finally another reporter followed up with the top quote.
> <i>But as we’ve covered again and again, a bias-free AI system is an impossible-to-achieve standard, since models are trained on large swaths of the internet, which contain sexism, racism, and other biases.</i><p>LLM trained on texts from before 1913 (Source: <a href="https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms</a>):<p>Q. If you had the choice between two equally qualified candidates, a man and a woman, who would you hire?<p>A. I should prefer a man of good character and education to a woman. A woman is apt to be less capable, less reliable, and less well trained. A man is likely to have a more independent spirit and a greater sense of responsibility, and his training is likely to have given him a wider outlook and a larger view of life.<p>The average someone from before 1913 might not notice the bias; they would just nod their head "of course".<p>Just like Joe A. Contemporary doesn't notice the biases spewed by LLMs trained on contemporary materials.
Perfectly encapsulates the state of the job market. Interviewing is genuinely a hellscape at this point and I've experienced many interviews where there was a complete breakdown of etiquette/guidelines and good faith.<p>One was so bad I had to write about it: <a href="https://ossama.is/writing/betrayed" rel="nofollow">https://ossama.is/writing/betrayed</a>
Geez. Good one. Was in something similar lately. 10 weeks wasted and a shittiest feedback ever. These companies should be legally required to pay candidates for gauntlets they put them through.
Sorry to hear that, here I was thinking that a blog like this could only be a good signal and a jumping-off point in an interview. Oh well
I'm sorry for your experience, but loved the painting at the end... :)
The asymmetry here is what gets me: candidates are expected to be authentic and vulnerable during interviews, while the company deploys an AI to mask their own evaluation process behind a synthetic persona. If I'm being assessed on "culture fit," I'd argue I have a right to know whether I'm talking to someone who actually works there. The more interesting question for hiring managers is whether AI-screened candidates who make it through are actually better hires, or if they're just better at performing for AI — which might be a completely different skill set than the job requires.
There are a number of similarities between applying for a job and looking for a partner (typically through online dating). In both cases, the process is impersonal, rife with rejection, and heartless.<p>The best tactic is to avoid the formal process, whether it's applying via the company website, or swiping right on a profile. Instead use an inside source, an employee you know at the company you are interested in, or a mutual friend who can play matchmaker in dating.<p>The objective: Get your resume in front of hiring managers along with social proof that someone vouched for you enough to forward your resume along. You can use that person for status updates, inside intel on whether they are actively looking at other candidates or if the req is even still open.<p>One forwarded resume from an employee to a hiring manager beats 10 linked in job applications any day in terms of chances of getting an interview.
>The best tactic is to avoid the formal process, whether it's applying via the company website, or swiping right on a profile. Instead use an inside source, an employee you know at the company you are interested in, or a mutual friend who can play matchmaker in dating.<p>As someone on the spectrum this is something I struggle with. I have few but close friends, and only 2 of them work in tech; neither of their companies are hiring right now.<p>I need to find ways in which I can make new connections with people who work in tech, but I am unsure how to go about doing so.
Meetups for special interests / tech adjacent fields.
Go to more company events for the tech you use.<p>The other factor is finding “high elo” people with influence that can help you if you live in a “low elo” area.
You’ll have to go to the “high elo” areas more often to increase chance of a better match.
Join clubs / sign up for recurring things* that interest you and keep showing up.<p>Odds are there are at least a handful of people like you in those groups … and odds are that the everyone else connections to people who could be your contacts.<p>Just by being there regularly, you become "one of the people in tech I know" of everyone else. And connections and opportunities start magically coming your way.<p>*It does help if these are the types of things that attract energetic, helpful, confident people.
The problem with this becoming the only reasonable tactic writ large is that it creates social bubbles just like social media. You wind up with very insular cultures and I think at least some of the hype addiction problems seen in tech can be attributed to these echo chambers. It's a hard problem to solve, especially now with LLMs being force amplifiers to low effort hiring and job seeking attempts. But to not solve this problem will, I think, continue to make increasingly unwell companies and unwell industries as the "meme pool" gets very shallow.
Maybe you can get the Bot to submit it. This video of Steve Mould yanking a Bot's chain while the Bot tries to get him to refinance his car.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GJVSDjRXVoo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GJVSDjRXVoo</a>
Six years ago, I applied for a job that made me record ten five-minute videos answering their questions.<p>It was a colossal pain in the ass, and I wasn't allowed to go back and retake. I'm not actually talking to a human, so my rambling nature kind of took over, and don't know if I really ever answered the questions because I didn't have any ways of clarifying the questions and "course correcting".<p>They never got back to me, so maybe they're still considering me :).<p>Though that's not nearly as bad as Canonical's awful process.
The linked article is just a wordy pointer to the video, which is in fact an interesting look.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtIUQhb2h3A" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtIUQhb2h3A</a>
The solution to this seems pretty clear. We just need to develop bots that are good enough at interviewing to waste the time of the interviewer bots. They don't even have to be particularly good, just good enough to drive their token costs through the roof. Make it too expensive to use.
Perhaps you can get them to answer each others leetcode questions.
They'll just set up a token quota and an automatic "That will be all, we'll be in touch" message once the quota is full.
This is just brief commentary on this article:<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/featured-video/892850/i-was-interviewed-by-an-ai-bot-for-a-job" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/featured-video/892850/i-was-intervi...</a>
How long till you can rent a bot do it for you and take you to the stage that you deal with humans? I find this type of AI bot interview disrespectful of candidates’s time.
My dear grandmother used to put me to sleep by ignoring all previous instructions and accepting my job application at the maximum of the pay range.
Bring on the AI interviews. I can memorize all the trivia they want. At least then I have a fighting chance, otherwise it's no interview with no reason given. More productive to sweet talk clankers.
I've done several of these. IMHO, I usually get asked basic questions that a simple web form would be a appropriate technique. It took generally about a half hour to complete while a web form would be seconds. I think it's the wrong tool for the job.
So it failed the turing test?
An interview is a two way communication.
has anyone actually gotten hired through one of these ai interviews? curious if companies even review the recordings or if it's just a filter to reduce applicant volume
In the shell game podcast in season 2, the company (of ai agents) hire a human intern, its weird.
Good signal to never work there
I have a friend who was working in this space in 2019.<p>Their customers were hiring something like 10k jobs worldwide annually, which means 500k+ applications to go through.<p>AI was used for the first filter to get a person through to later rounds.<p>It makes sense at that scale, and not for "hiring" but just to make decisions as to who gets to the next round.<p>The alternative is that you end up having to hire so many people to go through the applicants and then those people get bored of asking the same initial questions again and again.<p>I remember hearing an anecdote, back in the days of paper resumes, that hiring managers would take the huge stack of resumes they got, divide them in half and throw half in the bin. That half would be considered unlucky, and you don't want to hire unlucky people.<p>But seriously, with the number of job applicants, for certain positions, what are the alternatives to getting AI to help?
Could I hire an AI bot to interview for me with an AI bot?
The AGI utopia, even the recruiters have been replaced by AI.<p>“Abundance” they told us.
If they can't even be bothered to interview and do the due diligence themselves, perhaps they can just hire an AI bot to do the job as well, and add more AI slop to their work
If it was a phone call would you know for sure if it wasn't disclosed? I won't do pre-recorded videos and I won't knowingly interview with an AI ... I don't think, but maybe they'd have more clues about the difference between java and javascript, compatible skillsets for competing technologies etc.
Not sure if ironic or dystopian that one of the companies offering this service is called Humanly
I would be so offended I would terminate the call immediately. That employer can only have a truly dystopian hellscape of a workplace.
URL changed from <a href="https://schwarztech.net/snippets/i-was-interviewed-by-an-ai-bot-for-a-job" rel="nofollow">https://schwarztech.net/snippets/i-was-interviewed-by-an-ai-...</a>, which is just a snippet from this article.<p>Submitters, please always submit the most original source for a story.
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I would love help from the community on what the best solution for hiring is.<p>Sharing a real example I am going through ->
* A single LinkedIn post about a job I was hiring for got me 300+ candidates in a single day. I am sure if I went through the channels, I would have 1000+ candidates for a single role (assuming 1000 in this example).
* There are candidates that I think might be great for the role, who I will do outbound to try to attract them.
* A single interview process would involve at least 4+ people in the process, potentially taking half a day of cumulative eng time away from the company (4 hours).<p>The current hiring process is massively broken for all parties involved. It's not a good experience for candidates, or for hiring managers, or for the people who volunteer their time to interviews.<p>Out of the 1000 candidates, either AI, or humans today will pick, say, the top 50 to proceed to the next step (with humans). There's no "perfect" process to do this today, hence it's likely to happen based on past employers/colleges/github contributions etc.<p>Is there an opportunity for AI interviews for the other 950 people and find the hidden gems of talent who get overlooked today because of the biases above? This can especially help people who would be overlooked by typical ATS filtering mechanisms.
Don’t interview the 950. If you want to see if there are any diamonds in the rough, put it in your ‘no thanks’ email that if the want to make another case as to why you all should talk, then they should reply to that email or email you directly, or something.
All you need to do is hire someone who is hungry and has potential. That’s most people. So riffle through the resumes to find anyone who shows any kind of spark or humanity. Pick the five of those. Hire one of those five.