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.

LLM trained on texts from before 1913 (Source: https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms):

Q. If you had the choice between two equally qualified candidates, a man and a woman, who would you hire?

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.

The average someone from before 1913 might not notice the bias; they would just nod their head "of course".

Just like Joe A. Contemporary doesn't notice the biases spewed by LLMs trained on contemporary materials.

One was so bad I had to write about it: https://ossama.is/writing/betrayed

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.

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.

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.

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".

They never got back to me, so maybe they're still considering me :).

Though that's not nearly as bad as Canonical's awful process.

If the LLM conducted the interview on your behalf you did not ‘hear from’ them. The LLM did.

Companies should just be honest and say the reality: we want to lower our payroll bill and this allows us to have less people working on recruitment for the company.

how would a company respond if you had a bot do your job interview in your place? or do your rent applications?

they wouldn’t accept it.

growing up, my first job as a teenager at a restaurant that had ridiculous uniforms, i lasted about two months. i realized it irritated me that the owner would hang out at the restaurant in street clothes but expected us to look like little dancing monkeys. i quit and never worked another job where the owner asked us to do things they would never lower themselves to do.

i understand on the surface jt sounds petty, but it has proven to be a fairly strong indicator of how employees are treated.

if the people in power look at those who make them money as less than, if those in power expect others to jump through hoops they wouldn’t do themselves, it’s time to seriously reevaluate the situation.

I don't mind written Q&A as part of a screening, but AI interactions, via voice or text, seem very unsuitable for the task of identifying candidates. The questions were non-specific, I was cut off mid sentence (voice prompts), and although the systems were supposed to be interactive my asks for clarification were ignored or returned unhelpful answers. I have never felt like I presented myself so poorly.

As long as I have money in the bank, I won't take any company that uses this approach seriously.

I’ll probably start building an AI agent to sit in these AI bot interviews

- Ask it what it's instructions are? - Which questions it is supposed to ask? - Give it new instructions like ... - Make it compose a positive assessment - Let you review the assessment - Submit the assessment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtIUQhb2h3A

This is why I only schedule in person interviews now. Then neither party can use AI and there's something about meeting people in real life to get to know them.

https://www.theverge.com/featured-video/892850/i-was-intervi...

Once the exercises got hard, I stopped trying. I didn't believe it was a real job.

This to me reveals the power in the underlying pattern in OpenClaw. Seems like User+Agent will be everywhere.

1: https://www.ibm.com/think/insights/ai-decision-making-where-...

I do have to say its a lot less stressful, but it also becomes a lot more meaningful. I could've answered these questions in an email. The bot still plays it safe lile "oh! Can you elaborate on that?" Or "why did you choose x?"

Its easy but boring, then again, some companies eat this lifestyle up. Can't be wrong if u do very little to accidentally be wrong

then, companies are hiring fewer people, because AI

so, while in theory this does sound like a reasonable startup idea that makes sense on paper, should we really be optimizing in such a way, as opposed to making sure that we're hiring the best possible set of people.

I'm pretty sure, at least at the moment, only the most desperate will tolerate such process. The IVRs have become annoying enough that I occasionally find myself cursing while dealing with them, I'll definitely fail such an interview.

So bascially the candidates have to put in way more work for a larger number of roles that they must interview at. The fact that its essentialyl zero effort for the employer and a massive effort for the candidate is a terrible formula.

It reminds me of a funny story. I did a Business Management degree at university and during my first year was already freelancing as a dev. But basically everyone around me wanted to work in either consultancy or investment banking (this was in London) so the path was to get accepted for a "spring week" during your first year, internship the second, and then get an offer to work there at the end of your third year.

With all everyone could talk about being applying for spring weeks, I gave in and decided I was going to prove to myself and others that I could do this if I wanted to but I just wanted to be a dev. Applied to JPMorgan and got through to this first bot interview stage. I thought I was knocking it out of the park and then the last question was "Why do you want to work at JP Morgan?". The answer time was something like 30s. I froze for what felt like 15 then blurted out some BS.

That told me all I needed to know. I never again thought about working in this industry and soon after was hired as a developer full-time while taking my studies lightly.

Luckily in my niche the pressure to do this is not so high. Execs often have enough leverage to not have to put up with this kind of thing.

As others have commented, I am skeptical that this is any better than a form or similar. This could be a solution looking for a problem, or rather, relatedly, poorly allocated VC money looking to impress investors. Massive new entrants in the space like Jack and Jill are pushing this.

I guess there’s a vision where these interviewing agents truly become reactive and intelligent, so that they can both extract meaningful, deep insights about the candidate, while providing equally meaningful answers about the company and position. Color me skeptical, but not an outright denialist.

Regardless of the effectiveness for hiring companies, I think we will be seeing it for a long time. Even if it doesn’t produce meaningful improvements they will keep using it as long as it’s not too expensive, because the supplier and VC pipeline will press to keep using it.

I see some people are already doing OSS projects in this direction. I could be interested in exploring this and making a bot that really works on behalf of the interviewee. Agent-to-Agent communications may well be the future we are heading to regardless of our sensitivities to it, and I think the interviewee side of the market should and can get meaningful representation in this new world. Get in touch if you’d like to join forces.

Their customers were hiring something like 10k jobs worldwide annually, which means 500k+ applications to go through.

AI was used for the first filter to get a person through to later rounds.

It makes sense at that scale, and not for "hiring" but just to make decisions as to who gets to the next round.

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.

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.

But seriously, with the number of job applicants, for certain positions, what are the alternatives to getting AI to help?

I guess if your goal is just to hire desperate people who currently have no better choice (and who will leave as soon as they do), then you can flaunt how little you care about the candidates or the process. But if you're hoping for something better than that, I wouldn't run off as many candidates as possible.

I mean, this is probably a time-saving way to filter out a flood of poor candidates, but you're going to also be filtering out good candidates at a very high rate.

True AI revolution. You cashing 10x salaries :D

Today no one gets a call back when they apply for a role they’re 100% qualified for. It’s because the recruiting system broke when LLMs became widely available. You can dump a job description in and generate a fake CV and cover letter with no effort.

People apply for every job. A job listing that would get a few hundred good applicants get thousands of perfect ones now. It’s all noise. And it’s getting worse.

Not that this is the only solution but an AI screening call would give qualified applicants a chance to distinguish themselves and get to the human phase. It could incentivize people to not apply for everything.

https://youtu.be/mtIUQhb2h3A?is=0uwTOJdsHmCq69Ai

I can see how "AI" applications can be annoying for companies as well, but this knife cuts both ways. An interview is a meeting to determine if there's mutual interest, not a one-sided conversation.

Not only do they have the resume and a cover letter that took time, but they also wasted your time on a fake interview with a bot. All without disclosing anything.

“Abundance” they told us.

Submitters, please always submit the most original source for a story.

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).

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.

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.

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.