> “There is a growing gap between the candidate’s written persona and their live presence. I’ll see a cover letter that is poetic and a résumé that is flawlessly structured, but then the person on the video call struggles to explain their own bullet points.
This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”.
I can remember a few interviews where I asked candidates about something on their resume and they corrected me to explain that they did something else. Then I held up their resume and pointed to their exact words and they turned bright red while they tried to come up with a new explanation.
That was rare, though. You could catch a lot of little cases of stretching the truth, but it wasn’t common to feel like you were reading a resume that didn’t match the candidate.
What has changed in the age of AI is that more people are feeling more brazen about letting the AI speak for them. These situations are happening more frequently. You get the feeling that people are less shy about trying to cheat and manipulate because it feels like the AI is doing the cheating and writing the words, so it’s done at arm’s length.
I spend some time helping with resume reviews occasionally. It’s getting sad to see in the general discussion of the group when people go from elated that they got an interview for their dream job to embarrassed when the interviewers saw right through their AI written resume and ended the hiring cycle. I wonder if we’re seeing a peak in AI resume junk while everyone tries it out, but before it becomes common knowledge that an AI junk resume is a way to shoot yourself in the foot when applying to companies you actually want to work for.
ungreased0675 25 minutes ago [-]
Good hiring almost certainly has to be a significant competitive advantage.
It makes me wonder why so many otherwise successful companies let HR bungle the hiring process.
maccard 9 minutes ago [-]
I’ve worked with places that have had HR bungle the hiring and places that haven’t. The only difference is whether it’s HR or Engineering bungling the hiring. Writing a job description that actually matches what you want is hard work. Sifting through 300 applicants that don’t meet the requirements or lie on the application form is hard work. Doing 10 30 minute intro calls is hard work. Desigining “standard” questions for comparison is hard work. Wrangling 2 rounds of interviews per candidate, dealing with people who are too busy with work for hiring is hard work. Chasing people for interview feedback that isn’t just “yeah seems fine” is hard work. And then getting the group to stop saying “we want to speak to more people” is harder than any of the previous steps.
I’ve interviewed hundreds of people over the last few years as a peer, hiring manager, and as a “bar raiser”, and it’s just a lot of work no matter who does it…
stackskipton 19 minutes ago [-]
Because like a lot of things, metric of "What does recruiting cost us?" is very easy number to quantify so companies will attempt to reduce it.
"What does bad recruiting cost us?" is very hard number to quantify because it's just sand that gets thrown into so many gears, but cost of that sand is across a ton of departments and so measuring for it is very difficult.
dasil003 10 minutes ago [-]
Huh? Hiring being broken has nothing to do with cost, it's a filtering problem. Even when there's no HR or bean counter in sight it's still hard. There's fundamentally limited signal you can extract from interviews, so there's very loose correlation to on-the-job performance. Saying it's a cost-cutting problem would just encourage more and longer interviews, which could actually work against you because high performers tend to have more options and will not jump through infinite hoops.
maccard 4 minutes ago [-]
> High performers tend to have more options and will not jump through infinite hoops.
Biases are a strange thing. “High performers” aren’t one homogenous group; take a staff engineer at a FAANG and plop them in a role at a startup or vice versa and you’ll find very quickly that high performers are a product of environment (IME). The people you need to ship something at a big company will sink your startup, and the people who will lead a startup to unicorn levels of success will flounder in frustration in a big corp.
Finding high performers is really hard, as you said it’s a filtering problem, and it’s very much based on vibes and feelings. Leetcode, take home tests, on site tests, discussions about projects all filter for specific things - some or many of which aren’t related to the job at hand. If we removed the “risk of leaving current job element” the only way to do it would be to give someone a 3 month trial and see if they’re a fit. Honestly you probably know in your gut by week 2 if it’s going to work or not.
applfanboysbgon 4 minutes ago [-]
At scale, corporations want fungibility. Good hiring does give you a massive advantage (it is one of the prime reasons startups with a small team can compete with an enterprise that has thousands), but having extremely high-quality individuals with an outsized impact in your company gives them leverage to demand better working conditions because you are dependent on their high-quality work. If you systemize your processes to hire large numbers of middling employees, you can pay them much less and conduct huge layoffs at your whim because none of them have been given enough importance such that losing them will gravely harm the business.
cyanydeez 19 minutes ago [-]
Here's the secret: it's still just gambling. Elon musk isn't a trillionaire because he brought something special to the table; it's because he was able to perform the martigale enough times and he arbitrarily reached the top.
Hiring is exactly the same thing, even when trying to do it on merit, people are simply poor judges of character, ability and the rest.
Most of society is governed by people who simply kept getting lucky and kept doubling down because their ego demanded it and their last roll of the dice didn't drive them to poverty or happiness.
AI and remote interviewing have definitely exacerbated the problems that existed before though.
Leetcode was always weak, but now that it is easy to cheat on it is a negative selector, because the cheaters do best. Leetcode was originally supposed to be done in-person on a whiteboard to assess a candidate's collaborative problem solving skills, but with remote interviewing it has evolved into writing passing code with minimal or no feedback.
The real problem is that engineering departments are now filled with leetcode grinders and cheaters, who all live in permanent fear of being replaced by AI, and so any candidate who doesn't fit that paradigm is a threat that must be eliminated at all costs.
ghaff 16 minutes ago [-]
Much of it has been based on networking for a good 20+ years. Yes, there was a certain if you have a pulse era in tech at at a lot of companies--leet code notwithstanding though that was an issue--that has largely passed and a lot of people are reacting to tech hiring becoming a more normal multi-month process.
maximinus_thrax 5 minutes ago [-]
There's a spectrum of 'broken' and AI made it worse
watwut 8 minutes ago [-]
The premise of "flawless prose in cover letter and resume used to show work-quality of candidate rather their ability fine tune prose on resume" is dubious.
josefrichter 12 minutes ago [-]
It wasn't broken before?
fzeroracer 6 minutes ago [-]
I'm thinking back to a recent interview I had. It was one of those online coding tests; after spending about an hour and a half on it I sent it back to the recruiter and they came back to me saying I didn't pass because I 'only' got an 80% despite passing all criteria in the worst working environment possible. This was a no-AI test too so I unfortunately respected the criteria.
So many interviews still demand absolute perfection so they just optimize for people that are dishonest and get away with it.
Rendered at 17:03:27 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”.
I can remember a few interviews where I asked candidates about something on their resume and they corrected me to explain that they did something else. Then I held up their resume and pointed to their exact words and they turned bright red while they tried to come up with a new explanation.
That was rare, though. You could catch a lot of little cases of stretching the truth, but it wasn’t common to feel like you were reading a resume that didn’t match the candidate.
What has changed in the age of AI is that more people are feeling more brazen about letting the AI speak for them. These situations are happening more frequently. You get the feeling that people are less shy about trying to cheat and manipulate because it feels like the AI is doing the cheating and writing the words, so it’s done at arm’s length.
I spend some time helping with resume reviews occasionally. It’s getting sad to see in the general discussion of the group when people go from elated that they got an interview for their dream job to embarrassed when the interviewers saw right through their AI written resume and ended the hiring cycle. I wonder if we’re seeing a peak in AI resume junk while everyone tries it out, but before it becomes common knowledge that an AI junk resume is a way to shoot yourself in the foot when applying to companies you actually want to work for.
It makes me wonder why so many otherwise successful companies let HR bungle the hiring process.
I’ve interviewed hundreds of people over the last few years as a peer, hiring manager, and as a “bar raiser”, and it’s just a lot of work no matter who does it…
"What does bad recruiting cost us?" is very hard number to quantify because it's just sand that gets thrown into so many gears, but cost of that sand is across a ton of departments and so measuring for it is very difficult.
Biases are a strange thing. “High performers” aren’t one homogenous group; take a staff engineer at a FAANG and plop them in a role at a startup or vice versa and you’ll find very quickly that high performers are a product of environment (IME). The people you need to ship something at a big company will sink your startup, and the people who will lead a startup to unicorn levels of success will flounder in frustration in a big corp.
Finding high performers is really hard, as you said it’s a filtering problem, and it’s very much based on vibes and feelings. Leetcode, take home tests, on site tests, discussions about projects all filter for specific things - some or many of which aren’t related to the job at hand. If we removed the “risk of leaving current job element” the only way to do it would be to give someone a 3 month trial and see if they’re a fit. Honestly you probably know in your gut by week 2 if it’s going to work or not.
Hiring is exactly the same thing, even when trying to do it on merit, people are simply poor judges of character, ability and the rest.
Most of society is governed by people who simply kept getting lucky and kept doubling down because their ego demanded it and their last roll of the dice didn't drive them to poverty or happiness.
Leetcode was always weak, but now that it is easy to cheat on it is a negative selector, because the cheaters do best. Leetcode was originally supposed to be done in-person on a whiteboard to assess a candidate's collaborative problem solving skills, but with remote interviewing it has evolved into writing passing code with minimal or no feedback.
The real problem is that engineering departments are now filled with leetcode grinders and cheaters, who all live in permanent fear of being replaced by AI, and so any candidate who doesn't fit that paradigm is a threat that must be eliminated at all costs.
So many interviews still demand absolute perfection so they just optimize for people that are dishonest and get away with it.