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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sad that things have gotten to this point.
I'll just start a business that mails letters to companies for you.
Now, an APPLICATION FEE, that's interesting. Hmm.
I'll just start a business that lends money to job applicants. Apply now, pay later (ANPL).
No poorly paid (relative to company performance) recruitment team is going to take on sorting mail and recruitment.
So this just blows up business operations costs. Non-starter.
Its all in the profile - and we can all just swipe left/right instead.
Dysfunctional FAANG seeks 10X prompt engineer in hyderabad
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.