> Still, stretched-thin HR teams say it’s the only way to handle thousands of applicants.

You're doing it wrong if you're considering "thousands" of applicants.

First of all ask your current good employees if they can refer anyone.

If you need to go to resumes, sort by qualifications. Screen out obvious robo-applications, you know them when you see them just like you know spam email from the subject line alone.

Hint: if you're an insurance or financial services company in Chicago and getting applications from people with a degree from Stanford and 10 years of amazing experience at FAANG companies, they are fakes.

Hire the first candidate that has acceptable experience and interviews well. Check their references, but you don't need to consider hundreds or even dozens of people. Most people are average and that's who you're most likely going to hire no matter what you do.

Your job is also nothing very special. Have some humility. Very few companies need to be hiring the top 1% type of person, and your company is almost certainly of no interest to those people anyway.

Having thousands of applicants is only an issue if you give yourself the contrived problem of hiring the best person who sent you a resume. Your true objective is to strike a balance between cost of search and hiring someone from the top N% of potential people. Nobody has ever walked into a grocery store and bemoaned that there's no way they could locate the ripest banana in the building. You pick a number, evaluate that many at random, move on.

I think it galls people that they are likely cutting the best candidate out of the sample, but to be real: you don't have a magic incredibly sensitive, deterministic and bias free hiring method that can reliably pick the single best candidate out of thousands anyways. Any kind of cheapo ai-driven interview step you run is very possibly doing worse things to your sample than just cutting it down to size.

You are giving advice to some of the dumbest people in the country. I'm not saying its bad advice, but these people are universally stupid. I don't know exactly why things ended up this way, but I'd love to hear where this isn't a truth.

> if you're an insurance or financial services company in Chicago and getting applications from people with a degree from Stanford and 10 years of amazing experience at FAANG companies, they are fakes.

Maybe this explains why in my last job search I sent over 3000 applications and got almost nothing but form letter rejections back. I've got 10 years of mission-driven experience and NASA on my resume. In the end, I got my current job through a personal connection with someone I've known for 20 years.

> Your job is also nothing very special. Have some humility. Very few companies need to be hiring the top 1% type of person, and your company is almost certainly of no interest to those people anyway.

Right now, every company thinks that because times are uncertain, they only want to hire the best of the best, so they can be sure of their choice. Of course, everyone else has the same idea and the "best of the best" already got hired somewhere better. I'm not really sure why employers are taking so long to realize this.

Related: Funnily enough I’ve been getting a ton from robo applications who prepend a whole page with ascii art declaring that this is a robot application and the applicant (whose CV follows) is a “great match” and that I should reach out to the ai application mill with feedback. Naturally those are straight to the bin, but it’s just insane.

it's not, HR people are always lazy. i would ask a single chat bot to review every resume/cover letter and suggest the best based on some criteria, i would also ask it to cluster them into generalizable groups so i can review it

And that’s how to make it impossible to break into an industry regardless of capabilities. And god Covid if you have to move to another city.

I love this response.

First of all ask your current good employees if they can refer anyone.

Not permitted, depending on location and industry.

That kind of thought is how you end up with entire departments of 20-year-old single white guys wearing the same polo shirts and khaki pants.

A company with any size legal department is going to require you to consider applications from the general public.