> Applicants are using AI too. I've heard from people who hire/post jobs that they gets hundreds to low thousands of applications, and maybe 5% of them have any relevant experience.

This happened before "AI" too. When all it takes is clicking an "apply now" button on LinkedIn some desperate people will spam any job they see.

The companies have made this bed. They are upset its finally a mor even playing field.

For the 95% irrelevant and 5% relevant groups, I wonder what percentage of resumes come in through a third party recruiter.

I get tons of spam that could be generated by even a basic LLM based on public information about me, but for positions that are not a reasonable fit.

Apparently, it is common for such cold calls to come from “recruiters” that are not affiliated with the hiring firm, but are trying to collect some sort of referral bounty.

I have no idea why an HR department would be dumb enough to set up such a pipeline (by actually paying for the third party “service”), but I guess once they have the program in place, they also need an LLM to screen spam applications.

Using AI for what and is it bad or good?

At this point, we think using AI and being able to use AI effectively is a skill in and of itself. When you're hired, you'll have access to AI. You'd be expected to be able to use said AI effectively.

So, we still give you a FizzBuzz. You can use AI. Even if we told you not to use AI, we know almost everyone would use AI. But you have to understand the FizzBuzz and be able to explain it to us and make changes to it "live". The amount of people that get weeded out just by having to explain the code they "coded themselves" is staggering (even pre-AI, even on a take home where you had no "OMG I suck at live coding" pressure).

For every "20 min max" take home assignment, there will be people who are willing to spend 4+ hours doing it to outshine candidates who have jobs, families and lives.

If you want to make it more of a fair consideration of time, consider moving your take home to interviews, that way there isn't a time cost asymmetry. You can enforce your "20 min max" claim this way, you can judge a candidate's performance, thought process and filter out anyone who is LLMing or spending inordinate amounts of time on them.

You will also make a better impression on candidates by investing your time in them in the same way they are with you. Maybe you're hiring kids out of college without experience, but you only have to do so many take home tests before you realize that they're a waste of time, and pass on potential employers who throw them at you, or you learn to just send them your hourly rate for the test.

That seems reasonable. Some employers will hand out 3-6 hour assignments after a candidate’s resumes make it through an AI screening.

> but part of the point was to allow candidates to gauge their own abilities and not waste their time interviewing without a chance of being hired.

In my experience this is the wrong game theory. Unemployed people can make job hunting their full time job, so a 20 minute take home doesn't select for "who delivers the highest quality solution in the least amount of time," it selects for "who is the richest applicant who can burn hours on a take home to deliver a higher quality result than people with less time they can afford to spend?"

Also, nobody should ever self-select themselves out of an interview process. Passing a resume review and getting a callback is about 10% likely: for every job hunt, in my experience , candidates get about 10 callbacks for every 100 resume sends. From there, it's about 20% chance to get to final stage, and from there, maybe 50% to get an offer (you're either their first choice or second; if second, your hiring hinges on whether the first choice accepts). Math is right there: once you pass a resume check, in terms of the volume of applications you've sent, it's optimal to spend far more effort into this gig than into firing off ten or twenty more resumes.

Therefore, even if the candidate doesn't think they're a good fit, they should do everything they can to stay in the game, including lying by omission.

After all they might be engaging in imposter syndrome, right? Why assume for the interviewer that your python skills aren't good enough - maybe the interviewer understands perfectly well that you've only used it for scripts and one off tools, but doesn't care because they personally believe your startup experience is more valuable to them and they believe you can up skill! Maybe the take home was designed poorly by someone who was tasked randomly by a lead to shit out a take home, and it's not an accurate indication of what the job would be like. Maybe they sent you the wrong take home? Maybe it's a good take home but you need money so fuck it, if you manage to sneak in despite not being a good fit, you can just bust ass to upskill and make up the difference before anyone notices. Or fuck it twice, it's a shit market and who knows how much longer you'll be able to sell your labor as an engineer, even if you can only fool them for two weeks, that's two weeks of income while you still keep up your job hunt.

I got dinged on my Netflix take home 10 years ago because I used the DOM to store state instead of implementing a shadow DOM. Sure, let me just whip that right up.

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.

It's quite rare for companies to have evidence to support their hiring methods, which unfortunately means it's heavily driven by trends.

And why would this be the case? Maybe the solution is to ban AI from the hiring process. This seems like companies being hoisted by their own petard. This is because they are the ones who drove the hiring market to be this way. They are the ones who started using AI in the hiring process. They are the ones who decided to make applying so much work driving applicants to use AI to survive.

Also, if you are having trouble hiring right now, that is 1000% a skill issue. It is easier to hire good talent right now than ever before. So I have absolutely 0 sympathy for this POV. Go down to your HR department if you want to see who is at fault.

PS You fix it by charging $1 to apply for jobs. Took me all of 30 seconds to figure that one out.

Maybe we should go back to show up in person to drop off your resume

Smaller companies is one fix. These are almost all problems of fast growth and scale.

Require paper application.

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.

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.

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