Even for non-inside hires, I feel like it's more efficient for me as a hiring manager to go out and look for candidates rather than triage some AI-generated pile of crap.

I don't think anyone really wants the firehose. It's just something that happens when you advertise on any popular platform.

However I'll agree with you, the non-technical people sorting CVs on unknown criteria is something that became very widespread lately, and is certainly part of what's contributing to the problem.

Perhaps managers starting to do it by themselves rather than having HR in the middle is the answer to the problem.

That makes sense for the opportunities that actually close after they are posted. I'm talking about jobs that disqualify you as a candidate same day, then repost the same listing next week. And next month. And next year. These are clearly ghost jobs.

Regardless - it would be nothing to show some basic human decency and respect:

- Review them more often until you get the 5 quality candidates to interview (there's no way in hell you actually review all 100 resumes fully - quit sitting on them for weeks and weeks)

- Take down the posting after resumes are reviewed

- Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration

- A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview

- Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job

None of these add any substantial time to the hiring process, but can go a long way to remember the human in a job market that's an absolutely brutal and soulless Leviathan right now.

That's why feedback is important. If the reason was "we are looking for X experience and X is not on your resume" I can adjust that for later. If it was even as honest as "we found enough qualified candidates to interview and didn't look at your resume", that's still semi-actionable feedback. I either apply earlier or just accept that I was unlucky and it was not my ability.

Generic rejections like "we moved with other candidates" tells me nothing. So noise remains because candidates don't have feedback to improve upon. All because HR wants minimize lawsuits through obscurity.

> If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.

The thing though is it's a bad requirement. There are any number of great candidates who could be proficient in Python - the skills are very transferrable. (It's like trying to find a painter and filtering out people who have never painted a brown houses)

The thing you're screening for by being so specific is not finding the most qualified person, you're going to end up with the person with the most time and patience to fib or lie on their resume.

> I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.

That's exactly wrong - the best candidates are going to be busy people who are great at their job - the people jumping through HR hoops to get hired are by nature going to be worse candidates.

Probably a dumb question, but when you say "tailor your resume", what kind of tailoring do you mean? I've seen this advice repeated a lot, but I've rarely taken it because I tend to apply to jobs with the same job title and roughly the same responsibilities; in general, I assumed that tailoring is mainly helpful if you have a diverse/generalist skillset.

Like, it's obvious to me why a true Jack of all trades would use different resumes for applying to a plumber role vs a carpenter role, but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.

>Unpopular opinion around these parts, but there's a high correlation between the best candidates and people who take the time to review the job posting and customize their resume before submitting.

There's also a high correlation between matching the job description perfectly and the resume being AI generated and/or dishonest. Doubly so if the requirements are overly specific or contain pure nonsense as some do (saw "Must have 5 years experience with Claude Code" recently). You can filter out people who blatantly don't match the job and those who obviously just copied the job description. Never seen much correlation between the quality of resumes in the middle (ok to great) and how well they do in interviews.

Not to mention at many places "requirements" are mere suggestions or a low-effort list of technologies taken from the resume of the person who quit. Everybody has their own filtering rules and hiring managers rarely agree with each other much less the HR people usually doing the first round of filtering. The true requirements come out only at the resume filtering or interview stage.

>I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.

The "best candidate" a lot of times doesn't mean the best able to do the job. It often means the ones who 1. makes the hiring manager feel good by being enthusiastic about their (statistically) average job for average pay and 2. minimizes their perceived risk of looking bad for their hiring choice.

>If a job listing asks for Python and someone submits a resume that does not list Python, it's fair to reject that candidate.

If you're not a FAANGMULA type place then sure. But also if your job posting lists something like "Python 3.14" or "7+ years Python" I know the hiring manager probably doesn't know the first thing about python. In that case I think it's fair for any decent programmer to lie because they will likely surpass the hiring managers knowledge by studying python a bit before the interview.

>I doubt the "best candidate" is also the person who can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to update their resume before pressing submit.

Do you really think the best candidates are ones who are bothering to cold apply through hiring portals to begin with? The best interviewers, sure.

For people who are actively searching, 10 minutes for 100 applications is 15 hours of work. Reply rates can be as bad as 1 in 500. In this kind of market you want to get that application rate down to 2-3 minutes. There's no time nor point to tailoring towards dream jobs; oods are you dreams were crushed 200 applications ago.

There's no particular reason your time is more valuable. We're all just trying to survive in these tumultuous times.