[mead5432]

My partner has been searching for an SDE job for 8 months and recently received an email requesting her to do a recruiter screen. She responded and got a call instantly where the “recruiter was a text-to-speech AI.

Presumably the entire process was automated; I’m assuming if they’re using text-to-speech, the selection and initial email was all AI.

It’s an arms race on both sides.

[the_snooze]

It's the curse of scale. Automation allows there to be plenty of job postings and job applications, but it sidelines the human part of actually talking to someone. Those in the know will end up sidestepping this altogether and using their networks to get a direct line to a real hiring manager or applicant. I've done this myself where I talk to past collaborators and professors I know and ask "Do you have an intern/soon-to-graduate-student you recommend with skills X, Y, and Z?"

This is admittedly unfair to outsiders, but if you talk to someone, there's a high reputational pressure that assures you're dealing with a real person who's likely a decent match for the job/applicant. This is valuable precisely because there's high friction and doesn't scale.

[mead5432]

I generally agree that relying on a network and human referrals is the way to go but building an effective network is much harder than it used to be. Meetup groups and local conferences were a good source to make connections pre-pandemic but that has really withered in the last couple years.

Past collaborators are also a great source but she is junior and doesn’t really have any she can leverage.

My initial advice to her was do some real projects, document her work and insights in a blog and engage with others on social media but that’s mostly screaming into a void.

My approach to hiring is to focus on competencies (what do I need them to accomplish) rather than skills (how many years of JS) but that doesn’t cut down on the number of applicants any, just makes initial eval a little easier. I was pondering the idea of leaning in more on AI to screen on competencies which might incentivize higher information density on resumes but the quality of that eval might not actually be any better and only increase the “black box”-ness of it all.

[Danaemp]

That’s why we’re building Touvlo.co (for hardware engineers) - human engineer interviewers, interviewing humans on real world applicable engineering skills, more fair to outsiders, standardized, scaleable!

[Aurornis]

> It’s an arms race on both sides.

In my experience, the AI-vs-AI hiring battle takes place in parallel to normal hiring pipelines. Even before ChatGPT went mainstream, recruiting for key roles was largely happening via referrals or scraping LinkedIn for people at target companies.

When I posted jobs (for a moderately well known company name) on public job boards, we'd get 1000s of applications within the first week long before people were using ChatGPT to fill out applications. The majority of the submissions were absolute junk: People spamming their resume to every job out there, resumes from people completely unqualified (like tech support people applying for Staff Software Engineer roles), or mad-libs style resumes where people threw word salad into a PDF while forgetting to tell me what they actually did ("spearheaded initiative to reach across the company and leverage synergies, increasing company revenue by 23%")

It has been like this for a long time. ChatGPT only seems to have emboldened more people to switch to spamming resumes and sending vacuous applications everywhere.

[justahuman74]

I can understand having to respond if it's been 8 months, but this is a pretty big red flag that the company doesn't respect humans.

[mead5432]

It’s a giant telecom company that already had some pretty big red flags around how they treat employees from my own network.

The best part is that she already interviewed there a while back. She got a backend interview and didn’t pass (she’s primarily frontend); not a big deal but she gets a message from a new recruiter about every 2-3 months about the same role. This time it was just AI doing it.

[conradfr]

AI startup idea, CaaS, candidate as a service.

[kgermino]

Yep, I just had this happen too. I'm not looking nearly that seriously but the position as described was nearly perfect. The AI phone call plus a couple other minor details (slight changes in the description/requirements) which could probably be easily cleared up with a human made me distrust the entire process and walk away.

It's incredibly annoying

[RobotToaster]

Anyone have a text-to-speech AI to talk to recruiter text-to-speech AIs?

[mead5432]

I love that idea. Record the messages and use that to fine tune your own language model to improve the chances of talking to a real person? If she does that and can’t get a job, the market is officially broken.

[moneywoes]

yes interested