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almost | 8 months ago

Surely this now means now hiring managers (and people your code incorrectly identifies as hiring managers) now get spammed with loads of bullshit generated messages. Which obviously they'll ignore. But now you've made their jobs a bit harder by breaking a previously (maybe) working communication channel.

So you've put a effort in to build a product just to make the world slightly worse on net. Not hugely worse, but still it doesn't seem like the best way you could have spent your time.

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fhd2|8 months ago

Things are turning truly bonkers right now. I've hired two developers in the last couple of weeks:

1. One from my network, just announced it, someone I had worked with in the past reached out, quick chat, hired, great.

2. One with the usual approach of posting job ads and all that. We got an _insane_ amount of noise, even as an obscure, small company. I've hired hundreds of people, but most of those three years ago or earlier. Never seen such noise, most candidates barely meeting any of the requirements, weird auto generated cover letters and CVs. It was a bit exhausting, but I went through everyone manually to make sure I'm not accidentally filtering out a solid candidate. We found two in the end, one quickly backed out because they got another offer. But there was one good candidate left, and they accepted the offer. I don't remember this being so hard.

A few years ago I'd call people trying to automate screening or mainly hiring from their network lazy. In this time, I see the appeal.

The last thing I need is more bots spamming me on my LinkedIn account on top of all this madness.

neilv|8 months ago

I think some recruiters are already doing AI-slop, too. (Not just the LinkedIn-spamming templates that some sourcers were doing before.)

Hopefully we'll get a big backlash against disingenuous passing off AI-slop as a communication from a human.

Maybe sending someone an AI-slop message will become universally recognized as trashy behavior -- employed only by the corporate communications of companies that really don't care, but not by anyone respectable.

notpushkin|8 months ago

Yeah. Personally, I’ve also tried reaching out to people in companies I’m interested in, but automating that just feels dishonest somehow.

dloku|8 months ago

quick question: have YOU tried actually applying to any jobs right now? go on Linkedin and you'll see every JD has like 100 applications. Is this what you call "working" process?

fhd2|8 months ago

It's not. But I think you might be able to use your energy in ways that don't make the noise problem _worse_. Sure, if you don't do it, somebody else might, that occured to me. So what can one do?

1. Perhaps pivot to building a tool that cross references companies hiring with people attending local user groups or conferences you're interested in, to show an overlap? That might give you a hint about what circles you could enter for networking. Manual, human networking. It'd still be work, but a place to start. Of course this is stuff that's better to start when you're still employed and interested in a change, not when you've been applying for months. But it's one idea.

2. Try to work the other side. Why do fitting candidates get filtered out? Can you build a better system than what companies are using already? I wrote another comment about just how hard hiring is with all this automated spam, I'd love a human solution. This is hard of course, but I think I won't be alone and many companies will have similar experiences. Might be a problem they want to pay money for, but it's arguably harder to get than from job seekers.

Just some ideas. I emphasise with the situation and it's cool that you're trying to do _something_. Don't let folks like me discourage you from solving the problem. But consider the feedback on your proposed solution and consider other options to solve it, perhaps.

almost|8 months ago

I haven't, but it sounds honestly really bad. Sounds like it sucks for everyone right now. I just think your product will make it worse, probably only very slightly worse but still worse.