(but usually won't)
screening interview at an semi-exotic hardware manufacturer went very well, the guy I talked to is head of their customer service and is both around my age (i.e. old) and also neurodivergent, so we "clicked" in that way. I'm moving on to the next step which is obviously going to be more difficult but at the very least I get to talk to people
but here's the interesting part: when I thanked him for not ghosting me like nearly every other company has, he explained that they received over 500 applications for the position, and 95% of them were "AI"-generated sludge. and since they don't use any kind of automated filtering system like some HR departments, they had to go through all of them to figure out who the human beings were and decline the rest. he used the word "dystopian" several times. (he also gave me permission to share these details with other people)
the biggest problem is apparently lazyapply.com, which is just a straight-up "pay us and use our AI tools to write your resume, write your cover letter, and fill out your application" service. they even have a collection of pre-written answers to interview questions. it is so fucking scammy-looking that I find it hard to believe anyone would actually use it, but if anything it's an excellent filter for the kind of employees you don't want to hire anyway
it also apparently tends to fuck up in a classic "failed mailmerge" way and create cover letters that start with "hello [hiring manager]", so it's not even good at what it pretends to do
but clearly going through hundreds of "AI" sludge applications is not going to scale well to a large organization hiring dozens if not hundreds of people at once. this is the only position this company is hiring for right now and it still took them weeks to sort through it all, and if I hadn't been recommended by a former coworker, I might have been overlooked in all the noise. a large organization with a formal HR department is going to be absolutely inundated with this shit, and many of them will resort to using their own "AI" tools for filtering, which will inevitably generate large numbers of false positives and make ghosting legit applicants even more likely
it also explains why I've been receiving rejection emails three or four months after I applied; that's how long a large-ish company that still gives a shit about their HR department is going to take to go through the mountains of bullshit applications that any paid position is going to get. I need to rethink my opinion of those people, looks like
in addition, the sudden wave of "please record a video of yourself" application filters makes more sense. it absolutely sucks and is terrible and a shit thing to have to do, but it makes a weird kind of sense if you look at it from the perspective of an overwhelmed HR department, like a very elaborate captcha for your job application
the LLM spam problem is only getting worse because it's not just web SEO that's using it, it's anything that humans can write, including things like job applications. just an absolute fucking disaster all around
Also, requiring people to record a video of themselves for a job application is considered fundamentally equivalent to requiring a photograph of the applicant, which in most circumstances is kind of super duper illegal
