As somebody who just did job interviews, tech like this is why the job market has somehow become even worse in the LLM age.

You want to know why people are using AI to read your resume? Because tools like this are clogging job inboxes with hundreds of submissions per day.

Also, don't think this makes you special, we can tell when something is written by AI. Not only do you not look smart, you look like the 100s of the people who thought they could get one over but instead your resumes all read the same and say a whole lot of nothing.

This isn't a criticism of the tool or the people using it. More a rumination on how an already horrible process has someone become so bad that tools like this feel like a good idea to people.

I can’t think of the right concept - tragedy of the commons, prisoner’s dilemma?

Each individual has an incentive to use products like this because it should maximize their chances. However, if enough people do it, everyone’s chances essentially go to zero since the hiring person can’t tell two applications apart. It seems like we’ve already reached this point in the job market.

I, thankfully, am not looking for a job currently, but I think I’d do what other people aren’t doing - make in person connections in my local area.

https://github.com/feder-cr/Auto_Jobs_Applier_AIHawk?tab=rea...

    2. Easy Apply Button Not Found

    Error Message:

    Exception: No clickable 'Easy Apply' button found

    Solution:

    Ensure that you're logged properly
    Check if the job listings you're targeting actually have the "Easy Apply" option
    Verify that your search parameters in the config.yaml file are correct and returning jobs with the "Easy Apply" button
    Try increasing the wait time for page loading in the script to ensure all elements are loaded before searching for the button

If there are good candidates who applied on the company website, the applications that these bots generate never see a human eyeball for consideration.

So when does it get to the point that instead of spamming as many applications as possible directly into the round file it makes more sense to go in the opposite direction, and find a decent recruiter who you can talk to in person and who has actual people they know?

Most tech jobs are done by an LLM anyway. It's only logical that the LLM also applies for the job.

Have been seeing “include ‘some_code’ text somewhere in your resume” requirements in job postings lately.

Wonder if bots and AI would pick up on that. Maybe bots and AI are the reason those requirements exist

As long as it starts every email with “I hope this email finds you well. I’m writing to …” it’ll be easy to spot these submissions and apply whatever your organization’s policy is for AI-Aided applications.

Why you see a 1000 jobs applications submitted in less than a day for a single software eng. job.

I’m hiring at the moment, and the last batch of applications from the HN who’s hiring thread had about 50% LLM generated cover letters.

Instant rejection. People applying: no cover letter is better than an LLM cover letter that’s telling me “how passionate you are about $VARIABLE1, and how you’re interested in learning more about $VARIABLE2”

I am absolutely, 100% certain, that AI is already destroying the job market. Its breaking in ways no one would have predicted, its causing insane damage to job mobility, and frankly there is zero indication that further advances in underlying technology will fix the problems the current imperfect tech has created (like, one might say is the case for e.g. image-gen)

Here's one thing I'd say right off the bat: I applied to a role at OpenAI about eight months ago. I have a resume that, while certainly not the best, is definitely qualified for this role, and is entirely human written. I have not heard back, in the positive or negative. The job opening is still posted.

I suspect this is a common story in many companies, because I have been on the hiring side this year. At a small-ish startup, which no one has heard of (relatively speaking), we posted a new mid-level software engineering role on only our own job board; we never got to broadcasting it to linkedin or within our local networks because, within the first 24 hours we received 800 applications. Our aging CTO was blown away, wow there must be so many fantastic candidates we'll work all night to sort through these; and I had to break it to him, man, its AI. But, ok, let's remain hopeful.

- Using a combination of human might and HRIS AI tooling, we narrowed down the list down and started scheduling interviews. This was extremely expensive (person-hours + how expensive these HRIS tools are).

- Many (~30%) of the applications were ghosts. We'd email them back trying to get an interview scheduled, and get no response. In a few cases we got email delivery bounce-backs.

- But, after doing a handful of screening interviews, it became abundantly clear that many of the resumes were straight-up lies, not just concerning their depth of experience, but even the specific technologies ("Oh, I don't have much experience with React." "Your resume says you do..."). My leading theory is that there's some AI Job application tool out there which will both automatically apply to jobs for you, and generate a resume which is well-matched to the job description. A couple of the candidates seemed to be oblivious as to why their resume said what it said; but certainly if it were happening at scale most would have just lied about it.

We paused the process, as it was clear that even with our HR generalist and me trying to sort through the slop every day for a week we have no way to trust the applications that were coming in. Fortunately, around the time we started wondering what we'd do, an old buddy came across my radar as looking for a new role; he did one interview with the CTO, I vouched for him, we extended an offer, and its been a great hire.

The conclusion to this story: blind applications and blind job posts are dead. They do not work anymore. I had one former colleague tell me "I've applied to 800 jobs, I'm not finding anything, no one is even calling me back" yeah you're not adapting, my dude. The problem isn't the tech industry, its not the economy, its not you: its AI. I'm aware of one company in our local tech scene that won't even broadcast roles on the public internet anymore; we have private social networks in our 2nd tier US city that they exclusively share through. If you don't have a network; you're toast.

The new grads coming out of college are so fucked, its not funny, its not ok.

Apply jobs to what?