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‘I Applied to 2,843 Roles’: The Rise of AI-Powered Job Application Bots
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this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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Fuck AI
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I mean... online job applications have been a shitshow for over a decade, with many of the same problems of online dating apps (from an average male perspective).
The jobs you are applying to already have 100 other applicants.
The job requirements are very, very often faaar beyond what is necessary to do the job.
The job descriptions are also often absurd, written by HR people who have little to no idea what they're trying to describe, and usually your responsibilities will just expand ad hoc, at any time. Hell in most states you don't even have to list an actual wage, just a range, which you will almost always be lowballed on.
The applications very rarely follow a common format where one can upload a resume and just submit it, no, there's always some percentage of time consuming manual input required.
No response from employers is completely normal, and so is being strung along for weeks or months before they lose interest with no explanation why.
Oh and some of the job postings are already filled, might have an opening at a later undetermined date, but they don't indicate that at all.
... These all have rather direct analogues to what an average guy's experience of using a dating app is.
The primary difference is that employers have been using more rudimentary AIs / algorithms to analyze the submitted applications for around a decade as well.
I remember seeing in like 2018 or so that the average resume gets 2.7 seconds of viewing time by an HR person, and that's after some kind of software screening.
This is basically just fighting bots with bots. Nothing is reasonable or sincere, hasn't been for a long time.
This is just the next logical step in an escalating arms race.
Why not just do the scattershot approach when your chance of getting any one particular result is vanishingly small?
And in specialized fields, or really any career path, the way that you stand out from the crowd and actually have a chance at getting the job is to network and find the person to talk to that will give you a shoe-in.
So we've created this entire qualification & resume system, built on the idea of meritocracy. And it has gotten so ungainly and unusable that we have shortcutted the whole process and are back to "oh, I know a guy/gal."
Wonderful.
Yep. Nepotism trumps everything, and I've been on both ends of it.
I've had a job, team lead wants an addition to that team, screens nearly 100 people over 6 weeks, she asks me if I can recommend anyone... I think about it for a bit and well I do know one person who might be interested? I text her (my friend) about it and ....she's hired in a week.
I've also been in unemployment hell after becoming disabled, spending literally a full 40 hours a week for a year, applying to jobs, getting a grand total of 3 interviews, one of which landed me a job.
The system is completely broken and full of bullshit and liars.
EDIT:
So far, for my disabled and autistic self, I've concluded that I'd rather be poor and live off of disability than attempt to get a job I'm qualified for.
Too much bullshit to try to get another, too much stress trying to get a job, and every job I've ever had is also insanely stressful as theyre full of people asking me to do the damn near impossible in a day whilst my task is dependant on a whole bunch of incompetent / emotionally unstable people.
Blargh. Fuck it, I'm just fucking around in poverty now toying at making a video game. Happiest I've ever been in my life.
What are you using for game dev?
Right now just brainstorming, toying around with concepts.
Too poor to live somewhere thats internet capable.
Cellphone hotspot maxes out at 5gb per month, pretty hard to do much actual work.
When I said poverty, I meant it.
But at the same time, I also meant it when I said haven't been this happy in a very long time.
I've had quite a lot of idiot, backstabbing, gaslighting partners, friends and family, as well as ludicrously dysfunctional working environments.
Its very nice to just do basically nothing other than exist and not have people screaming at me and gaslighting me and threatening me all the time.
Which is incredibly discriminatory against the neurodivergent, BTW.
I'm HR and I support this message. Only thing I would add is that its much worse than that--its not just specialized jobs. Even bad, low wage jobs desperate for labor either a) don't have the HR budget to review and screen the volume of applicants correctly b) have given up on a) and have an AI screening system that sucks and still gives them too many candidates to review and screen with their budget. Hiring managers mostly have even less time than HR.
Blockchain resumes is the only way, but much like Esperanto has a critical mass of institutions and organizations that likely won't be reached.
I wonder if AIs also look at a resume from a guy named LaQuan and immediately turns it down because "black name?"
Most assuredly so. Those AIs are trained on human input, which is practically guaranteed to contain some level of bias.
I'm sure the embedded racism is deeeeep, yeah. All those "AI" hiring models are doing is pattern matching, based on whatever junk was fed into it.
So any discriminatory patterns are probably not only embedded, they're impossible to remove without some hypothetically non-discriminatory training data. Not sure where they would even look for that.