The entire market is quite fucked right now. But the thing is, if you have more and more applicants writing their applications with AI, and more and more companies evaluating them with AI, we get completely away from any kind of actual evaluation of relevant skills, and it becomes entirely a self-referential game with its own independent rules. To be sure this is generally a problem in these things, and the attempt to fix it by bloating the process even more is always doomed to failure, but AI risks putting it on turbo.
Of course it’s hard to make sure the applicants don’t use AI, so if only the employer is regulated that creates an asymmetry. I’m not sure how to address that. Maybe we should just start having employment speed-dating sessions where you get a bunch of ten minutes in-person interviews with prospective employers looking for people and then you get paired up at the end for a proper interview. At least it’s fast, efficient, and no AI bullshit is involved. And even ten minutes of in person talking can probably tell more than a hundred CVs/cover letters full of the same nonsense.
On the second paragraph—I could see this being an interesting approach, if you can get a good critical mass of employers with sufficiently similar needs and a willingness to try it. Certainly much better than some others I’ve seen, like (real example from 2009) “Let’s bring in 50 candidates at once on a Saturday for the whole day, and interview them all in parallel for 2 positions.”
I think one, slightly deeper problem is—who is doing the short interviews or the screenings? Do they actually know what the job entails and what would make someone a good fit, such that they can learn about it quickly from a rescue or a short interview? Or are they working off a script from a hiring manager who tried their best but can’t easily encapsulate what they’re looking for in a job description or list of keywords?
I think one, slightly deeper problem is—who is doing the short interviews or the screenings? Do they actually know what the job entails and what would make someone a good fit, such that they can learn about it quickly from a rescue or a short interview? Or are they working off a script from a hiring manager who tried their best but can’t easily encapsulate what they’re looking for in a job description or list of keywords?
Classic problem, but I see a lot of that happening already. Less of a problem for non-specialized jobs, but for tech jobs (like what I’m familiar with), it would have to be another tech person, yeah. Honestly for the vast majority of jobs anything other than the technical interview (like the pre-screening by a HR guy who doesn’t know the difference between SQL and C++, or the “culture fit” that is either just validation of some exec’s prejudices or an exercise in cold reading and bullshitting on the fly for the candidate) is probably useless fluff. So basically that’s a “companies need to actually recognise who is capable of identifying a good candidate quickly and accept that getting them to do that is a valuable use of their time” problem, which exists already regardless of the screening methodologies adopted.
The entire market is quite fucked right now. But the thing is, if you have more and more applicants writing their applications with AI, and more and more companies evaluating them with AI, we get completely away from any kind of actual evaluation of relevant skills, and it becomes entirely a self-referential game with its own independent rules. To be sure this is generally a problem in these things, and the attempt to fix it by bloating the process even more is always doomed to failure, but AI risks putting it on turbo.
Of course it’s hard to make sure the applicants don’t use AI, so if only the employer is regulated that creates an asymmetry. I’m not sure how to address that. Maybe we should just start having employment speed-dating sessions where you get a bunch of ten minutes in-person interviews with prospective employers looking for people and then you get paired up at the end for a proper interview. At least it’s fast, efficient, and no AI bullshit is involved. And even ten minutes of in person talking can probably tell more than a hundred CVs/cover letters full of the same nonsense.
On that first paragraph, we agree.
On the second paragraph—I could see this being an interesting approach, if you can get a good critical mass of employers with sufficiently similar needs and a willingness to try it. Certainly much better than some others I’ve seen, like (real example from 2009) “Let’s bring in 50 candidates at once on a Saturday for the whole day, and interview them all in parallel for 2 positions.”
I think one, slightly deeper problem is—who is doing the short interviews or the screenings? Do they actually know what the job entails and what would make someone a good fit, such that they can learn about it quickly from a rescue or a short interview? Or are they working off a script from a hiring manager who tried their best but can’t easily encapsulate what they’re looking for in a job description or list of keywords?
Classic problem, but I see a lot of that happening already. Less of a problem for non-specialized jobs, but for tech jobs (like what I’m familiar with), it would have to be another tech person, yeah. Honestly for the vast majority of jobs anything other than the technical interview (like the pre-screening by a HR guy who doesn’t know the difference between SQL and C++, or the “culture fit” that is either just validation of some exec’s prejudices or an exercise in cold reading and bullshitting on the fly for the candidate) is probably useless fluff. So basically that’s a “companies need to actually recognise who is capable of identifying a good candidate quickly and accept that getting them to do that is a valuable use of their time” problem, which exists already regardless of the screening methodologies adopted.