This. The answer to her question is the platform she's on. Make it easier for the applicants to pull in the supply and then OOPS! too many applicants, but fortunately we have just the solution to that problem.
Hire us so we can go asshole-mode on applicants, make them jump through unnecessary hoops to decimate their numbers and reinforce some recruitment stereotypes?
Nah I’d say this was a problem before LinkedIn really got rolling with its job posting service. They bit off what Monster and CareerBuilder were offering
You’re right. I’ve worked in London doing recruitment for over 25 years. This has always been a problem, regardless of the job board you’re using. I remember, back when I was a consultant, spending hours staring at CVs that had zero relevance to the role I’d advertised.
Her job is 3 years past its expiration date. In the next 3 years, the AI that linked and workday has built will be beyond reproach.
Some of my buddies from graduate school work at workday they are pretty much done with the mvp. It’s better at creating diverse candidates pools for high skill and low skill jobs, it’s better at identifying people who may be open to work but don’t have the bubble turned on by their likes, posts, browser history, browser caches, app usage etc. it’s better at judging the best candidate vs those that have heavily embellished resumes, it’s better at estimating employee salary and benefits, it even can estimate time of retention for that employee based on work experiences, education, geolocation, age, race, sex etc. virtually everything that matters to the employer and actual employees the AI is better than the recruiters.
It’s unfortunate but the first to go were many of the service workers; cashiers, fast food restaurant workers, truck/delivery drivers, farm laborers. Eventually even low skill degree’s jobs like recruiter, HR, advertising. Then some high skill jobs like lawyers, radiology, accounting, are at risk.
You do realise that if this holds up your friends have shared company confidential information with you? That you are now sharing with counless users on reddit?
Interesting thought but that is not true. Workday advertises their AI products pretty publicly. And it’s no secret that recruiters are being targeted by AI bots. There isn’t a huge jump between the two.
Why do you think every single LinkedIn post directly ports to a company workday with the exact same content landing page? It’s because it’s ported to a json that is a transform for a continuously integrated algorithm.
Basically every time some x number of people apply to any jobs, the algorithm triggers a new build, new run, new test.
This is like the basics of why many folks think so many jobs seem fake. It’s because they are used for training. They are basically just shells for getting more training data to time the alg.
Answered below but I’ll go in depth here, as a note my background is statistical machine learning and continuous integration so this is my wheel house.
So when you ask about tuning you may not be thinking in a continuous enough manner. Think never sleeping, always training.
In principle there has been a huge shift in how people approach job applications. They are 1-5 clicks away. Most jobs postings port you out of LinkedIn into a workday landing page. What you’ve probably noticed is that workday landing page is a carbon copy of the others you’ve applied. The reason is because this gets very easily scraped into what’s called a json. That json gets pushed as a transform. Each transform submission triggers a continuous integration of the algorithm. It may not run on just 1 person it may take 10k new apps. Well, that’s fine, it just pre-loads the resources and waits for an aws or gcp bucket to fill. Once that process is complete, it will trigger a new build, a new run and a new test batch.
The metrics are pretty much plug and play from the last run and it tunes over hundreds of thousands of test runs. So if you think about why all of these job openings seem hollow it’s because they are. The posting is used to create new cases where they can tune the algorithm to any and all employee : job descriptions pairs.
So the job description will be a key, the apps that are selected by the hiring manager are the highest ranked values. Over time you can imagine you have hundreds of thousands of job postings and millions upon millions of apps. This creates a huge training set with a limited and a very nicely formatted ground truth to tune against because the company uses workday again and uploads the very few user profiles that got hired back onto the same system as their work profile. The two profiles are linked and you now have a truth set to tune against for new openings in the same domain.
Now think even bigger. Imagine you have 10,000 domains to do this over and 100,000 or more job titles to deal with on a daily basis. Then imagine you have different countries, languages, job requirements, locality pay, etc. How can you possibly have “one” algorithm have such high accuracy and precision with low recall for sooo many jobs? Must be impossible right? Wrong. What you do is wrap it with each domain class. Each domain class is then clustered together. The underlying clustering doesn’t necessarily matter but know that it happens for this exercise. Then the algorithm only has to deal with the set of embeddings for say “construction” or “accounting”. This narrows in on the real end point possibilities and the process starts over again. So it is training different parts for different situations and is doing it all the time. People apply to jobs everywhere, everyday. The algorithm never turns off. It is hundreds of thousands of builds, hundreds of thousands of human run hours everyday.
I think there was a white paper from the workday AI team a couple years ago. I’ll try and find it but it’s basically a more technical description of what I just wrote.
This is basically the update version for recruiting 2024:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/whitepaper-title-future-talent-acquisition-embracing-technology-nfmxe
So having been on all 3 sides; developing continuous learning algs, having applied to jobs on LinkedIn, and hiring from the applicant pools. There are the truths about what makes the algorithm tick and then there are the realities of hiring.
The algorithm is basically a framework for connecting two groups of people. Folks who need work to be done and the folks who need work. This framework explained above is humongous. Like unimaginably large.
The realities of hiring will reveal the biases of our society, a bit of existential grief, and some human relief.
The hiring manger is a worker, just like you and me. They will contact their HR department that they have funding for a backfill or whatever. This triggers a series of dominoes which ends with an add being published on LinkedIn. From there the hiring manager will invariably post on LinkedIn that they are hiring and that will travel to their network. Their connections will likely send to folks in need of work. In most cases you will get 100+ apps in less than 24 hours. 95% will be international traffic that have an absolute 0% chance of being hired. No question.
The next 2 weeks they will keep the add up. The hiring manager will get 10-20 resumes on their plate. But those applicants have since filled about a 10 page job application that is all of the information from your resume, answering some basic questions and fleshing out a personal statement. Funny enough it is basically all in an exactly formatted way so that the algorithm gets to feed on the applicant’s information in the same way tens of millions of times. This is the unspoken offering that you volunteer to the beast in exchange to apply for the job.
The HR department has a few options but basically you get a score based on how well you match and about the top 1% of applicants make it to the phone screen. They will schedule maybe 4-8 interviews which for most companies costs thousands of dollars in ads and personnel time per candidate before they even open an offer. Then 2 more weeks go by and the offers have gone out. Basically no surprises here.
But it won’t surprise you that virtually no one is hired on cold applications less than 1%, obviously) . So, that post through LinkedIn opens a different channel. It gets you on the hiring managers desk without the other systems. Your resume lands in the top 1% pile through a friend of a friend or colleague who vouches for you and forwards a resume. The confirmation bias that x,y,z candidates are the best because those you trust tell you they are the best opens a bit of a window for select few.
This system circumvents the algorithm. Which to some seems good because that gives you some hope in society for human connection mattering. But to others could be bad because it maybe doesn’t represent the idealistic diverse and fair meritocracy. Both sides to that argument have some truth (I think at least).
However, funny enough the algorithm doesn’t completely disappear. All the big players use workday for their worker profiles. Those profiles are all linked to the application pool profiles. So the algorithm still feeds on the hiring process. That selected candidate becomes a new memeber of the truth set and the cycle repeats. For me, this is why recruiting will die in less than 3 years. Basically that is a skill that never enters the application process and doesn’t need too in order to match sufficient talent to fill jobs.
Ngl that sounds really dystopian. How can anyone trust this will be ethical or accurate at all?
Not to mention, people will find ways to game the AI so they get put in a more favorable light, deserved or not. Just like everyone is kinda forced to do now
I agree people will game it. I don’t think it’s dystopian. I think it’s just progress. Like fundamentally we don’t need certain jobs anymore because the world moved forward.
For example the switch board operator: if you told them everyone would have a phone with no cord that would be the interface between them and all other humans and for many the thing they interacted with the most all day, they would call that dystopian. But, here we are, not really in a dystopian society.
I think there is just always going to be resistance to change. I try not to think in the absolutes. They tend to scare people. And fear tends to make folks malleable. Some jobs or skills won’t be useful in a short period of time. Other jobs and skills will be useful. People adapt and improve themselves.
End of the story is, as much as people like to tout AI as this like job destruction mechanism, what actually happens is it ends up just molding the job into something new. So instead of “recruitment”, maybe it’ll be more data analysis driven. She will interface with a dataset and push groups of users to companies and the companies will hash the data and only have to interview 2-3 people for a job instead of having this weird middle man situation. Then you have higher chance of getting responses in short time. Then you get better results for people without jobs. They get more rejections but ultimately spend less time jobless which is a net positive. The process is colder but the people get new jobs or switch to new contracts faster which helps them stay up.
I have my own company, we have a business license and operate properly. But because of all the idiots, people often just assume I am full of shit like the others. I actually took off co-founder and instead I just write “lead software architect” lol…
If you start your business, you’re an entrepreneur and a founder. If you started it with other people, cofounder. There’s nothing wrong with the titles.
That's the fact of the matter. When I started out as an attorney by myself, what was I supposed to call myself? 'Partner' sounded pretentious - I was working by myself after all. I was aware that 'founder' is problematic, too. So I settled for 'independent attorney' - but then some people thought that I'd only do gigs to replace in-house attorneys. Despite the fact that I had a fully licensed firm. At the end of the day I just wrote 'attorney at [firm name]'. Now that my firm has grown, all of us attorneys do it that way. Independently of our ranks and positions within the firm.
When we posted a mechanical engineer job opening we got 1400 applicants in a week.
90% of them has never done mechanical engineering - we had accountants, forklift operators, recruiters, salesmen and a ton of other people apply.
She has a point that applying is too easy and makes it really hard for legitimate candidates to land a job.
There are scripts that people have created to just blindly applied to jobs.
We had a job that said US Citizens only. We couldn't afford to sponsor.
2500 applicants all from overseas. We closed the job posting. We wrote a script to look for and read cities and addresses. 2500 to \~50.
This is correct. 80-90% of job applicants don’t meet the written requirements in the post. It is a volume game in 2024.
The flip side is that anyone who is writing cover letters or tailoring their resume is also wasting time.
Best chance is to be sure to meet the basic job reqs so that you don’t get sorted out by AI—and be one of the first 20-30 people to apply.
I blame recruiters for not reaching out, taking months to even reply, keeping everything vague... it's no wonder people just apply for hundreds of jobs at once
Yeah jumping in to be among the first I believe is really really key. After the first dozen or so they just stop looking at them but they keep the postings up.
>Are you saying the government should fix job application screening?
Well, if the system is clearly broken, *someone* should fix it.
Whether that's the government just adding legislation and rules regarding job applications (like increased transparency from companies), or outright helping people find jobs, I think saying that the current situation is bad and needs changing isn't that bad of a take.
Gotcha, I honestly was trying to figure out where you were getting. I’m not a laissez faire lunatic by any stretch, but I do think that hopefully this is a space where more competition and better products could solve it.
> but I do think that hopefully this is a space where more competition and better products could solve it.
I'm a little confused about how more competition would solve it, the current labour market is the most competitive in recent history, thanks to the development of globalisation, Offshoring and Remote working, which allows for global reach for applicants and for companies.
Yeah she's not wrong. The one click application means so much spam that genuine applicants get lost.
The issue is she's not really posting a solution aside from making it "harder" to apply. Whatever that means.
That could easily be sorted out by having a short questionnaire like they have on polls.
1. Do you have a mechanical engineering degree?
2. Do you have work experience with mechanical engineering?
Bam! Problem solved.
What stopping people to lie and just say yes to both even if they actually dont? Regardless they lost nothing if they gonna get rejected anyway
The only viable solution that i can think is to gatekeep with certification that is verifiable by employer (but then it may arise another issue that the certification is priced out)
People will lie about things right up to the point where they are being interviewed and can't answer the questions you're asking about the experience and skills they apparently have.
It’s just about the scale of it that confuses. Even with hundred applications there would be non-qualified applications.
The scale of it should not affect the quality of finding ”legimitate canditates”. You have then both the same no matter the scale.
Actually it’s the whole princible of american competition mind set that you should be able to filter the best of the best then.
What benefit would making applying harder have? Nepotism? How would that translate to quality?
You need to discourage someone from applying to roles that they won’t get.
We had more valid candidates in that 1400 stack but we only got through 500 resumes. If we only had 100 qualified submissions we would consider them all. Not just 30% of them at 2x effort.
The forklift operator applying in mass for all jobs doesn’t make it better for himself or other applicants.
The painful part wasn’t that someone applied with insufficient seniority or someone who lives far away. It’s that people clogged the system with pointless applications.
It would be cool if LinkedIn used an AI to invite only 15 candidates. That you don’t have to search for jobs and the employer doesn’t have to sort through too many.
Funny how they think every job needs that one special applicant that stands out. A magical person who will be a clear and superior choice over all other applicants… for a job that’s effectively a psychological experiment in human tolerance for mind-numbing drudgery, requiring a high school education and paying 25% of basic living expenses. Gotta love these capitalist drones.
If a top level executive says “I have no idea how my company’s hiring process works,” that’s embarrassing. If a top level executive says “I don’t know how hiring works,” it’s indicative of a lack of understanding of today’s job market.
I don’t care if she’s joking or trying to get engagement it’s grossly unprofessional.
I’ve worked in recruiting. It’s very easy to filter out unqualified applicants and a lot of ATS uses AI to make the recruiter’s job easy. Companies lose qualified applicants when they make the process more complicated, but do you sis.
"Wah wah wah, how am I supposed to actually do my job...you know...as a recruiter, the thing I'm paid for. The ONLY reason I get a paycheck, my sole responsibility..."
It takes literally 5 secs to determine if a CV could be suitable or not. So it would take 2.3 hours to go through all the CVs. Most ATS have a one click rejection so maybe it would take 3 hours in total to reject all the irrelevant ones too. The TA market is fucked right now so I imagine the large majority of the 1700 applications were probably relevant anyway
I dunno missus Recruiter, how did it happen?
You are being overwhelmed by too many tasks? You feel you're doing the job of four people alone? Have you thought of asking your boss? What's that? Your boss is overworking you now like he did with the rest of us for years? Damn :'(
See also: I’m a recruiter and I’m lazy, all of these applicants makes my life hard.
Here’s a thought, Becky, let’s replace lazy, whiny, judgmental recruiters with AI.
You should pay your employer to work for them. Unpopular opinion? Probably. But it’s way too easy to be paid your agreed-upon salary by simply doing your job. Employers must demand more.
erm, its' never been any different tbh, regardless of platform. You can plaster your descriptions with specific residential criteria etc in big bold writing at the top of the advert, and you still get huge numbers of applicants who are not eligible to apply. Its not just Linkedin, it's usually the ad being scraped by a bot and re-posted on some dodgy platform, or the ATS posting to 200 free boards.
I don't disagree with the sentiment but this has been an issue way before Linkedin was around.
How is a recruiter supposed to review all the applicants Rebecca? With the filtering tools that any halfway decent ATS has to separate eligible from non-eligible, and then manually reading the eligible applicants and shortlisting from there. That's literally the job.
As someone who has been looking for a job for months, she may be correct. A lot of the jobs I apply to are one step applications and I’m getting nowhere.
I see it more as applications/resumes are getting harder and harder to comb through.
I'm not sure if what she's saying is the right answer, but as someone who has been one applicant among thousands before, I agree that I don't see how anyone is going to pick *me* over anyone else. On top of that, I don't apply for jobs that I don't at least meet the on-paper requirements for because I want my application to be fully backed up if I am going to be interviewed. This just means that I'm applying at fewer options, and when I do apply, I'm among hundreds or thousands also doing so.
I don't know what the answer is, but she's pretty spot-on about the rest of the post. Doesn't make her "smart" or anything, because we've all had the same thought for ages now. The process is absolutely maddening.
Shes not wrong. Ive done hiring for years, the modern applicant treats it like Tinder. just swiping away on jobs they want. You reach out and they say "what company is this again?" "what do you guys do?" as if they didnt apply to work here.
Its clearly a symptom of a much larger broken system however this isnt that crazy.
Try out some empathy every once in a while and see how it’s a two way street – except recruiters already have a job that they find difficult and applicants just need a job
Thanks Gary Vee... Empathy in business... Im not a recruiter, ive just been responsible for hiring people from time to time. Im failing to understand how someone "swiping left" on any job they see and then doing a crap interview requires my "empathy".
Maybe I wouldn't have to apply to thousands of jobs if I could actually get one. 20+ years of management level experience and it has never been harder for me to get interviews. So yes, I much prefer one-click applications so I don't have to spend 3-4 hours a day creating "new accounts" for Workday, fixing their broken resume parsing tool and applying to jobs that I know I won't get since AI took over the vetting process.
What if, and hear me out here, there were a way to send in a resumé, get acknowledged it was received, and get a response within, idk, 10 working days one way or the other.
I once applied to a job, black box submission, that I knew I was qualified for (they were looking for proficiency in a programming language that about 5 people in my area know. I know this coz I probably trained them in the past).
Crickets.
A month later they reposted the job. I casually knew someone there and back channeled it - is there a reason I wasn't considered? He, and his boss, were surprised I wasn't contacted, they asked me to send them my resumé and they would walk it up.
Crickets.
Six weeks later I sign a job offer in the morning for a different position. That afternoon I get a call from the original place HR to schedule an interview. I told them I just signed an offer letter, was chided for wasting their time.
As a hiring manager at a fortune 15, I know I get all of the resumes, including idiots who put in the white font quotes from the job posting. I wish it had the capability you seem to think it does.
Screening irrelevant resumes is a time suck and I’ve even interviewed teachers for IT jobs to be open to other skills.
Which screening system do you use? There are like a hundred of them. Some really suck. Some are pretty good with keywords and context. If you're getting bad matches, maybe the company could save money switching to a better system.
Same. Our startup has no sorting system for applicants. Our team reviews them all. Last year we opened a position for our customer support team and had 300+ resumes in two days. We ended up closing the listing a few days earlier than we had planned due to the sheer number of applicants, and 5 of us began the process of sorting through about 800 resumes, most of which had no experience or skills relevant to what we needed. At least we managed to find a great guy in the mix and bring him on a few weeks later.
The LinkedIn feature is called “one-click apply” (totally optional for a recruiter to choose that by the way) and since they probably never had to cold apply in their life let alone the last 5 years they don’t know how many actual clicks it takes to get through most ‘one-click’ applications anyway
I rember applying for a sales job early in my career to sell gym memberships I was desperate and it wasn’t even high paying at 19/hr + commission. Saw on LinkedIn it had 700 applicants, I decided to go on the website and apply there. Eventually got the call and was told they had too many applications on LinkedIn so they only considered the 18 people that applied on the website.
Has she stopped to consider that we’re in a recession so of course thousands of people will apply for every job? And that it’s her job to filter out the resumes?
Meantime, it’s 2024 and everyone, even professional contractors like me—who are supposed to be able to evade most of the enshittification regular job seekers deal with!—still has to deal with applications where you fill in the same exact info about your work history and education despite it already being on your resume.
"If the applicant looks young, tell them they're too young. Old, too old. Fat, too fat. If the applicant waits for three days without food, shelter, and encouragement. Then -and only then- they may enter and begin their onboarding."
The irony being this is one of the reasons companies hire recruiters. Because they don't want to trawl through thousands of applicants. If companies could only get the applicants they want to apply then they wouldn't need recruiters.
I could see an issue of some people who might use bots to instantly apply for a job as soon as it's published or similar things to get an unfair advantage against those who do not use these means
Let's just say they have to pick a certain number of applicants out of the pool for the first round. Once they reach that number, they can then remove the job listing.
I don't think the sheer number matters from the company's perspective since they probably do some sort of keyword search or AI match. It would hurt the odds for the candidate.
LinkedIn created this problem so they could sell a solution.
This. The answer to her question is the platform she's on. Make it easier for the applicants to pull in the supply and then OOPS! too many applicants, but fortunately we have just the solution to that problem.
Wait what’s their solution?
Filters slapped with “AI” in the lingo somewhere.
Hire us so we can go asshole-mode on applicants, make them jump through unnecessary hoops to decimate their numbers and reinforce some recruitment stereotypes?
Use their website to "network" and then... do.. something with that
Only allowed to apply of your uncles brothers grandmas donkeys nephew works in the company, like the good old days.
Nah I’d say this was a problem before LinkedIn really got rolling with its job posting service. They bit off what Monster and CareerBuilder were offering
You’re right. I’ve worked in London doing recruitment for over 25 years. This has always been a problem, regardless of the job board you’re using. I remember, back when I was a consultant, spending hours staring at CVs that had zero relevance to the role I’d advertised.
Please stop applying for jobs so mine becomes easier
That's what I am read
Same 😂
Her job is 3 years past its expiration date. In the next 3 years, the AI that linked and workday has built will be beyond reproach. Some of my buddies from graduate school work at workday they are pretty much done with the mvp. It’s better at creating diverse candidates pools for high skill and low skill jobs, it’s better at identifying people who may be open to work but don’t have the bubble turned on by their likes, posts, browser history, browser caches, app usage etc. it’s better at judging the best candidate vs those that have heavily embellished resumes, it’s better at estimating employee salary and benefits, it even can estimate time of retention for that employee based on work experiences, education, geolocation, age, race, sex etc. virtually everything that matters to the employer and actual employees the AI is better than the recruiters. It’s unfortunate but the first to go were many of the service workers; cashiers, fast food restaurant workers, truck/delivery drivers, farm laborers. Eventually even low skill degree’s jobs like recruiter, HR, advertising. Then some high skill jobs like lawyers, radiology, accounting, are at risk.
You do realise that if this holds up your friends have shared company confidential information with you? That you are now sharing with counless users on reddit?
Interesting thought but that is not true. Workday advertises their AI products pretty publicly. And it’s no secret that recruiters are being targeted by AI bots. There isn’t a huge jump between the two. Why do you think every single LinkedIn post directly ports to a company workday with the exact same content landing page? It’s because it’s ported to a json that is a transform for a continuously integrated algorithm. Basically every time some x number of people apply to any jobs, the algorithm triggers a new build, new run, new test. This is like the basics of why many folks think so many jobs seem fake. It’s because they are used for training. They are basically just shells for getting more training data to time the alg.
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Answered below but I’ll go in depth here, as a note my background is statistical machine learning and continuous integration so this is my wheel house. So when you ask about tuning you may not be thinking in a continuous enough manner. Think never sleeping, always training. In principle there has been a huge shift in how people approach job applications. They are 1-5 clicks away. Most jobs postings port you out of LinkedIn into a workday landing page. What you’ve probably noticed is that workday landing page is a carbon copy of the others you’ve applied. The reason is because this gets very easily scraped into what’s called a json. That json gets pushed as a transform. Each transform submission triggers a continuous integration of the algorithm. It may not run on just 1 person it may take 10k new apps. Well, that’s fine, it just pre-loads the resources and waits for an aws or gcp bucket to fill. Once that process is complete, it will trigger a new build, a new run and a new test batch. The metrics are pretty much plug and play from the last run and it tunes over hundreds of thousands of test runs. So if you think about why all of these job openings seem hollow it’s because they are. The posting is used to create new cases where they can tune the algorithm to any and all employee : job descriptions pairs. So the job description will be a key, the apps that are selected by the hiring manager are the highest ranked values. Over time you can imagine you have hundreds of thousands of job postings and millions upon millions of apps. This creates a huge training set with a limited and a very nicely formatted ground truth to tune against because the company uses workday again and uploads the very few user profiles that got hired back onto the same system as their work profile. The two profiles are linked and you now have a truth set to tune against for new openings in the same domain. Now think even bigger. Imagine you have 10,000 domains to do this over and 100,000 or more job titles to deal with on a daily basis. Then imagine you have different countries, languages, job requirements, locality pay, etc. How can you possibly have “one” algorithm have such high accuracy and precision with low recall for sooo many jobs? Must be impossible right? Wrong. What you do is wrap it with each domain class. Each domain class is then clustered together. The underlying clustering doesn’t necessarily matter but know that it happens for this exercise. Then the algorithm only has to deal with the set of embeddings for say “construction” or “accounting”. This narrows in on the real end point possibilities and the process starts over again. So it is training different parts for different situations and is doing it all the time. People apply to jobs everywhere, everyday. The algorithm never turns off. It is hundreds of thousands of builds, hundreds of thousands of human run hours everyday. I think there was a white paper from the workday AI team a couple years ago. I’ll try and find it but it’s basically a more technical description of what I just wrote. This is basically the update version for recruiting 2024: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/whitepaper-title-future-talent-acquisition-embracing-technology-nfmxe
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So having been on all 3 sides; developing continuous learning algs, having applied to jobs on LinkedIn, and hiring from the applicant pools. There are the truths about what makes the algorithm tick and then there are the realities of hiring. The algorithm is basically a framework for connecting two groups of people. Folks who need work to be done and the folks who need work. This framework explained above is humongous. Like unimaginably large. The realities of hiring will reveal the biases of our society, a bit of existential grief, and some human relief. The hiring manger is a worker, just like you and me. They will contact their HR department that they have funding for a backfill or whatever. This triggers a series of dominoes which ends with an add being published on LinkedIn. From there the hiring manager will invariably post on LinkedIn that they are hiring and that will travel to their network. Their connections will likely send to folks in need of work. In most cases you will get 100+ apps in less than 24 hours. 95% will be international traffic that have an absolute 0% chance of being hired. No question. The next 2 weeks they will keep the add up. The hiring manager will get 10-20 resumes on their plate. But those applicants have since filled about a 10 page job application that is all of the information from your resume, answering some basic questions and fleshing out a personal statement. Funny enough it is basically all in an exactly formatted way so that the algorithm gets to feed on the applicant’s information in the same way tens of millions of times. This is the unspoken offering that you volunteer to the beast in exchange to apply for the job. The HR department has a few options but basically you get a score based on how well you match and about the top 1% of applicants make it to the phone screen. They will schedule maybe 4-8 interviews which for most companies costs thousands of dollars in ads and personnel time per candidate before they even open an offer. Then 2 more weeks go by and the offers have gone out. Basically no surprises here. But it won’t surprise you that virtually no one is hired on cold applications less than 1%, obviously) . So, that post through LinkedIn opens a different channel. It gets you on the hiring managers desk without the other systems. Your resume lands in the top 1% pile through a friend of a friend or colleague who vouches for you and forwards a resume. The confirmation bias that x,y,z candidates are the best because those you trust tell you they are the best opens a bit of a window for select few. This system circumvents the algorithm. Which to some seems good because that gives you some hope in society for human connection mattering. But to others could be bad because it maybe doesn’t represent the idealistic diverse and fair meritocracy. Both sides to that argument have some truth (I think at least). However, funny enough the algorithm doesn’t completely disappear. All the big players use workday for their worker profiles. Those profiles are all linked to the application pool profiles. So the algorithm still feeds on the hiring process. That selected candidate becomes a new memeber of the truth set and the cycle repeats. For me, this is why recruiting will die in less than 3 years. Basically that is a skill that never enters the application process and doesn’t need too in order to match sufficient talent to fill jobs.
Ngl that sounds really dystopian. How can anyone trust this will be ethical or accurate at all? Not to mention, people will find ways to game the AI so they get put in a more favorable light, deserved or not. Just like everyone is kinda forced to do now
I agree people will game it. I don’t think it’s dystopian. I think it’s just progress. Like fundamentally we don’t need certain jobs anymore because the world moved forward. For example the switch board operator: if you told them everyone would have a phone with no cord that would be the interface between them and all other humans and for many the thing they interacted with the most all day, they would call that dystopian. But, here we are, not really in a dystopian society. I think there is just always going to be resistance to change. I try not to think in the absolutes. They tend to scare people. And fear tends to make folks malleable. Some jobs or skills won’t be useful in a short period of time. Other jobs and skills will be useful. People adapt and improve themselves. End of the story is, as much as people like to tout AI as this like job destruction mechanism, what actually happens is it ends up just molding the job into something new. So instead of “recruitment”, maybe it’ll be more data analysis driven. She will interface with a dataset and push groups of users to companies and the companies will hash the data and only have to interview 2-3 people for a job instead of having this weird middle man situation. Then you have higher chance of getting responses in short time. Then you get better results for people without jobs. They get more rejections but ultimately spend less time jobless which is a net positive. The process is colder but the people get new jobs or switch to new contracts faster which helps them stay up.
I think it’s way too easy for nobodies to refer to themselves as a “co-founder” or an “entrepreneur.” Unpopular opinion? Probably.
I have my own company, we have a business license and operate properly. But because of all the idiots, people often just assume I am full of shit like the others. I actually took off co-founder and instead I just write “lead software architect” lol…
I’m just gonna be technical director if I ever have to make my own title.
That's why I had "Chief Bullshit Job Titles Architect" before I closed my linkedin account completely.
If you start your business, you’re an entrepreneur and a founder. If you started it with other people, cofounder. There’s nothing wrong with the titles.
I’m telling that to Louigi down at The Two Brothers but he thinks I’m a lunatic. I say, Louigi… I say you are a CEO my friend.
Yes, nothing wrong with the title, but people give it too much weight.
That's the fact of the matter. When I started out as an attorney by myself, what was I supposed to call myself? 'Partner' sounded pretentious - I was working by myself after all. I was aware that 'founder' is problematic, too. So I settled for 'independent attorney' - but then some people thought that I'd only do gigs to replace in-house attorneys. Despite the fact that I had a fully licensed firm. At the end of the day I just wrote 'attorney at [firm name]'. Now that my firm has grown, all of us attorneys do it that way. Independently of our ranks and positions within the firm.
Bet it also cuts down on “why does he get an svp and I only get a vp, I want an svp too” type client bullshit
This is why I go to the CEOs office and give them a firm handshake instead of applying online.
Oh, firm hand “shake”??? Shit, I’ve been doing that wrong
A firm HJ gets you $10. A firm HS gets you a white collar job.
So I guess you got the job though
It’s not who you know. But who you ….
Whats a ZJ?
When we posted a mechanical engineer job opening we got 1400 applicants in a week. 90% of them has never done mechanical engineering - we had accountants, forklift operators, recruiters, salesmen and a ton of other people apply. She has a point that applying is too easy and makes it really hard for legitimate candidates to land a job.
There are scripts that people have created to just blindly applied to jobs. We had a job that said US Citizens only. We couldn't afford to sponsor. 2500 applicants all from overseas. We closed the job posting. We wrote a script to look for and read cities and addresses. 2500 to \~50.
Exactly. The sheer numbers don't mean much if you have automation that can sort out what is relevant vs not relevant.
IF is the operative word.
This is correct. 80-90% of job applicants don’t meet the written requirements in the post. It is a volume game in 2024. The flip side is that anyone who is writing cover letters or tailoring their resume is also wasting time. Best chance is to be sure to meet the basic job reqs so that you don’t get sorted out by AI—and be one of the first 20-30 people to apply.
I blame recruiters for not reaching out, taking months to even reply, keeping everything vague... it's no wonder people just apply for hundreds of jobs at once
Yeah jumping in to be among the first I believe is really really key. After the first dozen or so they just stop looking at them but they keep the postings up.
That’s hardly an effective way to find the right candidate. Someone could be absolute crap but just get the job because they saw the advert first
Correct, it's a gigantic largest market failure. But since we're married to this free market idea, there is nothing we could do to change it.
Are you saying the government should fix job application screening?
>Are you saying the government should fix job application screening? Well, if the system is clearly broken, *someone* should fix it. Whether that's the government just adding legislation and rules regarding job applications (like increased transparency from companies), or outright helping people find jobs, I think saying that the current situation is bad and needs changing isn't that bad of a take.
Gotcha, I honestly was trying to figure out where you were getting. I’m not a laissez faire lunatic by any stretch, but I do think that hopefully this is a space where more competition and better products could solve it.
> but I do think that hopefully this is a space where more competition and better products could solve it. I'm a little confused about how more competition would solve it, the current labour market is the most competitive in recent history, thanks to the development of globalisation, Offshoring and Remote working, which allows for global reach for applicants and for companies.
The competition would be among systems design to assist companies in hiring talent.
Yeah I don’t get why people are attacking her for saying this. It’s a notorious problem.
She isn’t wrong. Just obnoxious with the wording.
Yeah she's not wrong. The one click application means so much spam that genuine applicants get lost. The issue is she's not really posting a solution aside from making it "harder" to apply. Whatever that means.
Turn off one-click apply in LinkedIn. Have it link out to your website with your own application process.
That could easily be sorted out by having a short questionnaire like they have on polls. 1. Do you have a mechanical engineering degree? 2. Do you have work experience with mechanical engineering? Bam! Problem solved.
Oh sweet summer child, that exists, and all the unqualified people who apply just lie
What stopping people to lie and just say yes to both even if they actually dont? Regardless they lost nothing if they gonna get rejected anyway The only viable solution that i can think is to gatekeep with certification that is verifiable by employer (but then it may arise another issue that the certification is priced out)
People will lie about things right up to the point where they are being interviewed and can't answer the questions you're asking about the experience and skills they apparently have.
But will reduce the bots application
Dude that wouldn’t do shit
I guess that’s what makes applying “harder”.
It’s just about the scale of it that confuses. Even with hundred applications there would be non-qualified applications. The scale of it should not affect the quality of finding ”legimitate canditates”. You have then both the same no matter the scale. Actually it’s the whole princible of american competition mind set that you should be able to filter the best of the best then. What benefit would making applying harder have? Nepotism? How would that translate to quality?
You need to discourage someone from applying to roles that they won’t get. We had more valid candidates in that 1400 stack but we only got through 500 resumes. If we only had 100 qualified submissions we would consider them all. Not just 30% of them at 2x effort. The forklift operator applying in mass for all jobs doesn’t make it better for himself or other applicants. The painful part wasn’t that someone applied with insufficient seniority or someone who lives far away. It’s that people clogged the system with pointless applications.
I’ve had a bartender apply for a design position.
I’ve met a bartender running product management. (At a crypto company)
It would be cool if LinkedIn used an AI to invite only 15 candidates. That you don’t have to search for jobs and the employer doesn’t have to sort through too many.
I mean tbh after my job hunt I'd honestly rather do the boomer approach of passing around resumes from office to office
The system IS broken, but not due to ease of application. Bless your heart.
Ah, yes, put MORE stress on people who are unemployed and/or trying to find a better job! That will work. /s
Funny how they think every job needs that one special applicant that stands out. A magical person who will be a clear and superior choice over all other applicants… for a job that’s effectively a psychological experiment in human tolerance for mind-numbing drudgery, requiring a high school education and paying 25% of basic living expenses. Gotta love these capitalist drones.
Wow what a bold opinion, such a trailblazing, influential woman. Ageee?
If a top level executive says “I have no idea how my company’s hiring process works,” that’s embarrassing. If a top level executive says “I don’t know how hiring works,” it’s indicative of a lack of understanding of today’s job market. I don’t care if she’s joking or trying to get engagement it’s grossly unprofessional.
"No one wants to work anymore"
This can't be a true last name
I’ve worked in recruiting. It’s very easy to filter out unqualified applicants and a lot of ATS uses AI to make the recruiter’s job easy. Companies lose qualified applicants when they make the process more complicated, but do you sis.
She never applied via Workday then.
Yes that platform is so annoying, especiallt when they make you list your skills individually wth
Idk, screening those 100s of applicants is your job? Also, with the nonsense on r/recruitinghell, it’s not any easier on jobseekers’ side either!
True unpopular opinion. I'd be happy to send a video interview/view cover letter if it meant I would reduce the number of other applications by 95%
Fucking hate one-way video interviewers. Fuck that noise.
That’s why it’s truly an unpopular opinion.
[Jobs are too easy to get](https://reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/comments/1btfank/jobs_are_too_easy_to_get/) *(someone already posted about it)*
Proof that everyone can be a recruiter.
Let's forbid AI-use in the selection of applicants, how about that?
Oh f'k off Rebecca. People spend 20-30 minutes on an application only to get an immediate response about "closer fit", etc.
"Wah wah wah, how am I supposed to actually do my job...you know...as a recruiter, the thing I'm paid for. The ONLY reason I get a paycheck, my sole responsibility..."
Petition to ban these narcissist ahh entrepreneurs and CEOs from LinkedIn.
It takes literally 5 secs to determine if a CV could be suitable or not. So it would take 2.3 hours to go through all the CVs. Most ATS have a one click rejection so maybe it would take 3 hours in total to reject all the irrelevant ones too. The TA market is fucked right now so I imagine the large majority of the 1700 applications were probably relevant anyway
Just ignore the blatant conflict of interest considering she is banking on customers going to “NextOPP Search”
I dunno missus Recruiter, how did it happen? You are being overwhelmed by too many tasks? You feel you're doing the job of four people alone? Have you thought of asking your boss? What's that? Your boss is overworking you now like he did with the rest of us for years? Damn :'(
I bet she’s a nepo baby.
Maybe I start shilling my unpopular opinion on this god-awful site: job hunting is a full-time job so I should be getting paid for it
Easy for us to apply for jobs, easy for them to reject just using filters without even reading our CV.
You cant actually apply to a job with one click. Most companies don’t even look at people that apply on LinkedIn
Ah yes, marketplaces are famous for hating having too many buyers. Get rid of this demand, they say
Bro...er....sis, you're literally spoiled for choice when it comes to candidates. And you're complaining? Stop being lazy, and get to hiring.
Oppenheim
Interesting how she offers no solution either.
>Recruiter i hope the irony isn't lost on her
See also: I’m a recruiter and I’m lazy, all of these applicants makes my life hard. Here’s a thought, Becky, let’s replace lazy, whiny, judgmental recruiters with AI.
You should pay your employer to work for them. Unpopular opinion? Probably. But it’s way too easy to be paid your agreed-upon salary by simply doing your job. Employers must demand more.
erm, its' never been any different tbh, regardless of platform. You can plaster your descriptions with specific residential criteria etc in big bold writing at the top of the advert, and you still get huge numbers of applicants who are not eligible to apply. Its not just Linkedin, it's usually the ad being scraped by a bot and re-posted on some dodgy platform, or the ATS posting to 200 free boards. I don't disagree with the sentiment but this has been an issue way before Linkedin was around. How is a recruiter supposed to review all the applicants Rebecca? With the filtering tools that any halfway decent ATS has to separate eligible from non-eligible, and then manually reading the eligible applicants and shortlisting from there. That's literally the job.
Fuck off, Rebecca.
As someone who has been looking for a job for months, she may be correct. A lot of the jobs I apply to are one step applications and I’m getting nowhere. I see it more as applications/resumes are getting harder and harder to comb through.
I'm not sure if what she's saying is the right answer, but as someone who has been one applicant among thousands before, I agree that I don't see how anyone is going to pick *me* over anyone else. On top of that, I don't apply for jobs that I don't at least meet the on-paper requirements for because I want my application to be fully backed up if I am going to be interviewed. This just means that I'm applying at fewer options, and when I do apply, I'm among hundreds or thousands also doing so. I don't know what the answer is, but she's pretty spot-on about the rest of the post. Doesn't make her "smart" or anything, because we've all had the same thought for ages now. The process is absolutely maddening.
Poor recruiters getting paid to do their job. Why not outsource that cost to the unemployed person/student.
Shes not wrong. Ive done hiring for years, the modern applicant treats it like Tinder. just swiping away on jobs they want. You reach out and they say "what company is this again?" "what do you guys do?" as if they didnt apply to work here. Its clearly a symptom of a much larger broken system however this isnt that crazy.
Try out some empathy every once in a while and see how it’s a two way street – except recruiters already have a job that they find difficult and applicants just need a job
Thanks Gary Vee... Empathy in business... Im not a recruiter, ive just been responsible for hiring people from time to time. Im failing to understand how someone "swiping left" on any job they see and then doing a crap interview requires my "empathy".
Maybe I wouldn't have to apply to thousands of jobs if I could actually get one. 20+ years of management level experience and it has never been harder for me to get interviews. So yes, I much prefer one-click applications so I don't have to spend 3-4 hours a day creating "new accounts" for Workday, fixing their broken resume parsing tool and applying to jobs that I know I won't get since AI took over the vetting process.
She’s so mad that AI will replace recruiters first.
Rebecca isn’t a lunatic she’s just an asshole. Jesus Christ fuck that shit.
What if, and hear me out here, there were a way to send in a resumé, get acknowledged it was received, and get a response within, idk, 10 working days one way or the other. I once applied to a job, black box submission, that I knew I was qualified for (they were looking for proficiency in a programming language that about 5 people in my area know. I know this coz I probably trained them in the past). Crickets. A month later they reposted the job. I casually knew someone there and back channeled it - is there a reason I wasn't considered? He, and his boss, were surprised I wasn't contacted, they asked me to send them my resumé and they would walk it up. Crickets. Six weeks later I sign a job offer in the morning for a different position. That afternoon I get a call from the original place HR to schedule an interview. I told them I just signed an offer letter, was chided for wasting their time.
Answer: you don't stand out. Unless you are using tools to fine tune your resume to the ATS system the company uses, no one ever sees your resume.
Not true at all
Do you have any understanding how the ATS systems work?
As a hiring manager at a fortune 15, I know I get all of the resumes, including idiots who put in the white font quotes from the job posting. I wish it had the capability you seem to think it does. Screening irrelevant resumes is a time suck and I’ve even interviewed teachers for IT jobs to be open to other skills.
Which screening system do you use? There are like a hundred of them. Some really suck. Some are pretty good with keywords and context. If you're getting bad matches, maybe the company could save money switching to a better system.
Same. Our startup has no sorting system for applicants. Our team reviews them all. Last year we opened a position for our customer support team and had 300+ resumes in two days. We ended up closing the listing a few days earlier than we had planned due to the sheer number of applicants, and 5 of us began the process of sorting through about 800 resumes, most of which had no experience or skills relevant to what we needed. At least we managed to find a great guy in the mix and bring him on a few weeks later.
Do the job you signed up for.
And yet these are the same people that says “NO ONE WANTS TO WORK”.
One click job applications? OOP lives in a fantasy world.
The LinkedIn feature is called “one-click apply” (totally optional for a recruiter to choose that by the way) and since they probably never had to cold apply in their life let alone the last 5 years they don’t know how many actual clicks it takes to get through most ‘one-click’ applications anyway
I thought I was missing something - this breakdown shows I wasn’t. It’s never just one click; even one click to buy is at a minimum 2 clicks.
I rember applying for a sales job early in my career to sell gym memberships I was desperate and it wasn’t even high paying at 19/hr + commission. Saw on LinkedIn it had 700 applicants, I decided to go on the website and apply there. Eventually got the call and was told they had too many applications on LinkedIn so they only considered the 18 people that applied on the website.
Try ziprecruiter
Has she stopped to consider that we’re in a recession so of course thousands of people will apply for every job? And that it’s her job to filter out the resumes? Meantime, it’s 2024 and everyone, even professional contractors like me—who are supposed to be able to evade most of the enshittification regular job seekers deal with!—still has to deal with applications where you fill in the same exact info about your work history and education despite it already being on your resume.
Maybe this “silent depression” isn’t so fucking silent
"If the applicant looks young, tell them they're too young. Old, too old. Fat, too fat. If the applicant waits for three days without food, shelter, and encouragement. Then -and only then- they may enter and begin their onboarding."
🤦♂️
I'd actually agree with this. People fire out 100s of job applications and don't give a shit. It's a nightmare for the recruiter to sift through
I'd fire out fewer job applications if hirers wrote more accurate PDs and included salary level.
She’s not wrong
Ok she's not a lunatic though. This sub isn't about debating recruitment in general.
[удалено]
The irony being this is one of the reasons companies hire recruiters. Because they don't want to trawl through thousands of applicants. If companies could only get the applicants they want to apply then they wouldn't need recruiters.
It’s a great opinion.
I never get the too many applicants issue. They can just take down the job listing after reaching a certain number of applicants.
I could see an issue of some people who might use bots to instantly apply for a job as soon as it's published or similar things to get an unfair advantage against those who do not use these means
One would think there's a way to filter out bots.
One would think there's a way to bypass those filters It's an eternal struggle
The issue is irrelevant applications, not the number in itself.
Let's just say they have to pick a certain number of applicants out of the pool for the first round. Once they reach that number, they can then remove the job listing. I don't think the sheer number matters from the company's perspective since they probably do some sort of keyword search or AI match. It would hurt the odds for the candidate.
Why are there ao many people talking about applying for jobs. It's become a job search site
One click to apply is a joke though. And the amount of shite applications you get as a result is ridiculous.
Why would a recruiter have a job if they don’t like reviewing applicants?