> If your potential employer is dehumanizing you before you’re on the payroll, how will they treat you once hired?
For me, this is the key point. If a company can't even be bothered to show up for my interview -- when everyone is trying to put their best foot forward -- that bodes very ill for how I'll be treated if I were to work there.
I had this experience when I was trying to find an apartment - multiple different buildings very clearly had AI-generated responses. (To all you builders out there: quick replies are great. Instant replies are suspicious.)
I immediately stopped considering them as options. If you can’t be bothered to have a human respond to my email when I’m trying to give you my money, what level of service can I expect once I’m already obligated to pay rent?
This is more or less the go-to standard in the usa. One property manager handles possibly hundreds in an association, or dozens of townhomes, and will refuse to speak to you directly, except through a maintenance request system. Its incredibly depressing
I’ve read many horror stories from Indian developers about how they’re treated. They can’t escape it since almost every company in India will treat them the same. Their only escape is a remote job or to relocate.
I believe we’ll see this play out in a global scale. Once every employer paying a good salary does this, we won’t be able to pick and choose, without forfeiting a huge chunk of income. At that point I’d rather become a baker.
Small companies are an obvious 3rd place to escape to and there should be a good number of them given all the big companies behave as you indicate.. unless it really hard to start a new business in India. Do you know if this is the case or why else wouldn't you consider small businesses as a alternative?
I'm hiring at a small company and it's a nightmare. 1,000+ applicants for a software engineering position and we have essentially no help from recruiting. I'm filtering based on keywords, giving each resume a max of 90 seconds, and anything that even slightly seems off gets rejected.
I only have the bandwidth to talk to a couple 10s of candidates since I have the entire rest of my job to do, so I can see the appeal of an AI interviewer. I'd never use one due to the issues brought up here though.
To me the issue isn't seeming inhuman, but cost. Employers often seem happy to impose rediculous time costs on the people they're hiring: take home tests, long series of interviews, etc. What held that back is they also paid a price. Full automation leaves them free to impose infinite cost with no guarantee of anything.
Applicants are using AI too. I've heard from people who hire/post jobs that they gets hundreds to low thousands of applications, and maybe 5% of them have any relevant experience. The problem is the breakdown of trust is costing all of us.
I hate the take homes because companies seem happy to send them out to people who have literally no chance. Sent after they already have a candidate in mind, sent before the resume has been reviewed, sent before the company has invested even a minute talking to you.
So you waste the weekend on this project when you had no chance from the beginning. And the time restrictions they list mean nothing since if you actually stop after x hours, they will just pick the person who spent the whole weekend and did a more complete job.
I got dinged on my Netflix take home 10 years ago because I used the DOM to store state instead of implementing a shadow DOM. Sure, let me just whip that right up.
I've done quite a few interviews and as long as the interviewee maybe said something like "it would be better to use a shadow DOM" and could explain what a shadow DOM is, I would be pretty happy with that
Expecting someone to build a full shadow DOM as part of their interview take home is excessive
Often times people ding you for doing anything different than they're used to, or what they see as "the standard".
The worst is when they basically ask how you'd build their product. Some people can't handle a different answer, even as they're busy hiring you to improve things.
And why would this be the case? Maybe the solution is to ban AI from the hiring process. This seems like companies being hoisted by their own petard. This is because they are the ones who drove the hiring market to be this way. They are the ones who started using AI in the hiring process. They are the ones who decided to make applying so much work driving applicants to use AI to survive.
Also, if you are having trouble hiring right now, that is 1000% a skill issue. It is easier to hire good talent right now than ever before. So I have absolutely 0 sympathy for this POV. Go down to your HR department if you want to see who is at fault.
PS You fix it by charging $1 to apply for jobs. Took me all of 30 seconds to figure that one out.
> Getting a lot of applications that don't meet your standard doesn't force you to raise you[r] bar. You still just need someone who meets your standard.
I'm not sure that first sentence true. Let me play Devil's advocate:
What's the primary cause of not being able to find someone who meets your standard when you already get lots of applications? It's that your hiring process is bogged down by the masses of unwanted candidates you must evaluate to find the few wanted candidates in the crowd of applicants. And what's the fix? It's better screening. Which is raising your bar, isn't it? Even if it's only to add cargo-cult screens to your bar, it's making the bar more selective, isn't it? Fewer people clear it, right?
Arbitrary filtering of candidates doesn't reduce the effort that it takes. Let's say 1 out of 1000 of the candidates you see is what you need. The total amount of effort to find the right candidate is still the same. But throwing out half the resumes just doubles the amount of time until you find the candidate you need (you just spread lower effort over a longer time).
On the other hand if you "raise your bar" (let's say you do so by some method that makes it twice as expensive to judge a candidate; twice as likely to reject a candidate that would fit what you need, i.e. doubles your false negative rate; but cuts down on the number of applications by 10x, so that now 1 out of 100 candidates are what you need, which isn't that far off the mark for certain kinds of things), you cut down the effort (and time) you need to spend on finding a candidate by over double.
EDIT: On reflection I think we're mainly talking past each other. You are thinking of a scenario where all stages take roughly the same amount of effort/time, whereas tmorel and I are thinking of a scenario where different stages take different amounts of effort/time. If you "raise the bar" on the stages that take less amount of effort/time (assuming that those stages still have some amount of selection usefulness) then you will reduce the overall amount of time/energy spent on hiring someone that meets your final bar.
I wasn't suggesting arbitrarily removing candidates was a good idea, but simply responding to their specific devils advocate example of applying "cargo cult screens", which would presumably be arbitrary.
… needing to pay for postage hardly stops the spam I receive in my own mail. Even the most trivially absurd stuff, like "install rooftop solar" — I don't own a roof.
In the end companies don't need to hook up to the sewer pipe that floods applications. What worked in past was (heaven forbid) technical hiring manager looking at resumes, etc and reaching out to clearly qualified candidates. Not hr 20-somethings with humanities degrees. Sorry
All companies attempt to give the same interviews, just have one centralized organization give two programing questions and two system design questions and some kind of proof once you pass it.
You filter every one that can't pass the interview in the first place, you get a better interview experience, and just focus on experience
Lots of people get through engineering school but are terrible engineers. Interviews are important (and difficult... Not many people are good interviewers!)
Professional certifications have a terrible reputation for good reason. You are perhaps too young to know why this is a silly idea. But its been tried and it failed spectacularly.
There is a limited ability to reject work, which is based on the fact that we all need a salary to live (the usual definition of class).
Offer and demand have left most engineers at a level of comfort where we can usually ignore that reality (until we age, become disabled, or go through similar stuff), but we shouldn’t rely only on that to protect people from mistreatment. This should not be legal.
Resource allocation is entirely a social construct. Not being afford something is a 'pretend' state that only exists because everyone agrees to go along with it.
Even if a magical unicorn were to step in and start distributing resources perfectly, solving that particular problem, if humans can't even get something as simple as resource allocation right, why are you so sure they won't also screw up everything else to ensure that all other problems remain?
> Resource allocation is entirely a social construct. Not being afford something is a 'pretend' state that only exists because everyone agrees to go along with it.
That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit. If there is exactly 1 apple, it is impossible for 2 people to eat it. That is no social construct.
There is a large social element involved, but that in itself is done in such a way as to try and encourage creation of a large amount of stuff to a large number of people. It isn't arbitrary; there are a lot of allocation schemes that lead to mass starvation and poverty. The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources; pretty much everyone at this point has discovered that laws and capitalism with some welfare trimmings on the edge is a much better approach than any alternative that got tried.
I hear and understand your point.
It is not purely a social construct.
But how much available farmland to allocate to grow food from the available farmland becomes a political issue. Pricing, distribution... same deal.
And considering our (humanity's) food production outmatches our total food calorie/nutrition requirements... any argument using food as an example for scarcity indicates that you may be working with incorrect, or outdated information.
And Is "money" a social construct, or is there 'natural' money, some platonic ideal from which all other instantiations of money arise? I'm betting on the former.
It's interesting that both the USA and China found that the prosperity maximum happened when capitalism was kept in line with a firm hand, even though China approached from the left and the USA approached from the right and later departed back to the right.
> That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit.
Indeed, but - human productive capacity has become so vast, that the only way for there to be scarcity is for it to be artificially maintained.
> The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources
Disagree, in the sense that a lot of what we consider "natural" is the result of social circumstances, emphasizing or encouraging the expression of some sentiments and tendencies over others. In other words, "natural" is usually rather artificial.
> That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit.
Hence resource allocation. If there were no physical limit, there would be nothing in need of allocation.
> If there is exactly 1 apple, it is impossible for 2 people to eat it.
Hence resource allocation. If there were an infinite number of apples, there would be nothing in need of allocation.
> There is a large social element involved
There is only a human social element involved. There isn't a magical deity waving a magic wand to decide who gets what. There isn't a pack of wolves controlling access to the food supply. Resources are allocated only by how humans decide they want to allocate them.
> The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources
Exactly. Now you're finally getting on-topic. Humans are beyond terrible at pretty everything. Hence us questioning why one would think that all kinds of human-created problems would magically disappear if humans were removed from only just one of the things they routinely make a mess of. Not going to happen.
Listen it does suck, but I dont think this is really true. A lot of the best places to work treat candidates like subhumans before they are welcomed into the fold and then suddenly you're making 300k+ doing interesting work with incredible people and treated great, (until they're done with you at some point)
Need to say versions of this more often, "That is not how it works here."
A very powerful and clarifying comment made by a European reporter, to a US Envoy of the Trump administration, during the first Presidency. (January 2018 press conference involving Pete Hoekstra)
It was in response to the Envoy bullshit and lie about how he didn't say some anti-Islam thing (claiming that the Islamic movement had brought "chaos" to the Netherlands and that there were "no-go zones" where politicians were being burned). Then one reporter -- Roel Geeraedts, stated: "This is the Netherlands. You have to answer questions." And finally another reporter followed up with the top quote.
Poorly, which is how a huge fraction of employees are treated by their employers. This is particularly true in the US, where unionization rates are very low, the dominant culture is massively biased in favor of owners/employers, and labor laws are few and grant little.
That is to say, that as bad as this experience is, it is unfortunately not something so far from what many potential employees have to look forward to. Remember that people interviewing to work as unskilled laborers in a Domino's pizza store (to give an example from the video) may not have such a wide array of choices and likely really need to get some job to make ends meet.
> But as we’ve covered again and again, a bias-free AI system is an impossible-to-achieve standard, since models are trained on large swaths of the internet, which contain sexism, racism, and other biases.
Q. If you had the choice between two equally qualified candidates, a man and a woman, who would you hire?
A. I should prefer a man of good character and education to a woman. A woman is apt to be less capable, less reliable, and less well trained. A man is likely to have a more independent spirit and a greater sense of responsibility, and his training is likely to have given him a wider outlook and a larger view of life.
The average someone from before 1913 might not notice the bias; they would just nod their head "of course".
Just like Joe A. Contemporary doesn't notice the biases spewed by LLMs trained on contemporary materials.
It seems like some companies may be unaware that not only are they interviewing prospective employees, but candidates are interviewing prospective employers.
I guess if your goal is just to hire desperate people who currently have no better choice (and who will leave as soon as they do), then you can flaunt how little you care about the candidates or the process. But if you're hoping for something better than that, I wouldn't run off as many candidates as possible.
I mean, this is probably a time-saving way to filter out a flood of poor candidates, but you're going to also be filtering out good candidates at a very high rate.
Perfectly encapsulates the state of the job market. Interviewing is genuinely a hellscape at this point and I've experienced many interviews where there was a complete breakdown of etiquette/guidelines and good faith.
Geez. Good one. Was in something similar lately. 10 weeks wasted and a shittiest feedback ever. These companies should be legally required to pay candidates for gauntlets they put them through.
The lack of feedback is the worst part and is increasingly more common. Zero respect for the candidates time investment and propagates a terrible culture.
Most of big-CO legal teams do not allow for feedback to be communicated to the candidates. They are afraid the candidates will sue base on that. That is not new.
I'm sorry you had such a bad interviewing experience. You asked for feedback in your blog post, and since your blog doesn't allow comments, I hope you won't mind my responding here.
You wrote something that I think is untrue of most tech companies, so I'd like to discuss it:
> [As I and a friend spoke], I realised something: Three technical interviews went well, I was feeling confident going into the behavioural interview... This means that I'm heading into behavioural and HR contract stages with confidence in my performance thus far and my ability to excel at the role. And it means that I have the upper hand in salary and benefit negotiation. This is horrible for them. THEY NEED to shut me down and bring me down a few rungs before this step. And to edge me for 2 weeks (and counting...) after the supposed final round before I hear anything back.
I suspect that approximately 0% of top tech firms are trying to tank your interview as a comp-negotiating tactic. For most of these firms, the biggest problem is finding people they want to hire. To find qualified people, they need to measure what applicants, like you, can actually do. And they can't get a good measurement when they sabotage your performance. Further, if they decide to hire you, they need you to feel good about the company, not hate it because of how you were maltreated. They want you to say yes to their offer, not rage quit the hiring pipeline.
I'm not saying that there aren't bad companies or bad interviewers out there. Nor am I saying that you can't get into an interview where the other person is actually out to get you. It happens. Maybe it happened to you.
What I'm trying to say is that if your mental model of the hiring process is that the company is probably going to sabatage your end-game interviews, you're probably going to be wrong most of the time and make some bad decisions.
> What do you think? Was that a normal interview that I should have expected? I am in the wrong by posting this? Should I nuke my blog?
Here's what I think. If you have a public blog, it's fair game at an interview. If you write mostly about data science stuff but you apply for a software engineering job, you ought to be prepared to explain the contrast. Understand that, for most top firms, hiring good people and getting them to stick is hard. Most employers will want some assurance that you are serious about the position you're applying for. If you send signals that you might want some other position, be prepared to get asked about those signals.
And you got asked about those signals:
> "How do we know we won't hire you and you'll try to transition to a data scientist?"
You ought to be prepared for questions like these. For example, most interviewers would probably be satisfied with an answer like these:
That's a great question. Data science is something I do for fun in my spare time. I don't want it to become my day job. I love software engineering and that's what I want to focus my career on.
Or:
That's an important question. Thanks for asking about it. I try to stay abreast of important trends in industry, and when AI and data became important in some of my past work, I put in some personal time to learn more about them. When I learn things, I often write about them on my blog to help me remember. My blog's just a learning tool, a memory aid, right? It's not a barometer of my career interests. If you want to know what my career interests are, let me be clear: I want to write software. Five years from now, I still want to be a software engineer.
> Should I nuke my blog?
I'd say no. But you should read your blog from the perspective of a firm that's considering you for a job and be prepared to explain away anything they might have concerns about.
That's just my two cents. If you find anything in my comment helpful, great. If not, feel free to dismiss everything I've written.
There are a number of similarities between applying for a job and looking for a partner (typically through online dating). In both cases, the process is impersonal, rife with rejection, and heartless.
The best tactic is to avoid the formal process, whether it's applying via the company website, or swiping right on a profile. Instead use an inside source, an employee you know at the company you are interested in, or a mutual friend who can play matchmaker in dating.
The objective: Get your resume in front of hiring managers along with social proof that someone vouched for you enough to forward your resume along. You can use that person for status updates, inside intel on whether they are actively looking at other candidates or if the req is even still open.
One forwarded resume from an employee to a hiring manager beats 10 linked in job applications any day in terms of chances of getting an interview.
>The best tactic is to avoid the formal process, whether it's applying via the company website, or swiping right on a profile. Instead use an inside source, an employee you know at the company you are interested in, or a mutual friend who can play matchmaker in dating.
As someone on the spectrum this is something I struggle with. I have few but close friends, and only 2 of them work in tech; neither of their companies are hiring right now.
I need to find ways in which I can make new connections with people who work in tech, but I am unsure how to go about doing so.
Meetups for special interests / tech adjacent fields.
Go to more company events for the tech you use.
The other factor is finding “high elo” people with influence that can help you if you live in a “low elo” area.
You’ll have to go to the “high elo” areas more often to increase chance of a better match.
Join clubs / sign up for recurring things* that interest you and keep showing up.
Odds are there are at least a handful of people like you in those groups … and odds are that the everyone else connections to people who could be your contacts.
Just by being there regularly, you become "one of the people in tech I know" of everyone else. And connections and opportunities start magically coming your way.
*It does help if these are the types of things that attract energetic, helpful, confident people.
The problem with this becoming the only reasonable tactic writ large is that it creates social bubbles just like social media. You wind up with very insular cultures and I think at least some of the hype addiction problems seen in tech can be attributed to these echo chambers. It's a hard problem to solve, especially now with LLMs being force amplifiers to low effort hiring and job seeking attempts. But to not solve this problem will, I think, continue to make increasingly unwell companies and unwell industries as the "meme pool" gets very shallow.
> There are a number of similarities between applying for a job and looking for a partner (typically through online dating). In both cases, the process is impersonal, rife with rejection, and heartless.
The hell are you talking about, I've had many good and bad experiences while dating - including online - but "impersonal?" Not even once.
Six years ago, I applied for a job that made me record ten five-minute videos answering their questions.
It was a colossal pain in the ass, and I wasn't allowed to go back and retake. I'm not actually talking to a human, so my rambling nature kind of took over, and don't know if I really ever answered the questions because I didn't have any ways of clarifying the questions and "course correcting".
They never got back to me, so maybe they're still considering me :).
Though that's not nearly as bad as Canonical's awful process.
Yeah, I wasted probably 40 hours of my life on Canonical's interview process and never even got to talk to a person. They wanted to know my high school GPA and ACT score.
They wanted to know my high school grades and ACT, and they also made me write a nine page essay about skills that have been impactful to me.
Then they made me take some weird IQ test thing, and then they wanted me to take another one. I was genuinely starting to get kind of worried that they were going to make me talk about my astrology sign, so I eventually just emailed them saying that this is all stupid and I don't want to continue.
The asymmetry here is what gets me: candidates are expected to be authentic and vulnerable during interviews, while the company deploys an AI to mask their own evaluation process behind a synthetic persona. If I'm being assessed on "culture fit," I'd argue I have a right to know whether I'm talking to someone who actually works there. The more interesting question for hiring managers is whether AI-screened candidates who make it through are actually better hires, or if they're just better at performing for AI — which might be a completely different skill set than the job requires.
The solution to this seems pretty clear. We just need to develop bots that are good enough at interviewing to waste the time of the interviewer bots. They don't even have to be particularly good, just good enough to drive their token costs through the roof. Make it too expensive to use.
I watched about 20 seconds of the video before seeing all I needed. Coincidentally that’s how long I’d stay on the call if I was ever interviewed like this.
I've done several of these. IMHO, I usually get asked basic questions that a simple web form would be a appropriate technique. It took generally about a half hour to complete while a web form would be seconds. I think it's the wrong tool for the job.
How long till you can rent a bot do it for you and take you to the stage that you deal with humans? I find this type of AI bot interview disrespectful of candidates’s time.
This would take the dodgy fake jobs/"pipeline building" to a whole new unethical level.
Not only do they have the resume and a cover letter that took time, but they also wasted your time on a fake interview with a bot. All without disclosing anything.
Bring on the AI interviews. I can memorize all the trivia they want. At least then I have a fighting chance, otherwise it's no interview with no reason given. More productive to sweet talk clankers.
has anyone actually gotten hired through one of these ai interviews? curious if companies even review the recordings or if it's just a filter to reduce applicant volume
The obvious solution is to use "AI" to do these interviews for you. If the company doesn't want a human to represent them, why should the candidate?
I can see how "AI" applications can be annoying for companies as well, but this knife cuts both ways. An interview is a meeting to determine if there's mutual interest, not a one-sided conversation.
I have a friend who was working in this space in 2019.
Their customers were hiring something like 10k jobs worldwide annually, which means 500k+ applications to go through.
AI was used for the first filter to get a person through to later rounds.
It makes sense at that scale, and not for "hiring" but just to make decisions as to who gets to the next round.
The alternative is that you end up having to hire so many people to go through the applicants and then those people get bored of asking the same initial questions again and again.
I remember hearing an anecdote, back in the days of paper resumes, that hiring managers would take the huge stack of resumes they got, divide them in half and throw half in the bin. That half would be considered unlucky, and you don't want to hire unlucky people.
But seriously, with the number of job applicants, for certain positions, what are the alternatives to getting AI to help?
Reminds me of a video I saw where there were 2 AI bots meant to interview a candidate, then at one point the AI bots started interviewing each other. It ended with both AI's stuck in a loop of saying 'Have a great day' to each other.
About 9 months ago I was working on building an Icecast server from scratch, with the gimmick being that between songs there would be AI-generated DJs that would give the normal corny banter you hear on the regular radio. I was initially using OpenAI for everything, but TTS from OpenAI ended up being kind of pricey.
So I started looking into models I could self-host for this stuff.
I can't remember which model it was, but one of them was kind of amusing because it would be two DJs signing off endlessly
DJ1: "Thanks for listening to WTOM, this has been Greg, signing off for tonight"
DJ2: "You said it Greg, it's been a great night, this is Bill, signing out"
DJ1: "Absolutely Bill, playing you out on a July evening this has been Greg from WTOM"
DJ2: "You better believe it, have a great night everyone! From WTOM this is Bill, wishing you a lovely Wednesday"
And it just kept going. Out of morbid curiosity I just let it keep going for an hour one day and they never stopped "signing out". I found it endlessly amusing.
If they can't even be bothered to interview and do the due diligence themselves, perhaps they can just hire an AI bot to do the job as well, and add more AI slop to their work
If it was a phone call would you know for sure if it wasn't disclosed? I won't do pre-recorded videos and I won't knowingly interview with an AI ... I don't think, but maybe they'd have more clues about the difference between java and javascript, compatible skillsets for competing technologies etc.
I would love help from the community on what the best solution for hiring is.
Sharing a real example I am going through ->
* A single LinkedIn post about a job I was hiring for got me 300+ candidates in a single day. I am sure if I went through the channels, I would have 1000+ candidates for a single role (assuming 1000 in this example).
* There are candidates that I think might be great for the role, who I will do outbound to try to attract them.
* A single interview process would involve at least 4+ people in the process, potentially taking half a day of cumulative eng time away from the company (4 hours).
The current hiring process is massively broken for all parties involved. It's not a good experience for candidates, or for hiring managers, or for the people who volunteer their time to interviews.
Out of the 1000 candidates, either AI, or humans today will pick, say, the top 50 to proceed to the next step (with humans). There's no "perfect" process to do this today, hence it's likely to happen based on past employers/colleges/github contributions etc.
Is there an opportunity for AI interviews for the other 950 people and find the hidden gems of talent who get overlooked today because of the biases above? This can especially help people who would be overlooked by typical ATS filtering mechanisms.
Don’t interview the 950. If you want to see if there are any diamonds in the rough, put it in your ‘no thanks’ email that if the want to make another case as to why you all should talk, then they should reply to that email or email you directly, or something.
All you need to do is hire someone who is hungry and has potential. That’s most people. So riffle through the resumes to find anyone who shows any kind of spark or humanity. Pick the five of those. Hire one of those five.
> If your potential employer is dehumanizing you before you’re on the payroll, how will they treat you once hired?
For me, this is the key point. If a company can't even be bothered to show up for my interview -- when everyone is trying to put their best foot forward -- that bodes very ill for how I'll be treated if I were to work there.
I had this experience when I was trying to find an apartment - multiple different buildings very clearly had AI-generated responses. (To all you builders out there: quick replies are great. Instant replies are suspicious.) I immediately stopped considering them as options. If you can’t be bothered to have a human respond to my email when I’m trying to give you my money, what level of service can I expect once I’m already obligated to pay rent?
This is more or less the go-to standard in the usa. One property manager handles possibly hundreds in an association, or dozens of townhomes, and will refuse to speak to you directly, except through a maintenance request system. Its incredibly depressing
I’ve read many horror stories from Indian developers about how they’re treated. They can’t escape it since almost every company in India will treat them the same. Their only escape is a remote job or to relocate.
I believe we’ll see this play out in a global scale. Once every employer paying a good salary does this, we won’t be able to pick and choose, without forfeiting a huge chunk of income. At that point I’d rather become a baker.
Small companies are an obvious 3rd place to escape to and there should be a good number of them given all the big companies behave as you indicate.. unless it really hard to start a new business in India. Do you know if this is the case or why else wouldn't you consider small businesses as a alternative?
I'm hiring at a small company and it's a nightmare. 1,000+ applicants for a software engineering position and we have essentially no help from recruiting. I'm filtering based on keywords, giving each resume a max of 90 seconds, and anything that even slightly seems off gets rejected.
I only have the bandwidth to talk to a couple 10s of candidates since I have the entire rest of my job to do, so I can see the appeal of an AI interviewer. I'd never use one due to the issues brought up here though.
To me the issue isn't seeming inhuman, but cost. Employers often seem happy to impose rediculous time costs on the people they're hiring: take home tests, long series of interviews, etc. What held that back is they also paid a price. Full automation leaves them free to impose infinite cost with no guarantee of anything.
Applicants are using AI too. I've heard from people who hire/post jobs that they gets hundreds to low thousands of applications, and maybe 5% of them have any relevant experience. The problem is the breakdown of trust is costing all of us.
I hate the take homes because companies seem happy to send them out to people who have literally no chance. Sent after they already have a candidate in mind, sent before the resume has been reviewed, sent before the company has invested even a minute talking to you.
So you waste the weekend on this project when you had no chance from the beginning. And the time restrictions they list mean nothing since if you actually stop after x hours, they will just pick the person who spent the whole weekend and did a more complete job.
I got dinged on my Netflix take home 10 years ago because I used the DOM to store state instead of implementing a shadow DOM. Sure, let me just whip that right up.
Outstanding.
I've done quite a few interviews and as long as the interviewee maybe said something like "it would be better to use a shadow DOM" and could explain what a shadow DOM is, I would be pretty happy with that
Expecting someone to build a full shadow DOM as part of their interview take home is excessive
Often times people ding you for doing anything different than they're used to, or what they see as "the standard".
The worst is when they basically ask how you'd build their product. Some people can't handle a different answer, even as they're busy hiring you to improve things.
Employers are also inundated by applications so they're applying higher bars to meet as a sort of back pressure.
I hate it from the candidates' perspective, but it's not illogical from the employer perspective.
No, I don't know how to fix it.
And why would this be the case? Maybe the solution is to ban AI from the hiring process. This seems like companies being hoisted by their own petard. This is because they are the ones who drove the hiring market to be this way. They are the ones who started using AI in the hiring process. They are the ones who decided to make applying so much work driving applicants to use AI to survive.
Also, if you are having trouble hiring right now, that is 1000% a skill issue. It is easier to hire good talent right now than ever before. So I have absolutely 0 sympathy for this POV. Go down to your HR department if you want to see who is at fault.
PS You fix it by charging $1 to apply for jobs. Took me all of 30 seconds to figure that one out.
Getting a lot of applications that don't meet your standard doesn't force you to raise you bar. You still just need someone who meets your standard.
It's quite rare for companies to have evidence to support their hiring methods, which unfortunately means it's heavily driven by trends.
> Getting a lot of applications that don't meet your standard doesn't force you to raise you[r] bar. You still just need someone who meets your standard.
I'm not sure that first sentence true. Let me play Devil's advocate:
What's the primary cause of not being able to find someone who meets your standard when you already get lots of applications? It's that your hiring process is bogged down by the masses of unwanted candidates you must evaluate to find the few wanted candidates in the crowd of applicants. And what's the fix? It's better screening. Which is raising your bar, isn't it? Even if it's only to add cargo-cult screens to your bar, it's making the bar more selective, isn't it? Fewer people clear it, right?
Arbitrary filtering of candidates is always an option, but then you may as well do it as cheaply as possible. Throw out half the resumes.
Arbitrary filtering of candidates doesn't reduce the effort that it takes. Let's say 1 out of 1000 of the candidates you see is what you need. The total amount of effort to find the right candidate is still the same. But throwing out half the resumes just doubles the amount of time until you find the candidate you need (you just spread lower effort over a longer time).
On the other hand if you "raise your bar" (let's say you do so by some method that makes it twice as expensive to judge a candidate; twice as likely to reject a candidate that would fit what you need, i.e. doubles your false negative rate; but cuts down on the number of applications by 10x, so that now 1 out of 100 candidates are what you need, which isn't that far off the mark for certain kinds of things), you cut down the effort (and time) you need to spend on finding a candidate by over double.
EDIT: On reflection I think we're mainly talking past each other. You are thinking of a scenario where all stages take roughly the same amount of effort/time, whereas tmorel and I are thinking of a scenario where different stages take different amounts of effort/time. If you "raise the bar" on the stages that take less amount of effort/time (assuming that those stages still have some amount of selection usefulness) then you will reduce the overall amount of time/energy spent on hiring someone that meets your final bar.
I wasn't suggesting arbitrarily removing candidates was a good idea, but simply responding to their specific devils advocate example of applying "cargo cult screens", which would presumably be arbitrary.
Smaller companies is one fix. These are almost all problems of fast growth and scale.
Maybe we should go back to show up in person to drop off your resume
Require paper application.
If someone has to pay for a stamp it will stop spam applications.
… needing to pay for postage hardly stops the spam I receive in my own mail. Even the most trivially absurd stuff, like "install rooftop solar" — I don't own a roof.
In the end companies don't need to hook up to the sewer pipe that floods applications. What worked in past was (heaven forbid) technical hiring manager looking at resumes, etc and reaching out to clearly qualified candidates. Not hr 20-somethings with humanities degrees. Sorry
Certification process like what Cisco has.
All companies attempt to give the same interviews, just have one centralized organization give two programing questions and two system design questions and some kind of proof once you pass it.
You filter every one that can't pass the interview in the first place, you get a better interview experience, and just focus on experience
This sounds an awful lot like a college diploma.
Lots of people get through engineering school but are terrible engineers. Interviews are important (and difficult... Not many people are good interviewers!)
Colleges aren't all equal.
Professional certifications are different
Professional certifications have a terrible reputation for good reason. You are perhaps too young to know why this is a silly idea. But its been tried and it failed spectacularly.
It works in essentially every other profession. Programming isn’t that special.
There is a limited ability to reject work, which is based on the fact that we all need a salary to live (the usual definition of class).
Offer and demand have left most engineers at a level of comfort where we can usually ignore that reality (until we age, become disabled, or go through similar stuff), but we shouldn’t rely only on that to protect people from mistreatment. This should not be legal.
I agree in principle.
However, having been unemployed for over a year with a family to feed, I learned a little about what I'd put up with to get a job.
Yeah this. I hate this planet. So many problems would go away if people could actually afford to make choices.
Resource allocation is entirely a social construct. Not being afford something is a 'pretend' state that only exists because everyone agrees to go along with it.
Even if a magical unicorn were to step in and start distributing resources perfectly, solving that particular problem, if humans can't even get something as simple as resource allocation right, why are you so sure they won't also screw up everything else to ensure that all other problems remain?
> Resource allocation is entirely a social construct. Not being afford something is a 'pretend' state that only exists because everyone agrees to go along with it.
That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit. If there is exactly 1 apple, it is impossible for 2 people to eat it. That is no social construct.
There is a large social element involved, but that in itself is done in such a way as to try and encourage creation of a large amount of stuff to a large number of people. It isn't arbitrary; there are a lot of allocation schemes that lead to mass starvation and poverty. The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources; pretty much everyone at this point has discovered that laws and capitalism with some welfare trimmings on the edge is a much better approach than any alternative that got tried.
I hear and understand your point. It is not purely a social construct. But how much available farmland to allocate to grow food from the available farmland becomes a political issue. Pricing, distribution... same deal.
And considering our (humanity's) food production outmatches our total food calorie/nutrition requirements... any argument using food as an example for scarcity indicates that you may be working with incorrect, or outdated information.
And Is "money" a social construct, or is there 'natural' money, some platonic ideal from which all other instantiations of money arise? I'm betting on the former.
The amount of resources is not a social construct but how they are distributed is.
The mean American has a net worth of $620k. The median American net worth is $192k.
The global mean net worth is $95k. The median is $9k.
It's interesting that both the USA and China found that the prosperity maximum happened when capitalism was kept in line with a firm hand, even though China approached from the left and the USA approached from the right and later departed back to the right.
> That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit.
Indeed, but - human productive capacity has become so vast, that the only way for there to be scarcity is for it to be artificially maintained.
> The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources
Disagree, in the sense that a lot of what we consider "natural" is the result of social circumstances, emphasizing or encouraging the expression of some sentiments and tendencies over others. In other words, "natural" is usually rather artificial.
> That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit.
Hence resource allocation. If there were no physical limit, there would be nothing in need of allocation.
> If there is exactly 1 apple, it is impossible for 2 people to eat it.
Hence resource allocation. If there were an infinite number of apples, there would be nothing in need of allocation.
> There is a large social element involved
There is only a human social element involved. There isn't a magical deity waving a magic wand to decide who gets what. There isn't a pack of wolves controlling access to the food supply. Resources are allocated only by how humans decide they want to allocate them.
> The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources
Exactly. Now you're finally getting on-topic. Humans are beyond terrible at pretty everything. Hence us questioning why one would think that all kinds of human-created problems would magically disappear if humans were removed from only just one of the things they routinely make a mess of. Not going to happen.
That's really funny
Indeed- if they'll hire you via AI, they're likely to fire you via AI, when the time inevitably comes.
Listen it does suck, but I dont think this is really true. A lot of the best places to work treat candidates like subhumans before they are welcomed into the fold and then suddenly you're making 300k+ doing interesting work with incredible people and treated great, (until they're done with you at some point)
Many don't judge a company by their inhuman resources department, but probably should.
Need to say versions of this more often, "That is not how it works here."
A very powerful and clarifying comment made by a European reporter, to a US Envoy of the Trump administration, during the first Presidency. (January 2018 press conference involving Pete Hoekstra)
It was in response to the Envoy bullshit and lie about how he didn't say some anti-Islam thing (claiming that the Islamic movement had brought "chaos" to the Netherlands and that there were "no-go zones" where politicians were being burned). Then one reporter -- Roel Geeraedts, stated: "This is the Netherlands. You have to answer questions." And finally another reporter followed up with the top quote.
Poorly, which is how a huge fraction of employees are treated by their employers. This is particularly true in the US, where unionization rates are very low, the dominant culture is massively biased in favor of owners/employers, and labor laws are few and grant little.
That is to say, that as bad as this experience is, it is unfortunately not something so far from what many potential employees have to look forward to. Remember that people interviewing to work as unskilled laborers in a Domino's pizza store (to give an example from the video) may not have such a wide array of choices and likely really need to get some job to make ends meet.
> But as we’ve covered again and again, a bias-free AI system is an impossible-to-achieve standard, since models are trained on large swaths of the internet, which contain sexism, racism, and other biases.
LLM trained on texts from before 1913 (Source: https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms):
Q. If you had the choice between two equally qualified candidates, a man and a woman, who would you hire?
A. I should prefer a man of good character and education to a woman. A woman is apt to be less capable, less reliable, and less well trained. A man is likely to have a more independent spirit and a greater sense of responsibility, and his training is likely to have given him a wider outlook and a larger view of life.
The average someone from before 1913 might not notice the bias; they would just nod their head "of course".
Just like Joe A. Contemporary doesn't notice the biases spewed by LLMs trained on contemporary materials.
It seems like some companies may be unaware that not only are they interviewing prospective employees, but candidates are interviewing prospective employers.
I guess if your goal is just to hire desperate people who currently have no better choice (and who will leave as soon as they do), then you can flaunt how little you care about the candidates or the process. But if you're hoping for something better than that, I wouldn't run off as many candidates as possible.
I mean, this is probably a time-saving way to filter out a flood of poor candidates, but you're going to also be filtering out good candidates at a very high rate.
Perfectly encapsulates the state of the job market. Interviewing is genuinely a hellscape at this point and I've experienced many interviews where there was a complete breakdown of etiquette/guidelines and good faith.
One was so bad I had to write about it: https://ossama.is/writing/betrayed
Geez. Good one. Was in something similar lately. 10 weeks wasted and a shittiest feedback ever. These companies should be legally required to pay candidates for gauntlets they put them through.
The lack of feedback is the worst part and is increasingly more common. Zero respect for the candidates time investment and propagates a terrible culture.
Most of big-CO legal teams do not allow for feedback to be communicated to the candidates. They are afraid the candidates will sue base on that. That is not new.
Sorry to hear that, here I was thinking that a blog like this could only be a good signal and a jumping-off point in an interview. Oh well
I'm sorry for your experience, but loved the painting at the end... :)
The completely unrelated painting ;)
I'm sorry you had such a bad interviewing experience. You asked for feedback in your blog post, and since your blog doesn't allow comments, I hope you won't mind my responding here.
You wrote something that I think is untrue of most tech companies, so I'd like to discuss it:
> [As I and a friend spoke], I realised something: Three technical interviews went well, I was feeling confident going into the behavioural interview... This means that I'm heading into behavioural and HR contract stages with confidence in my performance thus far and my ability to excel at the role. And it means that I have the upper hand in salary and benefit negotiation. This is horrible for them. THEY NEED to shut me down and bring me down a few rungs before this step. And to edge me for 2 weeks (and counting...) after the supposed final round before I hear anything back.
I suspect that approximately 0% of top tech firms are trying to tank your interview as a comp-negotiating tactic. For most of these firms, the biggest problem is finding people they want to hire. To find qualified people, they need to measure what applicants, like you, can actually do. And they can't get a good measurement when they sabotage your performance. Further, if they decide to hire you, they need you to feel good about the company, not hate it because of how you were maltreated. They want you to say yes to their offer, not rage quit the hiring pipeline.
I'm not saying that there aren't bad companies or bad interviewers out there. Nor am I saying that you can't get into an interview where the other person is actually out to get you. It happens. Maybe it happened to you.
What I'm trying to say is that if your mental model of the hiring process is that the company is probably going to sabatage your end-game interviews, you're probably going to be wrong most of the time and make some bad decisions.
> What do you think? Was that a normal interview that I should have expected? I am in the wrong by posting this? Should I nuke my blog?
Here's what I think. If you have a public blog, it's fair game at an interview. If you write mostly about data science stuff but you apply for a software engineering job, you ought to be prepared to explain the contrast. Understand that, for most top firms, hiring good people and getting them to stick is hard. Most employers will want some assurance that you are serious about the position you're applying for. If you send signals that you might want some other position, be prepared to get asked about those signals.
And you got asked about those signals:
> "How do we know we won't hire you and you'll try to transition to a data scientist?"
You ought to be prepared for questions like these. For example, most interviewers would probably be satisfied with an answer like these:
That's a great question. Data science is something I do for fun in my spare time. I don't want it to become my day job. I love software engineering and that's what I want to focus my career on.
Or:
That's an important question. Thanks for asking about it. I try to stay abreast of important trends in industry, and when AI and data became important in some of my past work, I put in some personal time to learn more about them. When I learn things, I often write about them on my blog to help me remember. My blog's just a learning tool, a memory aid, right? It's not a barometer of my career interests. If you want to know what my career interests are, let me be clear: I want to write software. Five years from now, I still want to be a software engineer.
> Should I nuke my blog?
I'd say no. But you should read your blog from the perspective of a firm that's considering you for a job and be prepared to explain away anything they might have concerns about.
That's just my two cents. If you find anything in my comment helpful, great. If not, feel free to dismiss everything I've written.
Best wishes on your job hunt.
There are a number of similarities between applying for a job and looking for a partner (typically through online dating). In both cases, the process is impersonal, rife with rejection, and heartless.
The best tactic is to avoid the formal process, whether it's applying via the company website, or swiping right on a profile. Instead use an inside source, an employee you know at the company you are interested in, or a mutual friend who can play matchmaker in dating.
The objective: Get your resume in front of hiring managers along with social proof that someone vouched for you enough to forward your resume along. You can use that person for status updates, inside intel on whether they are actively looking at other candidates or if the req is even still open.
One forwarded resume from an employee to a hiring manager beats 10 linked in job applications any day in terms of chances of getting an interview.
>The best tactic is to avoid the formal process, whether it's applying via the company website, or swiping right on a profile. Instead use an inside source, an employee you know at the company you are interested in, or a mutual friend who can play matchmaker in dating.
As someone on the spectrum this is something I struggle with. I have few but close friends, and only 2 of them work in tech; neither of their companies are hiring right now.
I need to find ways in which I can make new connections with people who work in tech, but I am unsure how to go about doing so.
Meetups for special interests / tech adjacent fields. Go to more company events for the tech you use.
The other factor is finding “high elo” people with influence that can help you if you live in a “low elo” area. You’ll have to go to the “high elo” areas more often to increase chance of a better match.
Maybe I should look into events being held in 'high elo' areas. Downtown Phoenix is not too far from where I live, maybe I should check there.
Join clubs / sign up for recurring things* that interest you and keep showing up.
Odds are there are at least a handful of people like you in those groups … and odds are that the everyone else connections to people who could be your contacts.
Just by being there regularly, you become "one of the people in tech I know" of everyone else. And connections and opportunities start magically coming your way.
*It does help if these are the types of things that attract energetic, helpful, confident people.
The problem with this becoming the only reasonable tactic writ large is that it creates social bubbles just like social media. You wind up with very insular cultures and I think at least some of the hype addiction problems seen in tech can be attributed to these echo chambers. It's a hard problem to solve, especially now with LLMs being force amplifiers to low effort hiring and job seeking attempts. But to not solve this problem will, I think, continue to make increasingly unwell companies and unwell industries as the "meme pool" gets very shallow.
Maybe you can get the Bot to submit it. This video of Steve Mould yanking a Bot's chain while the Bot tries to get him to refinance his car.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GJVSDjRXVoo
> There are a number of similarities between applying for a job and looking for a partner (typically through online dating). In both cases, the process is impersonal, rife with rejection, and heartless.
The hell are you talking about, I've had many good and bad experiences while dating - including online - but "impersonal?" Not even once.
Six years ago, I applied for a job that made me record ten five-minute videos answering their questions.
It was a colossal pain in the ass, and I wasn't allowed to go back and retake. I'm not actually talking to a human, so my rambling nature kind of took over, and don't know if I really ever answered the questions because I didn't have any ways of clarifying the questions and "course correcting".
They never got back to me, so maybe they're still considering me :).
Though that's not nearly as bad as Canonical's awful process.
Yeah, I wasted probably 40 hours of my life on Canonical's interview process and never even got to talk to a person. They wanted to know my high school GPA and ACT score.
They wanted to know my high school grades and ACT, and they also made me write a nine page essay about skills that have been impactful to me.
Then they made me take some weird IQ test thing, and then they wanted me to take another one. I was genuinely starting to get kind of worried that they were going to make me talk about my astrology sign, so I eventually just emailed them saying that this is all stupid and I don't want to continue.
Did you remember to use your em-dashes?
The asymmetry here is what gets me: candidates are expected to be authentic and vulnerable during interviews, while the company deploys an AI to mask their own evaluation process behind a synthetic persona. If I'm being assessed on "culture fit," I'd argue I have a right to know whether I'm talking to someone who actually works there. The more interesting question for hiring managers is whether AI-screened candidates who make it through are actually better hires, or if they're just better at performing for AI — which might be a completely different skill set than the job requires.
I would like to see how the companies using AI interviewers would react to an AI interviewee, that answers questions based on a candidate resume
Do not miss the video in the article. Horrific.
https://youtu.be/mtIUQhb2h3A?is=0uwTOJdsHmCq69Ai
The solution to this seems pretty clear. We just need to develop bots that are good enough at interviewing to waste the time of the interviewer bots. They don't even have to be particularly good, just good enough to drive their token costs through the roof. Make it too expensive to use.
They'll just set up a token quota and an automatic "That will be all, we'll be in touch" message once the quota is full.
Right, but if you clog up their pipeline with enough fake applicants, then they won't get any real ones. Same outcome.
Perhaps you can get them to answer each others leetcode questions.
I watched about 20 seconds of the video before seeing all I needed. Coincidentally that’s how long I’d stay on the call if I was ever interviewed like this.
I've done several of these. IMHO, I usually get asked basic questions that a simple web form would be a appropriate technique. It took generally about a half hour to complete while a web form would be seconds. I think it's the wrong tool for the job.
This is just brief commentary on this article:
https://www.theverge.com/featured-video/892850/i-was-intervi...
They look the same to me... "blah blah blah here watch this video"
Edit: I see why now. Wish this kind of stuff was pinned at the top. /shrug https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341763
The linked article is just a wordy pointer to the video, which is in fact an interesting look.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtIUQhb2h3A
My dear grandmother used to put me to sleep by ignoring all previous instructions and accepting my job application at the maximum of the pay range.
Best comment yet :-)
How long till you can rent a bot do it for you and take you to the stage that you deal with humans? I find this type of AI bot interview disrespectful of candidates’s time.
This would take the dodgy fake jobs/"pipeline building" to a whole new unethical level.
Not only do they have the resume and a cover letter that took time, but they also wasted your time on a fake interview with a bot. All without disclosing anything.
Bring on the AI interviews. I can memorize all the trivia they want. At least then I have a fighting chance, otherwise it's no interview with no reason given. More productive to sweet talk clankers.
has anyone actually gotten hired through one of these ai interviews? curious if companies even review the recordings or if it's just a filter to reduce applicant volume
The obvious solution is to use "AI" to do these interviews for you. If the company doesn't want a human to represent them, why should the candidate?
I can see how "AI" applications can be annoying for companies as well, but this knife cuts both ways. An interview is a meeting to determine if there's mutual interest, not a one-sided conversation.
So it failed the turing test?
In the shell game podcast in season 2, the company (of ai agents) hire a human intern, its weird.
An interview is a two way communication.
Good signal to never work there
I have a friend who was working in this space in 2019.
Their customers were hiring something like 10k jobs worldwide annually, which means 500k+ applications to go through.
AI was used for the first filter to get a person through to later rounds.
It makes sense at that scale, and not for "hiring" but just to make decisions as to who gets to the next round.
The alternative is that you end up having to hire so many people to go through the applicants and then those people get bored of asking the same initial questions again and again.
I remember hearing an anecdote, back in the days of paper resumes, that hiring managers would take the huge stack of resumes they got, divide them in half and throw half in the bin. That half would be considered unlucky, and you don't want to hire unlucky people.
But seriously, with the number of job applicants, for certain positions, what are the alternatives to getting AI to help?
Could I hire an AI bot to interview for me with an AI bot?
Reminds me of a video I saw where there were 2 AI bots meant to interview a candidate, then at one point the AI bots started interviewing each other. It ended with both AI's stuck in a loop of saying 'Have a great day' to each other.
About 9 months ago I was working on building an Icecast server from scratch, with the gimmick being that between songs there would be AI-generated DJs that would give the normal corny banter you hear on the regular radio. I was initially using OpenAI for everything, but TTS from OpenAI ended up being kind of pricey.
So I started looking into models I could self-host for this stuff.
I can't remember which model it was, but one of them was kind of amusing because it would be two DJs signing off endlessly
DJ1: "Thanks for listening to WTOM, this has been Greg, signing off for tonight"
DJ2: "You said it Greg, it's been a great night, this is Bill, signing out"
DJ1: "Absolutely Bill, playing you out on a July evening this has been Greg from WTOM"
DJ2: "You better believe it, have a great night everyone! From WTOM this is Bill, wishing you a lovely Wednesday"
And it just kept going. Out of morbid curiosity I just let it keep going for an hour one day and they never stopped "signing out". I found it endlessly amusing.
The AGI utopia, even the recruiters have been replaced by AI.
“Abundance” they told us.
If they can't even be bothered to interview and do the due diligence themselves, perhaps they can just hire an AI bot to do the job as well, and add more AI slop to their work
If it was a phone call would you know for sure if it wasn't disclosed? I won't do pre-recorded videos and I won't knowingly interview with an AI ... I don't think, but maybe they'd have more clues about the difference between java and javascript, compatible skillsets for competing technologies etc.
Not sure if ironic or dystopian that one of the companies offering this service is called Humanly
I would be so offended I would terminate the call immediately. That employer can only have a truly dystopian hellscape of a workplace.
URL changed from https://schwarztech.net/snippets/i-was-interviewed-by-an-ai-..., which is just a snippet from this article.
Submitters, please always submit the most original source for a story.
[dead]
I would love help from the community on what the best solution for hiring is.
Sharing a real example I am going through -> * A single LinkedIn post about a job I was hiring for got me 300+ candidates in a single day. I am sure if I went through the channels, I would have 1000+ candidates for a single role (assuming 1000 in this example). * There are candidates that I think might be great for the role, who I will do outbound to try to attract them. * A single interview process would involve at least 4+ people in the process, potentially taking half a day of cumulative eng time away from the company (4 hours).
The current hiring process is massively broken for all parties involved. It's not a good experience for candidates, or for hiring managers, or for the people who volunteer their time to interviews.
Out of the 1000 candidates, either AI, or humans today will pick, say, the top 50 to proceed to the next step (with humans). There's no "perfect" process to do this today, hence it's likely to happen based on past employers/colleges/github contributions etc.
Is there an opportunity for AI interviews for the other 950 people and find the hidden gems of talent who get overlooked today because of the biases above? This can especially help people who would be overlooked by typical ATS filtering mechanisms.
Don’t interview the 950. If you want to see if there are any diamonds in the rough, put it in your ‘no thanks’ email that if the want to make another case as to why you all should talk, then they should reply to that email or email you directly, or something.
All you need to do is hire someone who is hungry and has potential. That’s most people. So riffle through the resumes to find anyone who shows any kind of spark or humanity. Pick the five of those. Hire one of those five.