The fact that it's that easy to apply belies the tone the article takes, which generally bemoans how hard job applications are. But they didn't demonstrate that it's hard at all! Moreover, the author even says in the beginning that they didn't use any of the products that help you, like LinkedIn Easy Apply.

Anyway seems interesting but this mostly just confirmed my perception that applying to jobs is pretty easy. Interviews, on the other hand...

Only to find out that the other side didn't read that letter, and most didn't read the resume.

I know, because I asked.

I believe people in the hiring process are looking to work efficiently and a cover letter is just more stuff to read. They want to just read your resume because that's what will get passed around and what matters. Anything in your cover letter is mostly things they want to know in the interview.

What is truly annoying though is creating new accounts for each company's application portal.

but of all of my jobs, to include bartending and FedGov, that's the only one. the rest came through personal contacts.

i guess the military applies, but that's not really the same thing.

Workday is such junk from a user facing perspective. It’s a huge pain to index content from. I have to omit a bunch of big semiconductor companies from my job site because it’s fucking impossible to get job data out of Workday.

If you work in talent at either NXP or Qualcomm, please God read this essay. You are actively harming your own recruiting prospects by using Workday!

I don’t have this problem at all with the more modern ATS’es - Lever, Greenhouse, and Workable all provide nice, easy to consume APIs for this.

This is the site I mentioned. They provide an addon for auto filling workday applications

Lol I’m definitely swiping this next time I throw shade on a website XD

I hear lots of antipathy about it, but the only problem I've personally noticed is (IIRC) it consistently mis-parses my PDF resume.

And of course, it wasn’t a free form text field that would allow me to just enter N/A or my high school. It was a drop-down/search box that had a predefined list of colleges and universities. I ended up just entering some college I attended for two months before dropping out.

https://simplify.jobs/copilot

We've raised the noise floor significantly.

Ps. If you're here mate I hope it worked out for you.

They are currently very easy to spot and the applications go directly into the trash, so the freelancers aren't doing themselves any favors using them.

It is increasing the noise floor a lot though.

That's crazy to me. Why would someone put ANYTHING on their resume that is not factually correct? That in the end is a disservice to yourself and to your potential employer, not to mention the pressure it puts on job seekers to push the envelope on embellishment.

What I am on the fence about in my own resume is including a skillset that yes I have done but maybe a couple years in the past. Right or wrong I have decided to keep them on their knowing full well that it might create a bit of a challenge for me during the interview process.

Tragedy of the commons and negative externalities. If you're applying for a ton of jobs, then lying on your resume comes with potential upsides (you could get a job that you normally wouldn't) with very little personal downside (employers don't really have a way to share which applicants falsified resume data).

Sure, doing this raises the noise level and makes it harder for people who don't lie on their resumes (tragedy of the commons), but from an individual perspective, that's a negative externality that they don't have to care about.

Because it works... They get the job and the person who wasnt captain of the football, tennis, rowing, lacrose, bowling, sailing, cheerleading, chess and debate teams all at the same time is just some unemployable loser.

The real question is why managers and recruiters fall for it - the obvious answer is that they got where they got by inflating their CV and simply assume everyone does it too.

I have dealt with my fair share of resume embellishments. I _will ask_ questions about anything that you put in your resume. Anything at all. It's fair game. That's part of my sanity check. Better have a pretty decent answer as to why something is in the resume relatively recently and you can't even give me an overview of what it was (I assume people forget details and it's fine).

However, have you ever seen 'proxy interviews'? In those cases, it's not just a case of 'embellishments', the candidate interviewing has zero experience and the resume is not even his. Had this experience a few months ago.

People go as far as lip syncing. It's horrendous.

It would be a fun experiment to have a few shots, update my resume and then read it the next day.

Another experiment - have a friend update your resume while you take those shots, and then see if you can really object to the results the next day. ;)

The internet has caused mass insanity.

As I recall, things were not quite so bad in the 1980s. I vaguely recall seeing the odd newspaper article about the intense interest in a job, because it attracted maybe 500 applications. That was newsworthy.

It’s less the internet, and more folks using the internet/apps for processes that used to require in person physical presence. Which has been getting more and more common.

I remember exaggerating a bit when applying for my first job. I was fresh out of university and really needed that job. I spent the following 2 years miserable, I just didn't fit in that well.

Nowadays I'm brutally honest with my application and the following interviews. I see it as me choosing where to work rather than the other way around. If they pick my application then I more or less know that I will fit in rather well. It has served me well over the years.

I can understand people being desperate and in need of that first job or having to start over due to different reasons though...

Desperate people do desperate and unpredictable things though. Case in point:

> I remember exaggerating a bit when applying for my first job. [...] I spent the following 2 years miserable, I just didn't fit in that well.

Every now and then I have to investigate employees who seem to spontaneously lose their shit-- aside from one with an alcoholic spouse, so far every single one of them were just in over their head. They don't return calls, cozy up to security and ask questions about monitoring tools, check into mental hospitals, suddenly have internet connection issues all the time, lose or destroy their equipment repeatedly, etc. One would hop onto the IT support Slack channel and see what widespread issue was currently impacting others, then claim it was happening to her (and do the same with general/social, to see when people were getting sick and with what).

I wouldn't say it rises to the level of malingering, but it's clear they're desperately stalling, and it just creates a vortex that sucks them and everyone around them into. Contractual obligations stop being met because they become an entire sideshow and won't surrender. My fear is that one might eventually resort to sabotage; the closest we've come was a nonperformer trying to leverage workplace violence allegations against an executive.

> Nowadays I'm brutally honest with my application and the following interviews.

This is the way to do it. When you weave a web of lies, you have to maintain all those threads. Pathological liars are always anxious. Honesty makes for a much easier life.

If their current income is $0 and the income from a successful ruse is minimum several weeks of several thousands of dollars, and the cost per throw is around a dime…

It’s not hard to see how the algebra works out.

You get what you fuckin deserve. If you can't be arsed to review applications with people, why should people be arsed to apply in person?

ChatGPT just consumes each of the job requirements, and then makes a story about how the applicant has had significant experience in all of those areas. I would prefer not to hire people who lie about their experience to get a job.

Who cares? The specifications half the time include experience that's impossible to achieve because the people writing them either are also in turn using automated software and/or because they have no idea what they're hiring for.

I am in the process right now of embedding keywords and a "shadow resume" invisibly in my resume to get past the stupid filtering software.

Employers are doing this to themselves.

It could read the job spec, then tailor your application with information that is actually true. Starting off with a company with information that is false is not a great way to start a (hopefully) long relationship.

FWIW, we review every application we receive on the freelancer sites and do not use automated filters.

Tiny barriers can have disproportionate effects.

I don't think an employer would mind a résumé that is factually correct, but edited by a LLM. In the style of "here is my résumé, emphasize the items that match this job offer, and also, fix my grammar and spelling".

Here, the candidates are using a LLM to invent experience that matches the job offer, making a fake résumé. A human doing it doesn't make it better.

We do also ask for Github, but many folks use other repositories. Linkedin is one of the best sources of credibility for us, so I would recommend continuing to try to get it unbanned, or start a new one.

- Desirable job applicants get hired quickly, but people who can't get hired stay on the market

- People who can't get hired will keep applying to more and more jobs

- So every new job opening gets flooded with applications from people who couldn't get hired elsewhere

- Employers don't have time to read the flood of applications in detail, so they rely on cheap filters (keywords on resume, where they went to college, did they work at FANG, etc.)

- Which makes the process worse for everyone

What if there was some way to limit job seekers to e.g. 10 job applications per month, industrywide? Feels like that could cut down the noise and allow employers to consider each individual applicant more carefully.

(It would be hard to implement this limit, though. You could do it via data-sharing between Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, etc., but there are huge privacy concerns and it would run into the same sorts of issues as credit reports do.)

Beyond the actual difficulty in doing this without a completely centralized hiring process, this feels incredibly immoral. People have families to feed.

People would submit fewer applications, but each individual application would have a higher chance of success, because everyone else would _also_ be submitting fewer applications. The number of job openings is the same either way, so the same number of people get hired in the end, right?

I think individual companies should do whatever they want (within legal bounds), but such a big overhaul just seems ripe to screw people over.

I sometimes think requiring people to telephone and navigate a voice system to get an application ID before they can apply might help.

Tiny barriers can have disproportionate effects.

- The better applicants usually have several warm leads and often don't bother with high-effort application processes, since they have a pretty decent chance of getting hired wherever they apply, and they're also not bothering to apply for things they're wildly unqualified for

- The worse and more desperate applicants have the time and motivation to stick through the most bizarre and convoluted application process until they get kicked out, with no regard to how well they actually match the requirements

So thus, the more hoops you put into your process to try and stem the tide of the hoards of desperate unqualified applicants, the more you disproportionately screen out the highly qualified applicants who have better things to do and better opportunities to pursue.

Exactly. Asking me to upload a resume, and then data entry all the facts from my resume into form fields, just so that a company can not even reject me, basically tells me that I will be expendable drone #88238875 if I get a job there.

I feel a little bad that sometimes the recruiter probably fills the form out for me if their process requires is, but at least they actually intend to follow up on me as a lead.

No, you’re hiring top-1% of applicants, not top-1% of employees!

I hope it didn’t, contaminating the applications like this and automating it will only hurt the ones who’s applying, because now authentic resumes and legit knowledge will be overlooked by other fake auto generated resumes. This try hard wannabe attitude is always going to ruin the experience for everyone else, either in jobs, blog writings, dating, gaming, and basically everywhere.

I can see your point, absolutely, and the new normal is unfortunate and probably unsustainable.

Careers boards are just another early battleground where we're at a bit of a wait and see moment as for how we're going to deal with all of this cheap, coherent noise.

I also automate part of the process, and I think everyone should be or soon will be, but having received many CVS/cover letters as well, the ones with too much LLM are glaringly obvious and an easy rejection.

These days with companies receiving hundreds of CVs, you only need 1 reason to reject an application. Don't make your application so LLMy that you give the hiring manager an easy reason

There was that time I was at a conference put on by Sun Microsystems in NYC and asked a question about main memory databases which got me jumped on by somebody from rentech. If I knew to the extent which hell was about to break loose at that job I was working at then, I should have applied for a job at rentech.

Just as an example, but one that trips me up a lot, every action seems to be controlled by an orange button (Submit?) way down in the lower right corner of your browser, even if the information you're working on is way up in the upper right corner.

Over 11 years in the workforce, my success rate with applying to ATS-like platforms on company websites is 0%. And even just getting a rejection is in the neighborhood of 5-10%.

So with those numbers do you still think 2.5 minutes is a lot of time? 2.5x500 applications is ~21 hours of applying to jobs.

With recruiters on LinkedIn, my success rate is roughly 80% to 1st interview, 60% to second and 20% to getting an offer.

My success rate was entirely for recruiters that reached out to me first.

(I also paid $400 for an HR consultant to update my resume and LinkedIn profile as a one-time fee, so maybe that helped, but I didn't really A/B test it before and after)

based on my experience its > 5 mins most of the time.

since the dawn of time (1970, jan1)

Photocopies were low quality and looked obvious and got you into the trash straight away.

So mass, but compared to population not very mass.

The real start date was Eternal September.

When 2/3 companies don't even bother sending a rejection email, I tend to not bother doing the 20 minute job applications.

- 2 did not progress past recruiter phone call

- 2 full loops (startup w/ no offer, tech company w/ offer)

- 1 did not progress past tech screen (skills mismatch)

5 opportunities out of 150 apps over 4 months. Not awesome, no?

PSA: I built a browser extension that autofills your job application so you don't have to manually re-type your resume on every job -> https://simplify.jobs/copilot (we're also YC backed!)

I doubt it matters much though. Even when I get passed the initial resume screen these days, it’s usually followed up with a “we’ve decided to pursue someone else” from the recruiter/hiring manager/etc. before I can even get to an interview. And that’s for jobs where my resume seems a perfect fit.

I also try to keep the formatting simple in hopes that the parser has an easier time. I had a previous resume that had a slightly more complex layout that I thing compiled down to tables, but recently I’ve been using one with a simpler linear/hierarchical format.

I’ve also removed some stuff I used to have on there, such as contributions to open source projects. No one I’ve ever talked to has cared about that stuff, even when the market was easier, but I suspect that’s partly because the OSS stuff I’ve done is in a different domain from my professional career.

Right now, most rejections I get at the ATS stage don’t come till 2-3 weeks after the application.

The real goal is when a human reads your resume they decide to call you in for an interview. That human doesn't have time for your whole CV, so even though it might get you to that person, it won't get you an interview: forget about the cold applications to a program, you are just wasting the other person's time if you get past the machine. If you have a job only apply to jobs you have looked into enough to know they are worth accepting an offer if you get one. If you don't have a job you can't be as picky - but you have a lot more time to investigate potential companies and design a resume to get their attention.

So my advice as someone who might read your resume: read the job ad and then modify your resume to make it fit. Don't remove unrelated jobs, but make them a couple lines, while jobs where you did things more inline with what they want get more attention. I only glance at cover letters so I wouldn't recommend you spend much time on them. Note that the above is focused on me - others are different but I can only advise how to get my attention: you get to figure out how/if it generalizes.

Honestly, finding someone worth hiring is hard. I want to know if you can do the job and nothing about the process is very good there.

If you are just finishing college [or worse looking for an internship] you will have trouble putting enough on a page to attract attention. Once you have been around for a few years though you should be cutting things - and that means there are things potentially relevant you can put back on.

It also depends on how focused you are. If you are only interested in OpenGL 1.1 jobs you would cut anything not related that and just have a single resume that you don't need to focus. I used openGl 1.1 to make a point: it is obsolete so normally you wouldn't put anything about it on a resume - but there is a small chance you would encounter it as a nice to have in an otherwise interesting job (If the job wants someone who knows Vulkan but is 10% maintaining old products: openGl 1.1 might catch their attention even though you have no Vulkan experience)

Granted this is for a relatively small company in a niche area. Maybe it is different when applying for jobs at big companies.

I scaled back a bit once I saw how people actually write job descriptions (search Google until they find something "close enough" and post that verbatim).

Of course it could be luck, but so far I wrote only two applications in my life and got both got accepted + for job offer from both (after interviewing).

When I tell people about my cover letters some say that HR don’t even read cover letters, but I want to believe otherwise :D

I typically spend two or three hours writing a cover letter and customizing my resume for each job application.

Don't forget that this isn't a hackernews comment. You should take an hour (day is better!) break and then reread and revise everything. Don't send the rough draft or even the second draft in - follow the whole writing process they told you in school. Some people will spot a spelling error at the bottom of the page in one second and reject you, so make sure everything is perfect.

Most companies I have applied to would probably take a week or more than a week

Honestly, I wish more applications were like that. Just let me know sooner rather than later what your filters are.

I remember applying for a position getting a phone call and then getting rejected afterwards but the funny thing was I got another email from the same company asking about my availability for the interview and I was like Woahh, are you sure you sent the email to the right person because I remember you already rejected me

At least for programmers, I always cast a wide net unless there is some very specific item that has a very steep learning curve.

Funny sidenote, my manager told me I was the first application he received that got a perfect score on the personality test. The next best applicant in the queue at the time was 85%. The questions were all things like "If a customer is complaining do you: Smile and listen to their complaint? Or Tell them it's fast food and to deal with it?" or "A customer accidentally included an extra 5 dollar bill when giving you their payment. You could keep this $5 without anyone knowing, do you keep it?" Just all very obvious answers and I don't understand why you wouldn't at least lie.

De-urbanizing and moving to a more rural location. Will get a job at a grocery store to avoid all the future dead people in office jobs whose toxic positivity psychosis is leading them to believe they’re leaving behind the most important outputs for the future.

Such jobs are not meaningful. They’re just a form of social organization, like religion before us.

Signal attenuation due to generational churn comes with loss of experience and an obligation on the future to re-discover and encode that knowledge. We only propagate the species, social norms are not fractal and immutable; nothing we’re doing is preserved. We’re just jumping through elites hoops for bigger paychecks.

Been there, done that. It gets just as banal and repetitive as everything else. It’s drug addiction, chasing dopamine highs. Physics will end the species and all this effort will be for naught.

Given that there’s little point to being a court jester and dancing for the high court.

there are usually old/unmaintained houses on the edge of nowhere to buy for less than a years rent of a flat in downtown.

you probably have to adjust your sense of "habitable" as well and put in some work.

not saying it's easy or nice

eat bugs and live in pods? that's no way to live

[0] https://resgen.app

My spouse is not in tech but in comms. The quickest I know she's done an application has been O(hours) primarily due to writing cover letters, personalizing resume and often sending in clips.

Having seen that, I find it amusing that we techies (yes me too) get annoyed when we have to provide our Linkedin AND all the information on that page.

I don't think anyone is sitting around going 'We just have no good candidates, if only people could apply in 71 seconds instead of 160, then we'd finally see the applicant quality increase'

Not at all. If anything, you want people to take their time when applying. In almost every A/B test I've ever run, the more questions I introduce into the application process, the quality of applications increases exponentially, the time to filter applications decreases, and the decrease in the total number of applications was barely noticeable.

Headhunters are trying to find a best fit for a company. Why is there no one trying to find a best fit for a candidate? The inherent problem in hiring, on both sides, is search costs.

I'm probably going to be searching for a new job sometime next year. I think that, to avoid the time spent on these appliations, and to ensure a relatively good fit, I'd be willing to pay quite a bit, or to try and align incentives pay a percentage of the pay increase from my current job for a period of time or something like that.

But essentially, it seems like free money on the ground to be able to pay people to solve these search frictions.

I realize headhunters exist on the company side, but it really seems like A) there should be more of that and B) there should be a reciprocal industry representing the applicants.

There are career coaches to be found these days, I'm not intending to include them in this rant. I've had a few friends use them, and I've talked to one and he was reasonable.

As an individual, I'd avoid anyone that wants a percentage. Specified fee for helping with resume, linkedin profile, etc., fine.

I've had a lot of jobs in my long career, and I have spent a considerable amount of time researching and applying for the few ones I am interested in. I have a pretty good hit rate.

Do people really apply for hundreds of jobs?

I’ve done it twice. The first time was when I was 18 or 19 trying to get my first job in the industry. I put in a ton of applications, and while it felt tedious, it only took around three months at the end of the day.

The second time was this time. I’ve probably put at least 100 applications in over the past year, and it’s been very hit or miss on whether I get interviews. I don’t bother researching and applying for the few jobs in interested in, because I’m usually not qualified for them. Most of my recent job applications have been exclusively ones that looks like they’re relevant compared to my resume, and some that are different from the work I’ve done in the past, but utilize tangential skills.

For what it's worth I think your current strategy of applying for relevant jobs is the right one, particularly if it's a difficult market where you are. Tangential skills are also good possibilities. I hope you find something that works for you.

When you have been our of school for a while we get a few resumes with interesting experience that can make a few people stand out. Most probably have standout experience, but it doesn't come out in the resume.

The biggest mistake I see for people with experience is that they describe their role and responsibilities but not what they specifically contributed and why they are awesome.

The best advice I was ever given is that your resume is a marketing document. It should contain things you would like to be asked about in an interview. Cut out everything else.

Did you make up some BS metrics, or did you do the honest thing and draw résumés from a hat?

https://www.reddit.com/r/rant/comments/9o8yvc/if_you_created...

Agree with the first two but not the last point. The types of companies you're referring to are almost always large and not particularly fast moving. Swapping out their archaic applicant tracking system is often a non-starter as it's usually embedded in their HRIS and swapping out a HRIS in a large company is a monster task.

I can take being rejected. Disappearing into the night is so disrespectful.

It's the most surreal and absurd experience. There are actually prep courses you can pay for just to improve your odds on the P&G testing process just to get someone to actually see your resume. Be warned though: if you don't score sufficiently high for the position you've applied to, you're banned from applying for any job at the company for a year!

Then the manager no-showed when I came in for the interview.