I haven’t looked for a job or hired anyone in a long time, which means I’m pretty out of touch. But from what I can see, the job search process is broken on so many levels. I’m not sure why it’s so broken, but I have some guesses.1
Let’s start with the vague and unrealistic job requirements. Like most things that suck in tech, the requirements are vague because the people writing those job postings usually aren’t the ones who need the help. Developers tell their managers they need more people for a project. The manager tells HR, and then HR tells a hiring manager who creates the job posting. After this shitty game of telephone, nobody really understands what the original requirements were anymore, so they end up posting garbage.
You’ll see job postings asking for developers who know C, Java, Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, and whatever reactangular JavaScript framework. Then you join the company and they only want you to maintain a PHP + jQuery website from 10 years ago. No one knows what these companies are really looking for. And since there’s no point in reading the job description, you might as well just shotgun your resume to 100 jobs without reading them.
Of course, most companies can’t handle getting 1,000 applications. So they use automated filters to weed out candidates. Then job seekers notice they can’t get interviews reliably anymore, so they start stuffing their resumes with keywords to avoid being filtered out by the algorithm.
In recent years, some job seekers have turned to AI to “optimize” their resumes. Then they automate the process and apply to 1,000 job postings. In response, companies also use AI to trim down those 10,000 applications to a manageable number. The problem is, AI can’t reliably tell human and AI-generated writing apart. So you see people get their resumes through the screening process, then fail the interviews miserably, wasting everyone’s time.
Since most interviews are on Zoom these days, some people use AI to cheat during the interview. And since many jobs are remote these days, some people use AI to cheat the interview, then pass off the work to others in another country, who probably use AI to do the job anyway. It’s scammers all the way down.2
Some scammers are already using speech-to-text AI to feed questions to ChatGPT so they don’t have to type it out. When you ask them to share their screen, they only show you the innocent one. And the scammers are only going to get better over time. If you’re a hiring company, you can go back to on-site interviews or only hire people through your personal network, but that’s pretty inefficient. And if you’re a job seeker, how do you compete in a job market like this?
When ChatGPT first came out, people worried it would take away their jobs. But I never thought it would do so through human scammers. I think job platforms need to fix this issue, or they won’t exist anymore in a few years. Sorry, what did you say? Indeed and LinkedIn are all-in on the AI hype train? Welp, never mind then.
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The worst case scenario is that a lot of those job postings are ghost jobs, and companies aren’t even hiring. I hope it’s not that bad yet. ↩
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Some businesspeople might see this and think, “Awesome! How do I skip the middleman and farm out the jobs to these guys?” First off, that’s mostly illegal. Second, do you honestly think those scammers are going to do a good job? They’ll just put your request into ChatGPT and hand over whatever comes out. If it doesn’t work, they won’t care. Then the person with the fake identity will make up excuses about being new or whatever. The manager will keep giving them chances, but they’ll just keep avoiding as much work as they can. By the time the company finally fires them, they’ve already made their $100k. ↩