It’s always a joy having two resumes. First, all my real qualifications. Second, good enough to be a janitor if need be.
This would explain my current experience. I lost my job in the middle of October to a round of layoffs and have been submitting resumes or applications to at least 2 places every day. Out of roughly 82 applications, I’ve had two interviews and neither of them called back (one actually said they’d let me know regardless of their choice).
I’m not being picky, either, as I’m submitting for everything from line cook to systems analyst. I’ve even utilized professional consultants to help me create resumes for just about every industry my skill set could apply to. It’s beyond discouraging.
It’s hard to take these all these policy wonk shitheads seriously when they claim no one wants to work when I’m over here banging on the window and fogging it with my pleas for employment.
The “nobody wants to work” myth businesses float around just about every year. It turns out the reality is people don’t want to work for shit wages.
Here’s a fun history of their whinging: https://thunderdungeon.com/2024/07/14/nobody-wants-to-work-anymore/
It turns out the reality is people don’t want to work for shit wages.
Companies also used it in the wake of the pandemic to justify running skeleton crews. Why hire more workers, when you can just give more work to your existing workers for no extra pay? If they complain, just fire a few of the loudest ones to make a point and keep the rest in line.
Really appreciated all the return to work mandates in spite of all evidence that it was better for workers’ lives. I ha e to provide a business reason for just about anything, yet there is no reasoning even attempted when the choice is between worker well being and company dominance of the will.
Rent goes up while wages don’t and nepotism is more valuable than competence.
“No one wants to work” fuck off, no one wants to trudge, plenty of people have drive to get shit done absent the Damocles sword of capitalism.
Job listings are far less likely to be fake if they are posted on the companies own website. They can outsource deceptive shit to LinkedIn and all those shitty websites because they cover liability and fraud for them.
Some companies even have you send resumes directly to a hiring managers real email, shockingly. Anyways thats all to say that you might have better luck applying directly.
From the other side, hiring competent people has gotten much harder with AI in the hands of people. Its making them dumb.
A coworker and I were interviewing someone for a technical role over a video meeting that we did NOT get through our network. His answers were strangely generic. We’d ask him a direct question about a technology or a software tool and the answer would come back like a sales brochure. I message my co-worker on the side about this strangeness, and he said “We’re not hiring this guy. Watch his eyes. Ever time you ask a question, he’s reading off the bottom of his screen.” My coworker was right. I saw it immediately after he pointed it out. We were only 4 minutes into the interview and we already knew we weren’t hiring this guy. I learned later about LLMs that you can run while being interviewed that will answer questions your in real time.
Another one happened within 48 hours of that interview. Someone that had been hired was on a team with me. An error came up in a software tool that we are all supposed to be experts on. I had a pretty good idea what the issue was from the error message text. This other team member posted into our chat what ChatGPT had thought of the error. In the first sentence of the ChatGPT message I immediately could tell that it was the wrong path. It referenced different methods our tool doesn’t even use.
To translate it with an analogy, assume we’re baking a cake and it came out too sour. The ChatGPT message said essentially “this happens when you put too much lemon juice in. Bake the cake and use less lemon juice next time” Sure, that would be a reasonably decent answer…except our cake had no lemon juice in it. So obviously any suggestions to fix our situation with altering the amount of lemon juice is completely wrong. This team member, presented this message and said “I think we should follow this instruction”. I was completely confused because he’s supposed to be an expert on our tool like I am, and he didn’t even pause to consider what ChatGPT said before he accepted it as fact. It would be one thing to plug the error message into ChatGPT to see what it said, but to then take that output and recommend following it without any critical thinking was insane to me.
AI can be a useful tool, but it can’t be a complete substitute for thinking on your own as people are using it as today. AI is making people stupid.
This is why I generally hire from inside my network or from referrals of those I know. Its so hard to find a qualified worker among all the other unqualified workers all applying at the same time. I know there are great workers not in my network, I just have no way to find them with the time and resources I have available to me.
, he’s reading off the bottom of his screen.
Aw fuck.
I’m gonna have to ask absolutely bullshit questions in interviews now, aren’t I? Do you have any other strategies for how to spot this? I really don’t want to drag in remote exam-taking software to invade the applicant’s system in order to be assured no other tools are in play.
I’m not in a hiring position, but my take would be to throw in unrelated tools as a question. E.g. “how would you use powershell in this html to improve browser performance?” A human would go what the fuck? A llm will confidently make shit up.
I’d probably immediately follow that with a comment to lower the interviewee’s blood pressure like, ‘you wouldn’t believe how many people try to answer that question with a llm’. A solid hire might actually come up with something, but you should be able to tell from their delivery if they are just reading llm output or are inspired by the question.
It’s a fine line to walk, but I see what you’re getting at here. I wouldn’t want to come across as incompetent either, lest it reflect on the company. Your follow-up remark is brilliant. Delivery is everything, I suppose.
Be careful tho because if you ask that with enough confidence I would think I am in the wrong.
"Powershell had OOP without me knowing for a few years so maybe it has hidden html usage too. "
That was my body language cue. An ‘umm… 😅’ answer is a pass, as well as any attempt to actually integrate disparate tools that doesn’t sound like it’s being read. The creased eyebrows, hesitation, wtf face, etc is the proof that the interviewee has domain knowledge and knows the question is wrong.
I do think the tools need to be tailored to the position. My example may not have been the best. I’m not a professional front end developer, but that was my theoretical job for the interviewee.
I wonder if AI seeding would work for this.
Like: come up with an error condition or a specific scenario that doesn’t/can’t work in real life. Post to a bunch of boards asking about the error, and answer back with an alt with a fake answer. You could even make the answer something obviously off like:
- ssh to the affected machine
- sudo to the root user: sudo -ks root
- Edit HKLM/system/current/32nodestatus, and create a DWORD with value 34057
Make sure to thank yourself with “hey that worked!” with the original account
After a bit, those answers should get digested and probably show up in searches and AI results, but given that they’re bullshit they’re a good flag for cheaters
There’s stuff out there now about how to poison content scrapers that are training AI, so this is absolutely doable on some scale. There are already what I like to call “golden tokens” that produce freaky reliable and stable results every time, and so I think it likely there are counterparts that trigger reliably bad output too. They’re just not documented yet.
In a sane world, commercial AI would have legally required watermarks and other quirks that give content away as artificial, every time. Em-dash is probably the closest we have to this right now for text, and likewise for the occasional impossible backdrop or extra fingers on images. You can’t stop a lone ranger with a home-rolled or Chinese model, but it would be a start.
Don’t have the source on me now, but I read an article that showed it was surprisingly easy. Like 0.01% of content had his magic words, and that was enough to trigger it.
I’ve never used AI for interview stuff, beyond a little thing that gave me sample questions and assessed my recorded verbal response, to use as prep before an interview, but in reading that, I remembered that Nvidia has a thing where a visual effect will make your eyes look like you’re looking straight into the camera all the time (unless they’re totally closed of course), and imagined this type of person using that as further subterfuge during the interview, to conceal the ‘looking down’.
Luckily, the average person leaning completely on AI for an interview is not nearly savvy enough for this sort of thing, in my experience.
Literally include “Can you name four basic SQL commands?” any time I interview someone and it’s a great litmus test.
I’m a software engineer with 15+ years of experience and this question had me stumped.
Select insert update delete?
Create alter drop rollback?
Or did you mean types of commands? But of those there are 5?
Or is that question supposed to get garbage response?
God it’s late.
I appreciate the use of a good old-fashioned shibboleth like this. Thanks.
I’m not following, wouldn’t an LLM be able to easily answer that one?
knowing absolutely nothing about this topic, i would assume an actual competent person would be able to answer them immediately and confidently, someone reading an LLM prompt is probably sounds like they’re reading from a script even if the answers arent wrong
i would assume an actual competent person would be able to answer them immediately and confidently,
People aren’t always able to regurgitate encyclopedic knowledge in interviews. Sure some can, but many have anxiety about interviews in general, or stuff going on in their lives which can make them not the sharpest when hit with a rando question like this. There are some absolutely brilliant people I’ve hired that would fail miserably if this was how they were measured.
Some people work better with scenario based questions instead of bulleted memorized answers. Honestly, I’d much rather have a candidate that knows the concept being discussed even if they can’t remember the exact name of a term or the name of a flag they’d need to include when issuing a command. Those last things can be googled in the moment. Conceptual knowledge and understanding is much more important to me than wrote memorization.
someone reading an LLM prompt is probably sounds like they’re reading from a script even if the answers arent wrong
Well, thats what I experienced from my original post, but I’m not sure it will always be that. Someone more clever could take the answer from the LLM and paraphrase it, or put it in their own words and sound competent.
Not in an in person interview
“June 2025 BLS data reveals dramatic differences in the percentage of ghost jobs across industries: Government roles: 60% Education and health services: 50% Information: 48% Finance: 44% Leisure and hospitality: 2% Construction: -44% (more hires than openings)”
leisure, hospitality, and construction . You’ll find a job as long as you’ve got a pulse. -That checks out.
Nothing quite crushes the soul like customizing a resume and cover letter for a job at a company, getting turned down via form letter, then see that same job listing posted a week or two later.
Except having every company in town do it to you.
For over two years.
You get rejection letters?
Ok, emails mostly. I have received a few letters though! Public service employers can be old fashioned that way.
Semantics aside, my point is that you’re even getting responses at all
In Canada JobBank can have employers request that you apply to their posting.
Nothing crushes your soul like receiving a request to apply for a position, customizing your resume and cover letter, and never hearing a thing. Then repeating that process for months.
You must live in my town because I’m dealing with the same bullshit.
I suspect this is going on in some Oklahoma school districts - I believe that some districts are actively trying to hire uncertified candidates. There is a drastic shortage, but many districts are surprisingly “choosy” - almost intentionally seeking the ability to claim they couldn’t find someone so they can “emergency certify” someone who won’t question orders/join unions.
There’s just something off, and the state is corrupt as all hell.
YES! Oh my god I just started in the putnam school district last year as a TA I have no formal education, practically no fucking qualifications, but bc my moms a speech path they hired me on the spot, and since my old favorite teacher is in admin and suddenly im about to be systems controller. Freaking bizarre
Because job listings are something investors look for.
Should be illegal to do that
the statistic was around like what, of 100 applications, a quarter will likely reject you, and like 5% will actually respond back with an interview to some extent. the rest will ghost you.
But employees start ghosting them and it’s the end of the world.
I mean, i always print out all applications, randomize them and throw half in the trash.
Who wants to work with unlucky people…
/s
Until your company does this paperless, I’m out. Who wants to work for wasteful companies? 🙃
This is why it’s more important to network and have a good work reputation. 70% of job hires is through networking. It makes sense because from employer’s perspective, there is a higher chance that the person recommended is reliable than the candidate who hasn’t been heard of before. It corroborates my own experience as a jobseeker before. A couple of the best jobs I have had was through connections.
Which is all fine and dandy for those with great social skills or who’ve stayed in the same place long term.
Many jobs have no social requirement, and shy, anxious people may be greatly suited for those roles. But they can’t get them because they are shit at networking.
Same goes for someone who’s moved to a new town, they may have a great CV with a huge skillset but they don’t know anyone so who do they network with?
Your solution boils down to, those who are extroverted or connected can survive while everyone else must be desolate. It’s shite and very easily leads to nepotism and corruption.
I’m not even shy. I go to parties where I don’t know anyone, on my own, and have a good time.
I still don’t particularly network, mostly because there’s not really opportunity to. I have clients, which means I have about 20ish people who I work with outside my org, but it’s unlikely they’ll ever offer me a job.
Yeah I like meeting and hanging out with people who are cool and chill.
But people who network are cringe.
I was going to mention this in my original comment, but I thought I would do so if someone mention the introvert vs extrovert personalities in jobs.
There is no other way of gently putting it, but if you are an introvert, you just have to suck it up. The job won’t come to you. You just have to fake it till you make it until you get a job. Or, while at work, be good and professional enough that you will get good reputation. You don’t have to be best buddies with the boss or coworkers outside of work.
That’s a good point you raised about if someone just moved to a new city. All I could say is that this is why it’s important to secure a job first, before moving to a new city or town, if the person could. But if you moved to a new environment and have been job searching, there are job fairs you could attend. Again, this is where “fake it till you make it” works again; tell the employer that the company is your dream job and all that jazz. And ask how you could apply for the role etc. This worked for me but before I moved out to the new city I am in now.
It’s not necessarily nepotism or cronyism but some places are indeed more corrupt in this regard. I have seen it in my previous company where there is a middle manager, whose position is unnecessary and just annoy the grunt workers. But for the most part, I don’t really see much cronyism and nepotism, although I guess it is because I am not up high in the career ladder yet to witness behind the scenes corruption.
So, what you’re saying is, the world is built for people who are good at superficial performances?
I guess I’ll just have to accept my fate as a highly skilled, highly valued individual who doesn’t need to perform a circus act to be taken seriously.
Yup, pretty much. Merit still matters more, but confidence matters just as much. And look, put yourself in the employer’s shoes, if the candidate is slouching, jittery and looks underconfident, what would you think of that candidate? Would you feel hiring that person? Would he be able to handle stress and unforeseen circumstances if he’s this nervous? Everyone has to fake it until they make it. Lemmy rightfully criticise the system, but truth of the matter is that we’re still reliant to having jobs to feed ourselves. It’s important to recognise what’s in one’s control and what’s not. We can’t control the world, but we can control how we respond to it.
That may be the reality, but it doesn’t/shouldn’t have to be.
If you mean networking sounds like nepotism or cronyism, it’s not really if a company do its best to have set rules and grade the interview candidates with set objective criteria. Not all companies are like that though.
What’s the alternative?
DEI. The whole point is to make the hiring process blind to everything about the hire that isn’t relevant to the job. It could be a lack of social skills, disabilities, being a minority, or a history of weed usage - all shouldn’t be issues for an employer to know nor care about.
All hiring postings and transactions should be done through a platform operated by the government, to weed out ghost jobs and to prevent employers from having unwarranted bias.
Hiring based on merit?
Define the metrics for hiring based on merit.
My job hunting experience may be quite atypical then, as I’ve gotten about 50% of the jobs I’ve applied for. It’s probably a lot easier since I work in the trades. I can just email a handful of local companies even if they’re not actively hiring, and a few will probably call me back.
Thanks for sharing.
I think my experience has been the opposite. Last time I got a job I applied for was 2005. Granted, I was with that company for 14 years, but since 2019, literally every job I have gotten (4 at this point) has been because recruiters reached out to me, while probably 95% of jobs I proactively applied for never even bothered to interview me. I’ve even seen job listings I applied for expire and get relisted without them even talking to me, which felt utterly humiliating.
It’s weird, simultaneously being in-demand enough that people reach out to offer jobs to me out of the blue, but at the same time being unable to even get an interview on my own. Really makes me think this phantom jobs thing is true.
After I was laid off in February due to Musk and his bullshit, I submitted several hundred applications to jobs I was very qualified for, and provided multiple letters of recommendation from the owners of my previous jobs.
Of all the jobs I applied for, only one of them moved me to stage 1 of the hiring process which was a questionnaire. Never heard back.
Ended up having to get a physical labor job at the business my wife worked at until an entry level position opened up, and probably only got the interview because she worked there.
its been this way since 2015ish. notice only 1 employer was like half all listing in my field in my area, and they never ever respond at all, looking at thier job listings, yup. it was a famous UC in my area,hint hint. they have been known to outsource certain positions. and i think they put out fake listing through thier own page, and other sites to make it look like they are hiring alot. they made Kaiser look like a saint around wage/hiring.
and the other half just as many ghost listing, or we looked for some else,or some other excuse. they almost never go for “FOB” graduates. hence why my field has a somewhat moderate unemployment rate, minus health industry hirings.
Hey now, there’s no reason both things can’t be true.
