His post on X said employees will receive an email “shortly” requesting to “understand what they got done last week.”
All federal government employees will have to share what they’ve been working on in the last week or face dismissal, Elon Musk said Saturday.
Musk posted on X that employees will be receiving an email “shortly” requesting to “understand what they got done last week.” A lack of response, Musk said, “will be taken as a resignation.” It’s unclear what legal authority, if any, Musk is relying on.
Ooooh malicious compliance idea:
Send the email and make it chock full of every acronym and industry terms you can think of. Make it as opaque as possible so only a technical expert can read it.
Include the entire dictionary in white single point font
And needlessly define the most obvious words while ignoring the tricky ones.
I wouldn’t do that. The burden of the proof to let someone go isn’t on the DOGE people. If they don’t feel convinced in whatever very-brief time they spend looking at someone that the person needs to be there, I expect that the DOGE people are liable to put them on the chopping block.
I’d treat it as a job interview. The interviewee has to convince the interviewer that they should work there, or else they aren’t going to be hired. Same thing here, just less-pleasant mood in the room.
If I were in the potentially-laid-off people’s shoes, I’d lead with a pretty concise summary of the important stuff that happens because of me doing my job, since I bet that the DOGE crowd isn’t spending a whole lot of time deeply looking at any of this.
Or just do what still tricks a lot of automated resume ingester/processor systems:
Write a small actual blurb, then throw buzzwords and basically SEO-but-for-resume terms in a hidden layer, in transparent text, shit like that.
Its been 10 years since the average resume got looked at for 3 seconds by a human.
I think that those are to filter out chaff resumes for people who have a skillset that has nothing to do with the job. I’ve never been in that “first line of filtering”, but I remember two people who were involved with deciding where to put our hiring resources at a company I was at talking about it next to me one day. They were expressing a lot of frustration that even when they hired headhunters to contact people and find relevant people, most of the resumes they got were from people with experience that just wasn’t very relevant to the job. Like, nine out of ten resumes got immediately dumped as soon as they went to our first-line filtering, weren’t relevant to the job.
IIRC their best return on time by a wide margin was from referrals. Like, if they have an employee who knows someone who would be a good hire at the company, they go talk to them (or just have that person contact the company and mention the referrer; they then pay a referral fee). They rarely got irrelevant resumes that way.
But if you are trying to dig through resumes, I could imagine someone training a classifier based on past successful hire resumes versus unsuccessful (or just filtered first-line) hires to try to do some of that “first stage” automatically, get the ratio of desirable resumes up.
In this case, though, my guess is that the DOGE people wouldn’t stand to gain much by doing automated filtering. Like, the people who are doing the jobs are already doing the job, so there’s no real question of them having a relevant skillset.
They look for keywords and phrases.
If you don’t have enough to reach a certain threshold, you insta-fail, and only get looked at if somehow all the people that pass it fail their first in person interviews.
This is why Indeed considers it a violation of their TOS to use an AI agent to autofill an application and/or write a custom resume and cover letter for each job:
Basically all you have to do is rephrase the job description into an application / resume format.
Nobody at HR nor most headhunters actually know anything about the words they are using, they just look for a match of buzzwords, relevant degrees, schools/unis that are highly ranked by some.other metric.
Everyone knows this whole process is bullshit, but to some extent pretends it isn’t so, which is why, as you mention, its all referrals, ie, nepotism.
It is not functionally possible to assess merit and aptitude with the current system. Merit means nothing, because anyone with a modicum of charisma can bullshit their way through a fluffed up, exagerated resume and interview for most positions.
What it can accurately assess is desperation.
Oh right, forgot to add in there the whole ‘ghost jobs’ behavior.
Here’s what you do:
List a bunch of job openings to make it look like your company is doing well, exoanding, growing.
In reality, you’re not hiring, or you are actually just promoting someone internally, but you’re legally required to pretend the position was open to anyone. Oops! All those resumes went to the trash, we waited 3 months, clearly our internal employee just outshined the entire job market.
This is why there has been a huge disconnect between the amount of job openings and actual hires since COVID, if not earlier.
Also makes the general macroeconomic indicators look better than they actually are, if you don’t bother to actually look at all the data… which most people who really should be, aren’t.