So I’ve gotten pretty good at applying for jobs having moved quite a bit and needing to change a few times in the past decade. Here’s my unsolicited advice for people getting sick of the application process (it sucks I know):
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Make sure your resume can be easily OCR’d. OCR, or optical character recognition, is how programs and machines convert image-formatted text into plain text. Sometimes it works pretty well, and sometimes it spits out a garbled mess of text. If you’ve ever done an application that auto-fills fields after you upload your resume, you probably have a good idea how readable your resume is by a computer. Like it or not, the first step for a lot of companies is to filter by OCR converted text fields, and if yours isn’t legible, you may be out of luck. Use a simple, consistent font and don’t do any special formatting. If you want a second “fancier” printed version of your resume for interviews, go for it.
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Fit your resume to a single page and highlight your skills at the top. You can change these from application to application if you want, and if you do, I suggest using verbiage from the job description because these are the keywords they’ll be looking for.
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You’ll probably see a few jobs that really seem like a great fit for companies you really want to work for. CALL THESE COMPANIES. Trust me, employers don’t love the hiring process either, and if they’re actively trying to fill a role and they get a call from someone interested, they’ll probably respond. They may just politely tell you to follow the standard process, but that’s really the worst case scenario. And even if they do, they’ll probably keep an eye out for your application.
It’s a job just to get a job. Damn.
Yeah it’s a lot of work and it sucks no matter what. Hopefully the tips I posted can make it a little quicker and easier for some!
Always has been.
Meh, I’d say it’s gotten significantly worse in the past 10 years
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Using this tool, you should submit many false but PERFECT UNICORN applications, flooding the system. As the interviews approach, obviously last minute cancel the others. If you booked an interview at all, you’ve improved your chances by generating multiple absents that would have been your competition.
Be sure to back these up with fake accounts and such.
That’s true chaos.
You had my attention but now you have my interest
Let’s go further.
Do voices. Wear costumes. ATTEND THE FAKE INTERVIEWS
Sir I wish to push the envelope. Dont do the voices. don’t wear costumes. ATTEND THE FAKE INTERVIEWS.
You’re hired
Do you perhaps have a newsletter I could sign up? Your advice is GOLD!
No but I think one of the other me’s does I’ll ask around
Make sure to have a friend dress as a crazy pharaoh for at least one of these
This is so evil lmao
As someone looking for a job, I fucking hate this. It is so annoying to hear HR people commenting that you should make sure to put a lot of effort into the jobs you are applying to and write a new cover letter tailored to each job. Bullshit. Maybe if you were not getting 300-500 applicants for your posting for a mid level position, I might consider it. There is zero possibility they are looking at more than a dozen out of the 100 that are qualified.
This is, of course, industry dependent. My wife was able to land a fairly decent job in her industry despite not meeting every qualification because there are simply not a lot of people in it. I’m in tech in Seattle where I have to contend with HR getting flooded with applicants which means they start looking for unicorns that somehow have experience in the combination of the dozen systems the job uses along with a decade of experience in them. I also have to contend with job postings getting canceled after applying, once while I was on the phone with the fucking recruiter.
My advice if you are in the tech industry is to work with recruiters. Eventually you will find one who is not shitty at their jobs.
As someone who had the wonderful experience to work with HR I can tell you that the bullshit they’re telling us is 100% an attempt to justify their own existence.
HR adds less than nothing to the entire recruiting process. They inflate requirements, they smash together templates so that the result makes no sense at all, they add buzzwords they think are important. If someone actually applies, they “filter” applications based on elaborate models of a coin toss, and during interviews, they want to make clear that they are, in fact, not useless by asking nonsensical questions.
In short, they are parasites and don’t want corporate to know.
I’ve got my current job via a recruiter and it was a super relaxed process. One video call of an hour or two with my (to be) team lead and his boss. Both of them were actual developers. HR was only involved for the formalities, as they should be.
I’m currently waiting to hear back on one that is being held up by HR unfortunately. I think they are essentially holding it open for a more diverse candidate which is understandable (the team is a bunch of white dudes) but kind of sucks.
Another one that annoyed me was a job I got rejected by that I saw get reposted. I actually emailed their HR along for some feedback and was surprised to get a response. They said the team was looking for someone with more enterprise level NOC experience. Guess what was not even mentioned in the job description?
One good thing that has happened in recent years though is that several states (including Washington lrequire postings to include the pay range so at the very least I can avoid an interview that would waste everyone’s time.
When I first did job hunting, companies used to actually write back to say no thanks. On paper.
Do you even get an email any more?
If you’re lucky. I think I still have a couple applications in an open status from 2015 that I never officially got rejected from. Still crossing my fingers on those ones. 🤞
I, uh…last time I put out feelers I got an offer for a position I was interested in rather quickly.
As in that was my sixth application.
The position before that I was at around 15.
I know I’m an outlier. This experience has made me wonder what’s different between myself, my situation, and my environment compared to others.
Are you in the Seattle area? Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Salesforce have all done pretty large layoffs in the area over the last year and a half. That has led to a ton more IT professionals in the area than there are openings so each opening has 100 applications at a minimum.
My previous job, I put in my resume for and while I did not get that position, they created one that also worked for me. My job before that, I had applied to a few jobs and the one I got I did not have all of the requirements but it was a fairly niche product so they did not expect to find anyone that checked all the boxes.
Currently basically just looking for a job that pays more than a nanny (>$35/hr which is significantly less than those two previous jobs). So if you have any suggestions in the Seattle area, I’m all ears.
Unfortunately I am not in Seattle. However, my universal recommendation in the U.S. is to begin networking. Go to where people still gather a little and socialize. Look up numbers for Front Desks and tell them that you are reaching out to get information on job opportunities - look up a company before contacting so you can actually hold a short conversation. Lie and say you were meeting a friend at a restaurant that actually exists down the street and had a few minutes and interest so you wanted to stop in. Be kind and if you can be personable and break through the small talk wall.
These are all things I did while working as an independent occupational specialist (lots more hats than just recruiting). While not a magical way to guarantee anything, you’d absolutely be surprised how often you can catch the ear of even CEOs using these tactics.
I doubt its HR people, it’s highly likely its employers.
If you don’t write the application for the job it’s going to be generic and b listed against the people who have written their applications for the job standing out far above yours. It shows you don’t have attention to detail and frankly don’t want the job. If an employer has 50 applicants (pretty low for tech) thats your competition.
TL;DR The harder you make it for an employer to justify hiring you the harder it is to get employment.
If I ever have to job seek again, I’m probably gonna just hand write my resume on a crumpled piece of notebook paper to make it stand out from the AI generated drivel.
I’m only sort of not joking.
I’m going to do the opposite. I’m going to get the AI to generate my resume and cover letter. If an AI is going to sort out which resumes are ‘good’ ones, I figure the ones written by an AI are going to be preferred.
That logic is sound, and I certainly can’t fault it, but personally, I refuse to use the problem to solve / deal with the problem. Call me stubborn (everyone else does lol), but I will not buy a solution from the same industry that created the problem. At most, I’ll let the “AI” fill out the unemployment forms for me lol.
If you write one half of the GAN to make resumes which always pass their AI screening, that’s proof you should be given whatever ML job they have.
Just feed the job posting straight into the resume generating AI. It’s bound to be a good match.
You’d run into a problem pretty quick once you get to the interview stage and they ask about your experience setting up cloud servers on the ISS or serving as an enforcer for the Dali Lama.
I had AI take a stab at revising my resume and it invented all kinds of things that sounded good but I could never back up or bullshit my way through.
I tried using ChatGPT to distill my LinkedIn profile down to a summary paragraph for a marketing resume (what gets included with a RFQ response when a design or engineering form is pursuing a project) and everything it spat out was worse than what I had already written and wasn’t happy with. Ultimately I lifted a phrase or two from ChatGPT’s output, but it didn’t do much to save me time or improve the quality of my copy.
Then train an AI on those and do it again. To distill it to its absolute pure AIssense.
In France you had to write your cover letter by hand, because they study your writing, the shape of letters, the height of your b and d, the loop, etc. They also with your DOB check some numerology and astrology too. You must include your picture too, it’s the first filter they apply, your face.
So in other words France produces 0 doctors?
In Canada, they put milk in bags
We’re not talking about getting jobs in 1300 ad
If you could write anything in 1300, you could probably get some sort of job.
Pfft yeah, if you ever got off the damned couch!
The conclusion was to rely on nepotism.
No it isn’t. The conclusion was to use networking. Nepotism is favoring your family members or favoring someone you are close to purely because of the closeness, not because of their skills. Networking is asking your friends if they know anyone hiring and then reaching out to them to apply. There might be a slight hint of nepotism in them listening to you at first, but networking is about building a relationship based on the work you have done in the past and using that to get new work.
Yup! Nepotism = getting a job because of who you are related to. Networking = Getting a job because people who know your work give you an advantage.
This one trick can make you a business success: Be born into wealth.
Have you tried not being poor tho. Then you won’t even need a job!
Are you sure it’s only money? Don’t you have to be a turbogenius to think up things as wildly complex as “books, but online,” “auctions, but online,” “campus social centers, but online,” and so on?
You’re behind the times. Now it’s “books, but AI,” “auctions, but AI,” “campus social centers, but AI” and so on.
Nepotism and other connections.
You’re just repeating what I said.
Nepotism is specifically family connections iirc
Is a friend of a friend who knows an editor nepotism? I thought nepotism meant hiring people you’re related to, or whose career you similarly have a vested interest in. Can your friend’s friend commit nepotism by recommending you to someone at a company they don’t work for?
Edit: Or, can the hiring manager commit nepotism by hiring someone they’ve never heard of before based on a tip from a coworker who heard about a potential hire from their friend? I didn’t originally mention this one because I felt like it was obviously no, but I guess it is more likely than the other question I asked since it’s actually about hiring.
No, that’s not nepotism.
120 jobs aren’t that many to apply for. I applied for 99 during my last job search granted it was over a few months but still. For an AI tool it should be much more
I hope this brings down the whole system as AI HR evaluates AI resumes.
Humans letting the bots fight it out isn’t much less arbitrary than what we have today.
Make it do 120 an hour for a week. Indeed and other job search apps with 1 click apply makes it easy for a regular person to apply to 120 different jobs in a day.
Reading the article, this went exactly as I imagined it would. Equal parts hilarious and horrifying!
So it’s pretty bad and barely works. And yet, I’m considering it.
Game the system buddy.
Aw dang, paywall.
Here’s a 12ft ladder for you
12ft.io/https://www.businessinsider.com/job-applications-hiring-ai-bots-spam-resume-cover-letter-2024-3
good bot
I’m human. At least I hope so 🤞
bad bot
01001001 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101 01110100 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101110 01100101 01111000 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 00100000 00111010 00101000
! binary2ascii
Paywall.
