Presumably the entire process was automated; I’m assuming if they’re using text-to-speech, the selection and initial email was all AI.
It’s an arms race on both sides.
This is admittedly unfair to outsiders, but if you talk to someone, there's a high reputational pressure that assures you're dealing with a real person who's likely a decent match for the job/applicant. This is valuable precisely because there's high friction and doesn't scale.
Past collaborators are also a great source but she is junior and doesn’t really have any she can leverage.
My initial advice to her was do some real projects, document her work and insights in a blog and engage with others on social media but that’s mostly screaming into a void.
My approach to hiring is to focus on competencies (what do I need them to accomplish) rather than skills (how many years of JS) but that doesn’t cut down on the number of applicants any, just makes initial eval a little easier. I was pondering the idea of leaning in more on AI to screen on competencies which might incentivize higher information density on resumes but the quality of that eval might not actually be any better and only increase the “black box”-ness of it all.
If you’re in an American city, go to cafes and bars. Be the annoying person who asks what someone does and persist. It’s absolutely annoying. But I’ll also always follow up on it, because that skill in itself is differentiating.
It seems to be a class-based social more. Among the rich and upper-middle class, approaching someone to introduce yourself isn't unfavourable. If anything, it's seen as a right and children are taught to do it. Among the lower classes it's seen as uncouthe.
You see it strikingly at e.g. birthday parties and galas. (Particularly in the U.K., Western and Southern Europe. Though there, unfortunately, such cold introductions usually aren't enough to cross the barrier. Hence my qualification for this only working in American cities. Also Nordic countries. It even extends to the design of social spaces, with private clubs and even elite airline lounges having chairs face each other while tables at fast food places are more isolated.)
Both parties are making short term sacrifices in hopes of finding a mutually beneficial relationship.
I've had more success sharing financial models on printed paper, than on working on code for free, building plugins and the like.
In my experience, the AI-vs-AI hiring battle takes place in parallel to normal hiring pipelines. Even before ChatGPT went mainstream, recruiting for key roles was largely happening via referrals or scraping LinkedIn for people at target companies.
When I posted jobs (for a moderately well known company name) on public job boards, we'd get 1000s of applications within the first week long before people were using ChatGPT to fill out applications. The majority of the submissions were absolute junk: People spamming their resume to every job out there, resumes from people completely unqualified (like tech support people applying for Staff Software Engineer roles), or mad-libs style resumes where people threw word salad into a PDF while forgetting to tell me what they actually did ("spearheaded initiative to reach across the company and leverage synergies, increasing company revenue by 23%")
It has been like this for a long time. ChatGPT only seems to have emboldened more people to switch to spamming resumes and sending vacuous applications everywhere.
The best part is that she already interviewed there a while back. She got a backend interview and didn’t pass (she’s primarily frontend); not a big deal but she gets a message from a new recruiter about every 2-3 months about the same role. This time it was just AI doing it.
It's incredibly annoying