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Comment by rachofsunshine | Hacker News Reader

The optimist in me hopes that this sort of thing kills resumes as a major communication channel for good. High-volume, low-signal, wildly-inflated-claims-as-the-norm structures have been devastating to good hiring, and I have some hope that as gen AI gets traction in job hunting that it'll take resumes from "low signal" to "no signal" enough to force a change.

The pessimist in me says that that just kills inbound entirely and we go back to an almost purely connections/network-driven hiring process because trust in anyone you don't know goes to zero.

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> The pessimist in me says that that just kills inbound entirely and we go back to an almost purely connections/network-driven hiring process because trust in anyone you don't know goes to zero.

What is the alternative; interviewing anybody who happens to apply? That is not feasible. Companies need a way to sort out the wheat from the chaff; they'll take any signal they can get.

> What is the alternative; interviewing anybody who happens to apply? That is not feasible. Companies need a way to sort out the wheat from the chaff; they'll take any signal they can get.

Connection. Every field will be as connection-based as politics.

And what if you are introvert or have social anxiety and not good at connecting to people? A lot of such people are very smart and exactly the type of people you would want to hire for some positions. Or what if you have a disability that makes it hard for you to travel and socialize? How about working remotely?

You will have a much harder time finding a job than people who don't share these traits.

I agree that they need a way to get signal. But resumes have never been a great way to get it - they just happen to be so cheap and every other signal so expensive at top-of-funnel that they've become the norm.

It's a vicious cycle. There's too much volume so we can't interview everyone, we can't interview everyone so candidates are incentivized to be spammy, so there's even more volume and we even more can't interview everyone. It's essentially the same reason that the old boomer "oh just walk in the door and hand them a resume" approach doesn't work anymore - it's too easy and therefore too spammy.

I used to be part of the leadership of one company working on this problem, and just founded another very recently, so it's something I've thought a lot about. I really think the thrust of the problem is:

* Signal is expensive to get, because

* The volume per candidate is too high

...and that the solution is to centralize early screening so you can get good signal. Which is what we're doing. Remains to be seen if it works, obviously.

IMO human recruiters and staffing agencies have done far worse than what AI could do.

My inbox used to be filled with 50+ resumes humans manipulated themselves - reviewing them for authenticity was hard and time consuming.

We make no claims to make this better. We claim to help the job seeker.

AI will indeed resolve dilemmas on all sides imo.

An output from the current state-of-the-"art" hallucinating models will be even more devastating.

What is a problem in editing your cv and simply being honest?

> we go back to an almost purely connections/network-driven hiring process

What if you don’t have friends? What if you are interviewer/not very social? Etc.

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