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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Yeah so job boards are as fake and gamed as the rest of the popular internet. Big surprise.

I wonder what the other side looks like. Do people using Indeed and other services to find employees get real applicants? Or is it mostly auto-generated garbage?

I'm imagining a world where nobody human actually uses these sites, it's all bots applying to scraped and auto-posted jobs.

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Of the thousands or so resumes I've received on Indeed, I have advanced maybe a dozen into an initial screening stage. The vast majority was basically spam - applicants with backgrounds that didn't match the job at all or new grad applicants for a posting that clearly stated we were looking for experienced candidates. Then there was the terrible auto-formatting that Indeed would apply to candidates' resumes, sometimes being so jumbled as to be illegible. It made it seem as if there was no one behind the submission checking to make sure their information was being sent correctly.

I realize this isn't exactly an earth shattering, but for the new grad applicants I think that's an understandable reaction to the way that job postings are written. Even when every listing isn't asking for the moon for an entry level positions, most job postings list so many desired skills that no one could actually be qualified.

Sometimes you see people with the complaints from the other side here.

It looks like recruiters filter the mass of fake applications, and only send real people to the companies. From those real people almost everybody is comically unprepared, and most attempts at filling a job fail.

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