Here's one thing I'd say right off the bat: I applied to a role at OpenAI about eight months ago. I have a resume that, while certainly not the best, is definitely qualified for this role, and is entirely human written. I have not heard back, in the positive or negative. The job opening is still posted.
I suspect this is a common story in many companies, because I have been on the hiring side this year. At a small-ish startup, which no one has heard of (relatively speaking), we posted a new mid-level software engineering role on only our own job board; we never got to broadcasting it to linkedin or within our local networks because, within the first 24 hours we received 800 applications. Our aging CTO was blown away, wow there must be so many fantastic candidates we'll work all night to sort through these; and I had to break it to him, man, its AI. But, ok, let's remain hopeful.
- Using a combination of human might and HRIS AI tooling, we narrowed down the list down and started scheduling interviews. This was extremely expensive (person-hours + how expensive these HRIS tools are).
- Many (~30%) of the applications were ghosts. We'd email them back trying to get an interview scheduled, and get no response. In a few cases we got email delivery bounce-backs.
- But, after doing a handful of screening interviews, it became abundantly clear that many of the resumes were straight-up lies, not just concerning their depth of experience, but even the specific technologies ("Oh, I don't have much experience with React." "Your resume says you do..."). My leading theory is that there's some AI Job application tool out there which will both automatically apply to jobs for you, and generate a resume which is well-matched to the job description. A couple of the candidates seemed to be oblivious as to why their resume said what it said; but certainly if it were happening at scale most would have just lied about it.
We paused the process, as it was clear that even with our HR generalist and me trying to sort through the slop every day for a week we have no way to trust the applications that were coming in. Fortunately, around the time we started wondering what we'd do, an old buddy came across my radar as looking for a new role; he did one interview with the CTO, I vouched for him, we extended an offer, and its been a great hire.
The conclusion to this story: blind applications and blind job posts are dead. They do not work anymore. I had one former colleague tell me "I've applied to 800 jobs, I'm not finding anything, no one is even calling me back" yeah you're not adapting, my dude. The problem isn't the tech industry, its not the economy, its not you: its AI. I'm aware of one company in our local tech scene that won't even broadcast roles on the public internet anymore; we have private social networks in our 2nd tier US city that they exclusively share through. If you don't have a network; you're toast.
The new grads coming out of college are so fucked, its not funny, its not ok.