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Comment by starik36 | Hacker News Reader

To all the naysayers here denying that an employment crisis for STEM graduates exists... I didn't believe it either until it happened to my kid. He is a top notch software developer, far better than I was at his age, problem solving comes naturally for him.

And yet, he can't even get an interview. He worked at Dropbox for a year as a contractor right out of school, until they did a huge layoff and hasn't been able to find anything in 6 months. Real interviews are super rare - most of it just recruiters fishing for stuff.

So that is the reality that he and his peers are facing.

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My experience is that there is an AI war going on right now. Employers are deluged with AI-augmented/generated resumes that make candidate seem perfect (but then they flop in an in-person interview), so employers are now filtering said AI-augmented resumes with AI to even determine who to advance in the pipeline. It's a viscous arms race and if you aren't playing the game it's really hard to get an "in" without knowing someone on the inside already.

Yes, I've seen that. But I am not sure how to even play this AI game. My kid is trying various methods but none of them are very successful.

If you're on here, there's a good chance you have more connections in the industry than you realize. The best way to avoid being AI-filtered is never have your resume get fed to the AI in the first place, which means applying through back channels.

Recommendations from trusted employees are valuable not out of nepotism or some other sinister force, they're valuable because it acts a pre-filter for the kinds of fuckups that no one would be willing to recommend.

Yep, market for lemons, sadly

Recruiting, as a whole, has been extremely harmed by technology and has therefore become an incredibly low-trust game.

There's only losers here. For companies, they can't find good candidates. They're inundated with fake resumes, even fake interviews. They're bombarded by bots.

For job seekers, they can't distinguish themselves. It's devolved into a sick numbers game. Want to get a job? Send the most applications. 100, 500, 1,000 - whatever it takes. 99% of jobs won't even so much as email you telling you you've been rejected. Just the logistics of keeping up with so many applications will eat the job seekers time.

Invest in airlines, job fairs are coming back.

Did he use an LLM to write the bullshit parts of his resumé? It's mandatory. Companies are running LLMs to look for a certain kind of bullshit and you're supposed to use an LLM to write it. I got more interviews after asking ChatGPT to write my "professional summary" saying I have a proven track record of building reliable applications with a strong understanding of software architecture, blah blah blah. Nobody mentioned this section, even the ones who wanted to talk about the rest of my resumé. But I got more interviews.

It’s the ATS more than anything

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