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Comment by billy99k | Hacker News Reader

Spray and pray is why it takes everyone longer to get hired. Companies have to sift through thousands of resumes of people that aren't qualified and shouldn't have applied in the first place.

Common advice on Reddit is also to lie about your experience.

The irony is that because of both of these, it takes longer to get a response and get through the interview process.

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Companies started this war when they laid off employees & began relying on applicant tracking systems (ATSes) to use algorithm-driven approaches to finding applicants well-suited to their open roles. Don't blame the people applying to jobs for also using AI to try and game the system in their favor.

Applicants lying on resumes does seem like it won't end well for them, even if it does mean they may get more initial callbacks from companies about open roles. But given how things are very much a numbers name right now, I also understand why an applicant would do it.

Exactly! So much of this is automated on their side already, as a job seeker you want to move as quickly as you can and automate as much as you can without resorting to lying or spam.

Sounds to me like these companies and those candidates deserve each other. I’d leave them to it.

Network. Talk to your friends and acquaintances. Go to meetups and talks, maybe even conferences. Speak to some recruiters. Find one who isn’t too full of shit.

Good advice except: my friends and acquaintances are either unemployed too or working for companies not hiring for my role/region. there are no meetups in my city and the conferences one can attend only happen a few times a year and sell out very quickly. And yes, I did speak to several recruiters and have probably spoken to dozens in my career. None have been useful in the end.

Given that, what is one to do? you can either quit tech and go work at whole foods, or you can try another tactic. That's what I did. And it actually landed me a perfect job that pays well and is aligned with my skill set.

Layoffs are not a new thing. The 80ies were already seeing the combination of recurring layoffs at the same time as a thick book of open positions - for the same companies. Layoffs were frequent, openings were plentiful.

Resume processing software indeed was a problem from the start, at first leading to resumes stuffed with BS keywords.

I feel that what are (somewhat) recent are (1) the brazenness of the whole process, combined with (2) the time-intensive-ness of the interview process. All the way to different people applying and showing up for the job. That is new. Hundreds of responses for each and every job posting, that is recent. Just the lid on the coffin of a process that has been breaking for a while.

Sending out lots of (literal) letters into the ether was certainly a thing out of engineering grad school in the early 80s. But other than on-campus interviews, there weren't a lot of options. And it actually worked.

But it did require some physical effort. I can imagine today the automation of everything makes similar approaches difficult.

Game theory says if everyone else is spraying and praying, i miss out if i don't do the same. Spray and pray is not my choice, i'd rather apply to a handful of jobs and that be enough.

I also discourage lying on your resume that's just a genuine waste of everyone's time.

Yeah lying or excessively padding one's resume is likely just going to bite one in the ass if they do actually get an interview.

My current hurdle though is soft skills related, rather than technical. I'm not the most social or outgoing person in the world, I'm there to do my job, not be everyone's best friend. However sadly the vast majority of my recent experience has been in support, so those are the types of positions i've been applying for and the interviews i'm getting are 90% behavioral questions, which I feel I do horribly on regardless of how much I prep.

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