Employers, please use postmarked letters for job applications (2025)
soapstone.mradford.com
soapstone.mradford.com
In a world that increasingly resembles The Library of Babel,
- the main way to know what's true is to tune into news sources you trust (monolithic old school media, or personality driven new-school media, social media, etc.),
- the main way to learn what to watch/listen/read is to take recommendations from people you trust, or received through channels you trust,
- the main way to hire or get hired is, increasingly, by exploiting a network of people you trust.
All of this compensates for ambient oversaturation by using the best available (and tunable!) desaturation filter: your trust network.
Except none of this scales in the modern world beyond flat small orgs in homogenous high trust cultures, basically modern tribes.
If you're a large org with diverse people from everywhere and you empower everyone down the ladder to hire the people they trust, they'll just end up gaming the system or hiring their friends and family and the org fails from nepotism, corruption and cronyism.
It's not like we don't have enough examples of this happening everywhere in the world, and why most places have official hiring policies against this behavior, or policies to obfuscate connections from the hiring pipeline to make sure people get in exclusively on merit.
It's also why socialism is only financially viable in small homogeneous communities (like the Amish for example) where everyone adheres to the social contract of contributing to society more than they take out, and is kept accountable by the ingroup to be honest, but fails at a nation level where everyone including the government in charge of managing it tries to defraud it or game the system in their favor taking out more than they contribute, leading to constant budget deficit and ultimately collapse (see EU state pension systems)
But yes, fully eliminating nepotism and cronyism via rules and laws is nearly impossible due to human own-group bias, so networking will always be a huge asset.
Although I might know a solution, hear me out. I have fond memories of being part of this amazing private torrent tracker back in the day, that was 100% invite only, and the way the community was kept honest and accountable to the spirit and the rules, was that every person was responsible for the people they invite, so if their invites would commit a bannable offense, their parent who invited them would also got banned, meaning people would be very selective with their invites, biasing more towards meritocracy rather than nepotism or selling their invites online for cash which was common back then. Feels like something that could scale IRL as well. You hire your friend that turns out to be a shit employee, you're out the door along with him.
Nepotism is because ‘what is the point of doing all this’ - aka passing things on to family.
It also enables a degree of aligned interests between what could otherwise be hard to align parties (trust, like you mention), but that not why someone gets a big name acting slot, or gets put on the board of a friends company.
Nepotism entangles organizational interests with personal interests, in both good and bad ways. It means that someone may hire a friend or family member because they know they're a) competent enough for the job, and b) they actually, personally know them, which significantly reduces a risk of the hire turning out bad, relative to a stranger with equal or better credentials. But it also means that someone may hire a friend or family member because they're trading favors, which is bad for the organization[0].
I suppose in practice the latter might be more common - I'd guess it could be the whole idea has structural dynamics similar to "the market for lemons". I haven't spent much time thinking about it and researching the problem in depth, so I can't say.
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[0] - And may or may not be bad for the local community. I suppose the larger problem for organizations is simply that they're designed to be focused, and need to maintain alignment of incentives across the org chart. Nepotism is a threat because it attaches new edges to the org chart - edges that lead to much more complex and fuzzy graphs of family and community relationships, breaking the narrow focus that makes organizations work.
Unfortunately these have been bought up by billionaires that use them as play things to get richer.
>from people you trust,
In one particular area where they understand what is going on. I have lawyers I would trust with my life on legal matters, but should not be trusted around any digital device.
>y exploiting a network of people you trust.
agreed, but sucks for people that don't have that.
But I think it's a generational thing. The younger agents I know of just shut down all their submissions when they get overwhelmed, or they start requiring everyone to physically meet them at a conference first.
This stopped being a thing about 15 years ago though.
I still have some of those applications in a box somewhere.
If you want personalized human rejection letters to come back to you, then the hiring process would have to be equally friction based: i.e. mailing in notarized copies of documents and interviewing in person, for it to scale and not overwhelm a company's resources.
>I put some effort in to applying
Yeah but so did hundreds of other people. This worked in the world of 20+ years ago, but it doesn't scale anymore in the era of online applications where every job posting gets hundreds of applications within a week.
It doesn't matter if you put in more work in your application than the other 200 candidates who are doing "spray and pray", it's too much noise for humans to swift through with without some automated screening that might just as well drop you through the net because it can't tell the amount of work you put in, you're just a number in a queue.
However, when we wanted to hire a new Ops person at work, the flood of obviously not qualified at all applicants we got was insane.
Sad that things have gotten to this point.
From speaking to folks looking for jobs in tech over the past few years, this is a natural result.
1. Companies write requirements on the job posting that are a little beyond reasonable for the role and salary.
2. Applicants learn over time, and start applying to jobs for which they only meet most of the qualifications.
3. Companies adjust and write even more ridiculous requirements.
4. Applicants start applying to jobs for which they only meet some requirements.
5. Repeat.
As evidence that the applicants are, at every stage, correctly reacting to the situation: I have received positive responses (and, later, job offers) by applying to roles for which I am only mostly qualified, and I know many people for whom this is true of jobs they are only barely qualified for.
Over 40% were totally nonqualified. The job was for a rails engineer. In the current market, I wanted exactly what I asked for: a senior rails eng. But as long as the applicant had shipped a web app in a dynamic language -- node, react, vue, svelte, django, flask, phoenix, whatever the php folks use, etc -- it's not unreasonable to apply. That 40% had never shipped a webapp. Another 10% or more completely ignored the senior: many had < 1 year of experience.
I ended up using AI to filter because even 1 minute per is an entire 9 hour day. Engaging for 3 minutes per application is 3x that. And I can't be in a position where I spend effort while the applicant spent none: I assume the bulk of these were just mass applications.
A hiring manager throws away half the applications without looking at them. They don’t want to hire “unlucky” people.
Looks like the root point of the arms race.
But isn't that literally what you are paid for? Your job is to do the steps needed to hire someone and that includes reading through applicants. Why would the applicants -that are dojng this for free, for a promise of a posibility- need to put more effort than you?
Even fifteen years ago, I was getting advice from grizzled (programming industry) veterans of the form
If you match even half of what they're asking for, apply. Most of the time, those lists are put together by HR; and even if the list is completely accurate, they're never going to find anyone that meets all those requirements. The ad is asking for the *ideal* candidate. The smart companies know they're going to have to settle for less. Let *them* filter *you* out.
What are we even doing here?
It’s a Turing pattern generator. Inevitable results.
To fix it, employers could require applicants to include a random variant as part of their application. What parameters? Postage, as is being discussed. Attach a handwritten personal reference letter.
I once designed, built and sent — on my own initiative — a building facade model for an architecture job, but it was with Michael Graves, so I’m sure other applicants sent in entire villages. They were old school enough to send it back with the rejection letter.
You'd have to pay with no guarantee anyone will even read it, which even at a fairly low cost rapidly becomes an issue when you might have to apply to a lot of jobs.
Making the employer also pay might help, but I suspect then the employers will just wander over to another jobs site that promises free listings.
You'll likely see some listings with very specific and odd instructions to apply. I seem to recall there was a ruling/advisory that requiring application on paper doesn't actually meet the requirements for immigration, but it used to. You would see very detailed and specific requirements, and it would be cumbersome to apply, and the hiring company would be hoping that only the candidate they already knew would apply.
Maybe there is a dearth of talent, maybe it’s about control, maybe is someone trying to get a friend hired. I don’t think it’s about the money.
Control of the employee is a huge one.
When telling a US citizen they have to work 80s, the citizen can tell you to fuck off and leave for the weekend. The H1B debates the risk of their visa not getting renewed/revoked.
The second issue is a huge problem in some large companies. Instead of a branch being a random assortment of people based on merit it becomes a tight knit group based on loyalty to the person that got them hired with few actual interests in the company itself. These can become serious risks for companies as classism and racism very commonly occur. Also with everyone covering for everyone else fraud and other means of overcoming accounting controls is at higher risk of occurring.
I'll just start a business that mails letters to companies for you.
Now, an APPLICATION FEE, that's interesting. Hmm.
I'll just start a business that lends money to job applicants. Apply now, pay later (ANPL).
Instead, everyone expects there to be a magical unicorn out there who has decades of experience as a senior at multiple FAANGs but lives in Warm Spit, Missouri and is willing to work for the average Walmart wage in Warm Spit (locality adjustment, surely you understand why we must do this). Shrink your pool to your local area. Even if you allow remote work, require a physical interview at your office. Stop screwing up the process by worrying about edge cases involving unicorns flying across the globe to meet you. Once you stop chasing unicorns, most of the fraud goes away because it's the unicorn chute that's letting the fraudsters into the process.
But seriously, stop getting rid of good employees and stop refusing to build up employees from within. Very few are going to get hired away if you treat them well. The few who do leave will either be treated poorly at their new employer and want to return or be treated well, which means that employer isn't gaining some advantage over you by treating their employees lesser.
Of course, if you're just trying to get a bonus for cutting labor expenses a few percentage points before you parachute off to somewhere else, then you and the company that tolerates this both deserve to suffer. No doubt you'll both be at your congress critter's door to demand access to the global market because you believe skill is based on how little an employee is willing to accept in compensation. In a labor pool of over 150 million, no doubt it's true that you can't find anyone who knows React or Spring Boot.
I find handwriting physically painful and people feel the same about reading it.
I like this suggestion, but please don't practice some equivalent of phrenology to deny me a job.
All this does is increase the effort and barrier to entry to apply for a job. This is not a good thing. Applying to jobs is already time consuming as it is; nobody wants more hoops to jump through.
I understand that recruiters/hiring managers/whatever get a lot of junk applications, but frankly, it is your job to sort through them. You are paid to do this.
Could the hiring/job seeking process be better? Yes, absolutely. Currently, it's terrible, and almost everyone involved is making it worse. But the solution is not mailing job applications.
The reduction in what are essentially spam applications means your genuine application will stand out and be more likely to be considered.
Things that help employers find qualified candidates also help those qualified candidates.
Recruiters, hiring managers, and whatevers are humans too, with ordinary human limitations. Just because they are paid to do something doesn't mean they gain superhuman capabilities.
Even if I am a recruiter with nothing else to do, if I get 5k applications for a role each week, I won't individually review 5k applications in a week. It's not possible. So I will have to rely on some automated system that filters out most of those applications. Who knows how good that system is.
On the other hand, if I get 100 mail applications for a role each week, that I can review that.
I'm not in love with this proposal, but I definitely see the appeal. Adding a little cost/effort on the applicant side automatically filters out a ton of applicants that have not bothered to learn anything about the role or company.
In the past I've had success with adding things to the job description like: "please include a link to your favorite gif in your email." And that filters out about 95% of applicants who don't read the job description and don't have a gif link in their email. But with LLMs I imagine those kinds of filters work less well than before.
I don't mean to say that recruiters must/should review all applications, because indeed this is sometimes impossible. I'm just saying that, as a recruiter, your job is to review applications and you should therefore not be making things harder for the applicants.
Asking for someone's favourite GIF to filter out junk applications is a great idea. This does not detriment the applicant, and it makes the recruiter's job easier. This is good. Making all applications mail-in is not good, because it detriments the applicant (by way of costing significantly more time and some money), while also not solving some of the larger problems when it comes to the job application process.
But this isn't their job. Their job is to hire someone who passes the hiring bar. If they can do that without ever looking at a random resume everyone at the company is happy.
An unstated thesis of the article is that several years from now people who want to accomplish that job just won't look at resumes submitted online - whatever anyone's feelings about it.
The less nonsensical applications they get, the more time they can give your application.
> I understand that recruiters/hiring managers/whatever get a lot of junk applications, but frankly, it is your job to sort through them. You are paid to do this.
Indeed they are, and that is what they're doing by asking for a written application.
Have a lot of applications to send out? Subscribe to us monthly for $34.99/mo (billed annually).
My mother had insanely superb handwriting, in part because her mother pushed good penmanship on her. While I can be sloppy, it was for me a challenge when I was young to copy her perfect handwriting (not for forging signatures though!) Handwriting is influenced by which hand is dominant. I am left, she was right handed... so not exactly close :)
Its all in the profile - and we can all just swipe left/right instead.
Dysfunctional FAANG seeks 10X prompt engineer in hyderabad