> What bothers me more is there are talented people sitting on unemployment right now that can't find a job, yet fake people are getting hired left and right. Something in the industry as a whole is quite broken.
It IS "broken" by design as employers just don't want to go through the effort into finding great candidates (even if they are truly exceptional) and now it is even easier for candidates to cheat it thanks to AI.
The ones claiming to "fix" it aren't fixing anything and are making it worse for both the interviewer and the candidate and are just extracting money from the process.
I wouldn't necessarily say that employers don't want to put in the effort. They put in a lot of effort, but employers direct the effort towards the process rather than the results.
I've been through multiple rounds of interviews with some companies with no end in sight, as many people have. I refer to the endless number of interview rounds as an obsession with process because employers tend to think that the more they evaluate people, the better result they get, regardless of how useful the processes they subject applicants to are. I've generally found people to be going through motions more than anything else, and the additional process is just more work that is not particularly useful to evaluate the candidates. It's still a lot of effort for both the employer and applicants.
That said, I do agree wholeheartedly that they should direct their efforts more towards the result of hiring a good candidate rather than just falling back to blind devotion to some series of processes to weed people out. They should focus on getting the most meaningful bit of information at each round to eliminate the most candidates possible, kinda like a form of optimal experimental design [1] if you are familiar with that term.
Even at small startups, posting engineering jobs will get you hundreds of applications a day. There's simply no way for employers to fairly go through them.
LinkedIn et al make everything worse by making the application process so easy.
If you're a small company, the fix is to outsource the top of your funnel to a recruiting company you trust.
If you're a medium or large company, the fix is to require on-site work.
This isn't really a new problem. I remember back during a previous tech downturn, the small-ish (~200 people) no-name company I worked for also got hundreds of applications a day. Yes, today, fake candidates and AI make it worse, but fundamentally the "huge number of people in the top of the funnel" problem has been a thing for a long time.
> employers just don't want to go through the effort into finding great candidate
The notion that employers can put in the effort to give every candidate a totally fair shot so they can find the best ones is, I think, wrong, let alone the notion that they could but choose not to.
At my last company, we would have needed more people doing application reviews and interviews than we actually had employees if we wanted to do that.
Hell, I remember in college applying for a stock job at the local liquor store. When I went to hand in the application, I was told to put it on the pile- a stack of filled out applications thicker than several of my textbooks put together, suspiciously placed at the edge of a desk right next to a trash can.
> There's simply no way for employers to fairly go through them.
Sure there is. Randomly sample N, filter down to M, go through preliminary interview stages. Depending on how many that leaves you with rinse and repeat.
The important thing here isn't fairness from the perspective of the applicant. It's a process that works reliably for the company and doesn't unfairly waste applicant's time.
If the very first stage (application plus resume) is no longer a reliable signal then accept that fact and rework the process to match.
It IS "broken" by design as employers just don't want to go through the effort into finding great candidates (even if they are truly exceptional) and now it is even easier for candidates to cheat it thanks to AI.
The ones claiming to "fix" it aren't fixing anything and are making it worse for both the interviewer and the candidate and are just extracting money from the process.
The reality is, there is no fix.