Comment by dvcoolarun

I felt the same way until I saw a friend (engineer not a recruiter) post an opening for a hybrid job on LinkedIn. There were literally 100s of comments from people who didn't even live in the same country. Not to point fingers but they were all from India, had the same rhetoric and the few I clicked on didn't seem qualified.

I am not blaming anyone, I can imagine making >100k in India enables you to take care of your whole family. At the same time do you really expect companies to treat applicants with as much care when they have gone from ~100 applicants per job to several thousand?

I posted jobs in the monthly thread a few times. I tried to respond to everyone who seemed real and then schedule at least a phone intro and screen. Some observations from the other side that might help applicants increase their response rate:

1. The majority of application emails I received obviously had not read the job description. They applied with a resume that didn’t have any relevant experience or, if they had experience, didn’t explain it in the resume. If you’re applying to a job, send a resume that shows why your experience is good for the job you’re applying for.

2. Check your email. I would say that most of the people I responded to either never followed up or waited weeks to respond. Of those who scheduled calls, many were no shows. This no-show rate was higher on HN than for my other job postings.

3. Make it easy for the hiring manager to believe you’re a real person and you are who you say you are. This will make some people angry, but when hiring remote you get a lot of scam applicants, overemployed people, and I even know one friend whose company accidentally hired two North Korean people pretending to live in the US. Do yourself a favor and make it easy to believe you’re real. Spend 30 minutes making a LinkedIn profile and updating it right before your job search (and then never check the site again if you prefer). Make sure your resume states the same location you tell the hiring manager. Use the same phone number everywhere. Make it easy to verify past employment even if you have to do a little extra work. There are so many scam applicants that you can easily get filtered out if something looks a little bit off.

4. Do not submit an AI resume and AI application letter! Hiring managers see these all day long and can recognize them. Do not fall prey to the social media wisdom that nobody reads your resume or that you need to use AI to write it because AI will read it. These AI written resumes are exactly what all those scam applicants use and it makes you hard to differentiate.

Speaking from experience, I get hundreds of of applications per month. 90%+ of them are either templated or less than 20 words. 50%+ of them have no indication they even read the job post, applying for technologies or positions not included in the job posting, or containing no indication of who or what they’re applying for, let alone why they are interested or would be a good fit.

I write all my responses by hand, that’s just how I like to do things. If it is going to take me longer to write the rejection than the applicant spent on the application, I’m not going to do it. It would be unmaintainable to keep up with, and it’s hard to feel that someone deserves a few minutes of my time because they copy pasted an email address (if that).

I can’t speak for everyone’s practices, but genuine applications with effort put in are met with the same level of effort in the response. I’ve interviewed dozens of people solely on their level of effort put into the application (as opposed to the content of their resume). I’d rather spend an hour interviewing a bad fit that cares than responding to 20 people who couldn’t even name the company they applied to.

I think those struggling would find better luck with quality over quantity wrt applications. It takes shockingly little to stand out from the flood of applications you get on here. Including things like the name of the company, why you’re interested, and why you’d be a good fit are exceedingly rare (and imho the bare minimum for an application). If you can convey even a modicum of excitement or competence, it basically guarantees you at least a response, if not an interview.

Also, I’ve never responded to an AI generated application. That is not a solution, as it’s impossible to tell whether you’ve even seen the job ad or just signed up for some service. If you’re a non-native speaker, don’t worry about grammatical errors. If you’re really concerned and must use it, disclose your use of it if you want any hopes of a response

Just my two cents from the other side of the conversation.

It would be nice to have minimum standards for being allowed to post for things like you mention. Identification of violations and enforcement is, of course, the challenge.

This is already in the post

  Please only post if you are actively filling a position and are committed to responding to applicants.

https://chatgpt.com/s/m_692dd7066a048191a44585b69b99f806

Most job openings are receiving several hundred, if not thousands, of resumes as soon as they're posted thanks to AI powered resume mills. Most resumes don't even get reviewed, let alone acknowledged. It's basically impossible to keep up with. Recruiters aren't ignoring people because they're cruel, they are being drowned by AI slop and resume mills.

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