How does your HR department handle the deluge of job applications? And how does that affect you as a hiring manager?
I just chatted online with someone currently hiring for a mid-level software engineer who received more than 2,000 applications. That’s ridiculous.
So (inspired by actual events), I’m writing a freelanced article, "Upending the hiring process for technical talent.” Although the topic applies to any job search situation, the story is tuned to software developers and other tech fields, and I expect both remote work and AI to be primary factors.
Getting thousands of applications is nuts for both the company and the applicants. My question is, "What — if anything — can be done to make the process more sane for everybody?"
I would love input from the wise people on Tildes. (Formal attribution is not required, but context is helpful for verisimilitude: "...says one program lead from a midwest insurance firm.") I know you have opinions. However, the HIVE MIND responses I care about should come from people who have been affected by this change – primarily HR professionals and tech industry hiring managers. My short (?) list of questions:
• How many job applications do you typically get today for a technical position such as a software engineer? How has that number changed?
• Are there differences in the applications? I’m open to anything from “remote work expanded the number of people who want to work here” to “They are impersonal and seem AI-generated” to… well, what? Tell me.
• How do you triage the applications (no / maybe / worth talking to)? How long does it take? For HR, what percentage of the applications are provided to the hiring managers? For hiring managers, how does that percentage make you feel?
• How have you changed job listings? For instance, are you asking for more information in the application process or including more detail in the job req? Are you employing tools that claim to sort responses? Are you offering salary transparency so that nobody wastes time when the numbers don’t align?
• What changes have you implemented in the job process? (Turning more to recruiters, for instance? Relying more on employee referrals?)
• Is “return to office” an issue here? (I would imagine that “local candidates only” would reduce the number of applications, but I don’t want to assume too much about any HR connection.)
• Regardless of what your company IS doing to deal with the job application deluge, what — if anything — do you think COULD be done to make the process more sane for everybody? What would you do if you could wave a magic wand to address the problem?
Inspired by the brown m&ms, I always clearly ask that they do something very simple but particular in the application. 95%+ do not, which indicates they didn’t actually read the job posting and weren’t actually specifically interested in the job — they were just mass submitting, so I ignore their application.
It hurts when you're hiring against the clock. No one follows the instructions and you have to sift through them all anyway.
I read a joke somewhere once, something about randomly throwing out 50% of applications to get rid of the unlucky people, and every time we have a hiring need I'm very tempted to act on it.
It’s also a provably non-discriminatory method to cutting down the pile to a manageable size.
Without doxxing yourself, would it be possible to give one or more examples of something you ask people to do? In the past months I'd probably generated hundreds of custom CVs (sometimes fully manually, sometimes semi-manually) based on job postings and I haven't seen such an example yet.
Sometimes it’s as simple as “you must email your resume with the term ‘attentive to detail’ in the subject line”. Sometimes I’ll ask that they recall a particular fact, like the second listed skill requirement. Really just about anything that shows they actually read to the end of the job posting.
Haha literally a captcha! great idea to weed out the
botsmass-appliers.Is it a role that’s sufficiently specialized/senior that it would make a difference whether they were specifically interested or just were carpet bombing the industry? Applying for need a job reasons is a spammy numbers game; it’s not until career growth moves (or delusional recent graduates hoping for a dream job) that applicants care for one company over another.
It also makes a difference if you’re small and can afford to be picky, vs a large corporation that needs to fill 100+ roles a month.
It’s more that they actually read the job description and possibly thought “yes, I am qualified for this”. I doubt most applicants have even seen the job posting — it’s automated or semi-automated submissions.
I guess my job posts are typically somewhat specialized in that they do have technical knowledge requirements.
Wow, that is genius.
For those unfamiliar with the brown M&M's: https://www.safetydimensions.com.au/van-halen/
I'm an independent IT consultant, so I work at a variety of small to medium-sized businesses. There are some commonalities with how HR handles applications. No one takes random submissions any more, and any that do arrive are /dev/nulled without a second thought. Some kind of simple gating (as in, answer four painfully basic questions first) gets rid of 95%+ of the submitters, and what makes it through it still almost all chaff.
Blatant lying on resumes (to be fair, partially in response to ridiculous requirements in the first place) has become so endemic that it's almost pointless to play requirements bingo when listing. There is nothing that can be automated that really works, as the rate of churn of the gamification meta is too rapid.
The reality is that back-channel recommendations, which have always been the way most people get jobs, have only become more important. Everything else is window dressing, and I am not engaging in hyperbole or exaggerating.
In this situation where referrals, recommendations, connections, etc, are so much more important than just a job application, to the point they might be a necessity for getting a job:
What’s a fresh graduate, with no industry connections, supposed to do to break into the field and land their first job?
@tachyon @rosco, since you both mentioned something similar in your comments, I’d appreciate your thoughts as well.
Leverage the connections you do have, and be open to not landing their exact desired industry right away. Which sounds an awful lot like have experience already, I know. But that is where friends, family, and extended social networks from college come in to play. By the time a fresh grad is ready to apply, they know people, who know people. Whether it's a connected friend from college who puts in a good word where they're heading, the friend of a parent, the friend of the manager at the college coffee shop job they had, a professor putting in a good word... there's going to be something available. They need to take it, and grow their network from there.
Perhaps in the case of a lucky fresh grad.
Success depends on getting help from other people. There is no way around this. Go to office hours. Talk to your professors and TAs. Go to internships and talk to people while you're there. Someone somewhere in this chain will be able and willing to help when the time comes.
I'm a natural introvert; learning how to do these things felt like pulling teeth, for a long time. Still needed to do it, because that's how the world works.
I graduated with a master's in 2021, so I don't strictly need the advice. All I can say is that it's situational. I moved abroad between my bachelor's and my master's, and it's a lot harder to make those connections in other countries (and that doesn't mean the connections are less important to getting hired, unfortunately).
It's good to call out. Unfortunately it's one of the "invisible" reasons why kids that come from wealthy families end up with better career trajectories - mom and pop usually have connections. Honestly we've been asked by our advisors multiple times if we would consider giving their kids or their friends kids an internship. We don't engage in that type of hiring though.
For normal folks, this is where working in labs or summer internships come in. I ended up getting my first job because a grad student who I had worked under was working at a company I was interested in and gave me an internal referral/recommendation. In other cases, their friends might have interned or worked at a company - this was the case from a former intern that happened to have a friend that was interested in working with us the following year.
I think even as an undergraduate there are opportunities with your friends, peers, and mentors (be it professors or grad students) to act as your network. If one of my former professors reached out on behalf of a candidate, I'd take the time to connect with them.
The last option is for the student to attempt connecting to ask for advice or mentorship. I have folks reach out pretty often, I think mostly because I have National Geographic on my resume, and they'll often ask for guidance on how to get into X career or ask questions about how Y space is changing. In those cases, if I like the person and think they could be capable, I'll often offer to connect them with other folks in industry. I don't think everyone responds to those kinds of emails, but if it's a student I always will.
Interesting. As a job seeker and previous hiring manager, I've found that referrals, lately, often seem to have little effect compared to the past two decades of hiring. I'd say that maybe 1 in 10 applications with a referral have netted me at least a recruiter interview. This may speak more to the diluted effect of damn near everything in the face of a thousand applicants per role.
Consider that applications without referrals are closer to 1:100 or worse!
I'll buy that. Essentially what I meant about "diluted effect".
450k+ unemployed over a fairly short span of time will have that effect. Causes me to wonder how much longer I'll be looking for a job that I can work while not feeling like a straight up wage-slave.
Sure, I'm not financially independent. But I hope to have e a job that I can at least be modestly engaged in beyond the scope of "pays the bills". Absent that, ADHD makes a job a form of torture.
I lead a small climate tech startup which ends up making me defacto hiring manager. I cannot wait until we're big enough for that not to be the case.
High level thoughts: There has been a pretty monumental shift in how difficult recruiting has gotten. There was a pointed difference from 2021-2024. We are getting much more qualified candidates now - I'm assuming due to the limp tech job market and maintain our remote positions - but we're also getting an absolute deluge of candidates - due to some combination of AI and desperation.
Specific answers to your questions:
In 2020 and 2021 we'd get 30-80 applications for most of our positions. Climate tech wasn't "hot" yet, so that may have been a factor, but the positions were pretty straight forward: frontend engineer, data scientist, etc. We had decent candidates, but folks you might expect to be applying for a startup with relatively low wages.
In 2023-2024 we get anywhere from 400 to over 1000 applications per position. The positions have become extremely niche: PhD Post Doc ML/Ecology, Data Scientists with experience in developing carbon and hydrology models, etc. For each position there are probably at most 20 people in the US that are actually qualified. And we do get that applying, but we also get everyone else and their mom applying. Separating the noise has become a much bigger issue.
As I said above, I think the poor job market has really inflated caliber of the folks applying. Other folks in the industry have expressed a similar feeling. Like many, many overly qualified folks applying for these positions. We also had an uptick in the number of cover letters we got - most seeming AI generated - so it's no longer a good indicator of someone being really interested in working with us.
We don't cast a wide net anymore. We only post to very niche job boards - industry specific (i.e. climatebase) or requirement specific (via academia list serves for post docs). Even then we get a deluge. Also, fuck Handshake. Their platform sucks. I'd say ~1% of applications actually moves forward to a review by our technical team, with me doing the initial reads and culling. Any more than that is a time suck. I'd say I spend 1-2 weeks hiring for each new position. As in 40-80 hours. It sucks.
We went through an accelerator with Google that helped us change the language in our posts to be more open and friendly. If you put hard limits (i.e. 5 years experience with X) we found that it deters more diverse candidates, and women most specifically. We don't want to end up with all Chads and Brads so that is important to us. We also always post salary. It's fucked up not to and I'm pretty sure it's illegal not to now.
Other than changing where we're posting to, we're looking for more in network referrals. It's nice to have someone suggested for a position even if it stinks of nepotism.
NA
I think you'd need to fix the job market. And the enshittification of all the job platforms. They are making it "easier" to apply and in doing so making it so much harder to get a job.
This thread is really discouraging as someone who was laid off and forced into the job hunt. I'm not even in the tech field, so my industry isn't as bad, but it's unbelievably frustrating knowing that half of my applications are basically being shredded without being looked at due to the sheer number of other people applying to the same job.
They don't review applications submitted through portals anymore. The job listings are posted online for legal reasons. They only rely on referrals now.
(EDIT: Sorry, guess this response is off-topic, but someone else recently telling me their experience and then my anxiety, and reading other posts here, caused me to rant about the absolutely asinine job market.)
Not sure what I'm going to do when I re-enter the job market in the future. I'm trying to postpone that as long as possible and give myself time to try to find other ways to make money and reduce my budget extensively, because I'm not looking forward to the job hunt process at all anymore.
No one calls back, your resume gets overlooked because of some technicality or some dingus that made a typo or decided to be overly zealous in their filtering, half of the companies don't behave in a way that i would ever want to work there anyway, requirements are ridiculous, pay sucks, and it's only worse now than it was 6-7 years ago when i did my last search. AI is making a mess of things. Job sites suck now too. There's a bunch of busywork BS you have to do (oh great, I upload my resume but then I still have to manually fill out a form that answers everything that my resume that I spent time working on answers? jesus christ).
Hoping I can just nope out of ever worrying about this again. I'm so cynical and jaded and done with the entire career landscape at this point. Maybe a reference from a prior job will get me somewhere, maybe not. Don't have any dreams or ambitions re: careers anymore. I just want out of the rat race altogether. I don't even care if I make a low amount of money now. Just want something bearable that will eventually cover my kept-small budget / living costs and just coast forever.
I know unemployed people with decades of experience in their fields that have been unemployed for years now and to this day, even after addressing things in their resume they thought might be getting them denied, they still get auto-denial after auto-denial. F the entire job landscape at this point.
Thinking about changing fields completely from what I have experience in and hoping I can land some union job that gives training for something I haven't done before and just go that route.
if you're american, I hear demand for tradesmen is higher them ever, and nets good salaries. maybe check those fields. I think the increasing availability of dirt-cheap qualified candidates from 3rd-world is contributing to what you're currently experiencing. 10K USD per year would net you some high-quality candidates from South America, Africa, and south-east Asia.
So Corporates, especially large ones with off-shore offices can skip hiring in the US entirely.
Yeah where I am moving to there are some union trade stuff like car chassis assembly etc, might be able to find a way into that or something else
If I get laid off now I think I'm going into trades. There should be some subsidies to tie me over and then the dream is to build my own house (??? Profit)
I'm glad someone is being deluged with applicants. I'm trying to hire for a website developer position and have received 40 applicants max over four months, many of them do not meet the requirements, so I end up with only a few who are even remotely qualified. Our HR department handles all of the publicizing of the job opening so I have no idea where they are posting it to, but it's not getting much response. Still looking.
As an unemployed web developer - what does this job look like?
This position would work with the website designer and the rest of the website team, to provide custom functionality for the new Modern Campus CMS we are implementing. It will involve programing in JavaScript, and working with XML and the Apache Velocity Engine. We need someone who can provide backend programing support in-house so we don't have to go to the vendor every time we want build something more complex than basic HTML and CSS.
This position would also help develop support and training for the website editors and content creators.
https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/sc/tridenttech/jobs/4476999/website-cms-analyst-it-business-analyst-i-2485-redvertising-previous-applican
Semi-relevant article from 404 Media about applying for jobs using an automated AI tool:
https://www.404media.co/i-applied-to-2-843-roles-the-rise-of-ai-powered-job-application-bots/
Applying for 17 jobs in an hour, some people leave it running 24/7 or overnight. And an AI tool like the one used in the article would potentially fool the “Brown M&Ms Test” (but likely be detectable as AI by an actual human reviewing the application. Probably less detectable if a company has their own automated tooling to review applications).
The future is bleak.