> Google, McKinsey, and other companies have responded by reintroducing in-person interviews for some candidates, a meaningful step backward in efficiency (due to travel time and costs) that signals how seriously they are treating this problem.

Maybe the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" at all costs has broken the world?

I remember when I applied for my first job. I got dressed up and my mom drove me to the interview because I didn't have a driver's license or car at the time. It wasn't "efficient" for me and I suppose it wasn't "efficient" for the company but much to my surprise, I got an offer and that was my first "tech job"...before tech jobs were cool.

It's very strange that the authors talk about how "making a bad hire is terribly expensive" but then call out "travel time and costs". Well, if B < A for each role filled, is it really so bad?

And yeah, I get that huge companies like Google and Facebook hire from around the world and not everyone is located in close proximity to Mountain View and Palo Alto, but that speaks more to the oligopolistic world we're living in than anything else.

If a small number of companies weren't distorting the labor markets, this might matter less.

> “There is a growing gap between the candidate’s written persona and their live presence. I’ll see a cover letter that is poetic and a résumé that is flawlessly structured, but then the person on the video call struggles to explain their own bullet points.

This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”.

I can remember a few interviews where I asked candidates about something I read on their resume (which I study before every call) and they corrected me to explain that they did something different. Then I held up their resume and pointed to their exact words and they turned bright red while they tried to come up with a new explanation.

That was rare, though. You could catch a lot of little cases of stretching the truth, but it wasn’t common to feel like you were reading a resume that didn’t match the candidate.

What has changed in the age of AI is that more people are feeling more brazen about letting the AI speak for them. These situations are happening more frequently. You get the feeling that people are less shy about trying to cheat and manipulate because it feels like the AI is doing the cheating and writing the words, so it’s done at arm’s length.

I spend some time helping with resume reviews occasionally. It’s getting sad to see in the general discussion of the group when people go from elated that they got an interview for their dream job to embarrassed when the interviewers saw right through their AI written resume and ended the hiring cycle. I wonder if we’re seeing a peak in AI resume junk while everyone tries it out, but before it becomes common knowledge that an AI junk resume is a way to shoot yourself in the foot when applying to companies you actually want to work for.

Good hiring almost certainly has to be a significant competitive advantage.

It makes me wonder why so many otherwise successful companies let HR bungle the hiring process.

I was walking through a startup neighborhood in San Francisco the other day and I encountered several telephone poles which were posted with advertisements for software engineering jobs. These were not generic or scam advertisements. This was a particular startup, looking for software engineers. What is old is new again.

> When the earliest filters in your hiring process stop working, your organization begins to systematically select for candidates who are best at performing the hiring process, rather than those best equipped to do the job.

Isn't "performing the hiring process" theatre what Big Tech hiring has been demanding for ~20 years?

And gifted to most smaller companies? (Because people already knew Google frat-hazing student style interviews, from their own interview prep, to try to get into a FAANG, so they mimicked that when they went elsewhere?)

I'm responsible for hiring junior C++ developers in a small company (first role). Let met tell you that almost all candidates are stating "medium" level in C++ in their resume but don't even know how to work with pointers or references, they don't even have the level of someone studying the language for half a day. And I don't even think it's related to AI. Whatever the reason, it's very easy to assert a candidate competency with a 30 minutes to an hour interview in person.

What is means is that now hiring is symmetrically broken.

Hiring has always been broken. May be not completely at the FAANG level, but below that, and more importantly across the globe it's seriously broken, and there's a high variance when it comes to hiring consultants quality.

The widespread use of AI vy applicants is very likely surfacing how comfortable consultants were doing the bare minimum when hiring.

Source: I've been working for 10+ years for a company that has an ATS for mostly European clients.

I know for a fact how crappy work around hiring is.

P.S.: the article focuses mostly on one direction of hiring. The opposite direction is also suffering from this (briefly explained in the article about AI fueled hiring bias). In my opinion, that is an even greater problem.

As an engineer working on my company’s top of funnel it’s tough. Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call. Async technical challenges are obviously gamed but you’d be surprised at how few people both cheat + take longer than 3m to submit the solution

Hiring was broken long before ai

None of that stuff done during hiring should matter as long as the one hired can satisfactorily perform their duties, regardless of their actual knowledge/skills and the tools they use. Break firing as well so it's easy to get rid of those who underperform. Problem solved.

HR/legal departments broke hiring. AI is just revealing how broken it is.

https://archive.ph/Pfl79

hard to be sympathetic here when the candidate experience has been such a mess in tech for years now. i appreciate that remotely and efficiently judging future success based on a resume is now basically a wash, that sucks. but no one seemed to treat it like an emergency that perfectly qualified candidates have been getting filtered out after tripping various invisible wires for years (due to ATS systems but also not having word-for-word experience across the board, or not having big enough logos on your resume, which in turn makes it harder to get bigger logos in the future, etc.) and that's to say nothing of the rampant ghost postings, which someone else mentioned here, which STILL happens all the time. it's cruelty.

Here's how you fix hiring... Have them demonstrate competency.

It's really easy to screen out people when you say "Hey - login to this VM and show me how to import raw data into postgres and run a report."

Or do whatever you're going to do.

My favorite story is from a particular sean who had a candidate that said they'd been using VM for 20 years, and when he went into a document the candidate hit j 200 times to go line 200.

Hiring has always been broken.

> "The conversational interview, long considered the ultimate, unhackable test of a candidate’s authenticity"

Lol. I'm not sure this person has ever given an interview before

I have very little sympathy for companies grappling with this. They use AI to reject applicants within seconds, and make people jump through so many hoops (not to mention ghost jobs) that it's almost a humiliation ritual.

I'm recruiting for apprentices right now. By definition, they have almost nothing to put on their CVs, and thus their CVs are more or less identical, or rather all of them have almost zero signal.

We took a chance on a flash recruiting session our canton organized. 35 interviews in 2 hr 15 mins. Crazy. But excellent signal, because if you are looking for it, and give the candidate a hint to show it ("tell me a story about how you solved a computer problem for your self/friend/family/club"), you can find the candidates with a spark. And I would not have detected it from their CVs or cover letter alone.

More human connection. Less machines. There, I fixed it for you.

> "For the C-suite, this is no longer just an HR headache, it is a critical strategic risk."

I have seen this phrase structure before.

It wasn't broken before?

Principle: Problem created by X are also solvable by X. (where X = railways, internet, mobile phones, now AI)

In practical terms Problem: AI made "skill-fishing" easy, and previous signals like good cover letters, well-crafted CV, even correct answers in interviews now don't have their old signalling power - because anyone can do it.

Solution: If this is the case, a) now recruiters need to assess AI skills (exactly what I'm working on - but won't link as it's flagged anytime I link it - but you can search for "aisa test")

b) we need to move on to a system where we accept it's agents talking to each other. CV is for human-human communication but now agent writes, another agent reads. If THAT'S THE CASE - we need an updated protocol for representative agents of each party to contact. (this is the product I'd be working on if I wasn't working on the former)

Interviews, all of them, should be working on problem with and agent and a human interviewer.

Just had a "guess the teachers password" moment at some interview as a senior and the interviewer didn't understand my answer and didn't ask questions.

The problem is incentives. A lot of people probably need to be fired who are gate keeping by blocking hiring.

All interviews should be bilateral win win recommendation chats.

They should not end because one person didn't understand the other or someone who was not yet interested in the job did g remember some weird detail of something.

Our memories are getting worse with AI and augmentation.

We need to judge marginal add and make recommendations.

The premise of "flawless prose in cover letter and resume used to show work-quality of candidate rather their ability fine tune prose on resume" is dubious.

I'm thinking back to a recent interview I had. It was one of those online coding tests; after spending about an hour and a half on it I sent it back to the recruiter and they came back to me saying I didn't pass because I 'only' got an 80% despite passing all criteria in the worst working environment possible. This was a no-AI test too so I unfortunately respected the criteria.

So many interviews still demand absolute perfection so they just optimize for people that are dishonest and get away with it.