We hire on Freelancer sites quite a bit and have noticed that about 50%-80% of applicants now very obviously use ChatGPT or equivalent to apply. Now suddenly every person magically has 8 years experience in a weird esoteric requirement that we're looking for.

They are currently very easy to spot and the applications go directly into the trash, so the freelancers aren't doing themselves any favors using them.

It is increasing the noise floor a lot though.

> Now suddenly every person magically has 8 years experience in a weird esoteric requirement that we're looking for.

That's crazy to me. Why would someone put ANYTHING on their resume that is not factually correct? That in the end is a disservice to yourself and to your potential employer, not to mention the pressure it puts on job seekers to push the envelope on embellishment.

What I am on the fence about in my own resume is including a skillset that yes I have done but maybe a couple years in the past. Right or wrong I have decided to keep them on their knowing full well that it might create a bit of a challenge for me during the interview process.

> Why would someone put ANYTHING on their resume that is not factually correct?

Tragedy of the commons and negative externalities. If you're applying for a ton of jobs, then lying on your resume comes with potential upsides (you could get a job that you normally wouldn't) with very little personal downside (employers don't really have a way to share which applicants falsified resume data).

Sure, doing this raises the noise level and makes it harder for people who don't lie on their resumes (tragedy of the commons), but from an individual perspective, that's a negative externality that they don't have to care about.

> That's crazy to me. Why would s ...

Because it works... They get the job and the person who wasnt captain of the football, tennis, rowing, lacrose, bowling, sailing, cheerleading, chess and debate teams all at the same time is just some unemployable loser.

The real question is why managers and recruiters fall for it - the obvious answer is that they got where they got by inflating their CV and simply assume everyone does it too.

I really hope your obvious answer is not a widespread truth. Seems like a horribly vicious circle.

idk over-promising and under-delivering is called business isn't it?

Its a bold demonstration that you have the Sigma Grindset needed for success.

owned a mitsubishi sigma once, nice car unless something broke.

> That's crazy to me. Why would someone put ANYTHING on their resume that is not factually correct?

I have dealt with my fair share of resume embellishments. I _will ask_ questions about anything that you put in your resume. Anything at all. It's fair game. That's part of my sanity check. Better have a pretty decent answer as to why something is in the resume relatively recently and you can't even give me an overview of what it was (I assume people forget details and it's fine).

However, have you ever seen 'proxy interviews'? In those cases, it's not just a case of 'embellishments', the candidate interviewing has zero experience and the resume is not even his. Had this experience a few months ago.

People go as far as lip syncing. It's horrendous.

I bet you’re surprised that people lie all the time to women at bars too!

Haha.. wait have we met? :D

It would be a fun experiment to have a few shots, update my resume and then read it the next day.

Haha, unlikely. I just know the feeling.

Another experiment - have a friend update your resume while you take those shots, and then see if you can really object to the results the next day. ;)

.. and women have totally unrealistic criteria, too, just like employers.

The internet has caused mass insanity.

It’s definitely helped spread it. But honestly, these situations are nothing new. Back in the dot-com crash I remember it all being the same. Even entry level school computer labs were requiring CS PhD’s! And women, well, same.

Er, we had the internet during the dot-com crash. And before it, even.

As I recall, things were not quite so bad in the 1980s. I vaguely recall seeing the odd newspaper article about the intense interest in a job, because it attracted maybe 500 applications. That was newsworthy.

It used to be you had to physically show up, or mail in a form to apply. That tends to put the brakes on mass applications pretty effectively.

It’s less the internet, and more folks using the internet/apps for processes that used to require in person physical presence. Which has been getting more and more common.

I think it depends a bit on where you are in life.

I remember exaggerating a bit when applying for my first job. I was fresh out of university and really needed that job. I spent the following 2 years miserable, I just didn't fit in that well.

Nowadays I'm brutally honest with my application and the following interviews. I see it as me choosing where to work rather than the other way around. If they pick my application then I more or less know that I will fit in rather well. It has served me well over the years.

I can understand people being desperate and in need of that first job or having to start over due to different reasons though...

> I can understand people being desperate and in need of that first job

Desperate people do desperate and unpredictable things though. Case in point:

> I remember exaggerating a bit when applying for my first job. [...] I spent the following 2 years miserable, I just didn't fit in that well.

Every now and then I have to investigate employees who seem to spontaneously lose their shit-- aside from one with an alcoholic spouse, so far every single one of them were just in over their head. They don't return calls, cozy up to security and ask questions about monitoring tools, check into mental hospitals, suddenly have internet connection issues all the time, lose or destroy their equipment repeatedly, etc. One would hop onto the IT support Slack channel and see what widespread issue was currently impacting others, then claim it was happening to her (and do the same with general/social, to see when people were getting sick and with what).

I wouldn't say it rises to the level of malingering, but it's clear they're desperately stalling, and it just creates a vortex that sucks them and everyone around them into. Contractual obligations stop being met because they become an entire sideshow and won't surrender. My fear is that one might eventually resort to sabotage; the closest we've come was a nonperformer trying to leverage workplace violence allegations against an executive.

> Nowadays I'm brutally honest with my application and the following interviews.

This is the way to do it. When you weave a web of lies, you have to maintain all those threads. Pathological liars are always anxious. Honesty makes for a much easier life.

> Why would someone put ANYTHING on their resume that is not factually correct?

If their current income is $0 and the income from a successful ruse is minimum several weeks of several thousands of dollars, and the cost per throw is around a dime…

It’s not hard to see how the algebra works out.

you need algebra to figure that out?

Algebra that you can do in your head is still algebra.

I mean, big corpos for years have been automating the hiring process to the detriment of their own results. Is it really that surprising applicants are ready to do the same? Now suddenly automation is bad? Hiring managers being butt-hurt that their automated factory farm application process is being inundated with spam generated by other automation is so hilarious to me, this just made my day.

You get what you fuckin deserve. If you can't be arsed to review applications with people, why should people be arsed to apply in person?

It isn't the use of automation that is the problem. It's that in the automated applications we're receiving, there is very obviously fraudulent information in there. The applicants are LYING about their experience, in order to match the job specification.

ChatGPT just consumes each of the job requirements, and then makes a story about how the applicant has had significant experience in all of those areas. I would prefer not to hire people who lie about their experience to get a job.

> It isn't the use of automation that is the problem. It's that in the automated applications we're receiving, there is very obviously fraudulent information in there. The applicants are LYING about their experience, in order to match the job specification.

Who cares? The specifications half the time include experience that's impossible to achieve because the people writing them either are also in turn using automated software and/or because they have no idea what they're hiring for.

I wasn't making a value judgement, for what it's worth. I'm not sure the commenter that you're replying to was either.

Suppose you could have some fun putting made up technology honeypots in there to weed them out.

I once applied to a job that had recommended experience in applied sitting algorithms. I asked the recruiter WTF sitting algorithms are and she told me it was just a test, and it's surprising how many candidates will say that they've studied sitting algorithms. It works!

That's a great idea, we will do that.

Okay, but I have a resume that is a good fit for a lot of different roles but isn't seen by any human ever because it doesn't include the specific combination of keywords mentioned in the job posting.

I am in the process right now of embedding keywords and a "shadow resume" invisibly in my resume to get past the stupid filtering software.

Employers are doing this to themselves.

Sure, tailoring your resume for a specific job is pretty standard. Perhaps an LLM that has access to your resume, along with loads of documentation on what you have previously done would provide for a much better automation process.

It could read the job spec, then tailor your application with information that is actually true. Starting off with a company with information that is false is not a great way to start a (hopefully) long relationship.

FWIW, we review every application we receive on the freelancer sites and do not use automated filters.

I sometimes think requiring people to telephone and navigate a voice system to get an application ID before they can apply might help.

Tiny barriers can have disproportionate effects.

have you thought of adding a trap that a LLM might trip on but a human wouldn't.

The problem is not the LLM, the lies are the problem.

I don't think an employer would mind a résumé that is factually correct, but edited by a LLM. In the style of "here is my résumé, emphasize the items that match this job offer, and also, fix my grammar and spelling".

Here, the candidates are using a LLM to invent experience that matches the job offer, making a fake résumé. A human doing it doesn't make it better.

What are the most common freelancing sites you use for job postings?

Freelancer.com and Upwork. Although after the torrent of AI powered garbage we received after our latest posting on Freelancer, I'm not sure we will use that again.

Thank you. I have side question for you. Sorry, all this thread coincides with another thread about LinkedIn and me getting banned without knowing why (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37748263). As a job recruiter looking for freelancers, do you expect to find the person on LinkedIn as part of the fact checking process? Would you seriously consider alternating sites such as a person’s website or GitHub and would you find the person a suspect if their LinkedIn profile does not exist ?

Sorry to hear about your Linkedin profile. Yes, we do look at Linkedin profiles for shortlisted candidates. It helps to establish credibility and for us to get an idea of whether the claimed previous experience is legitimate.

We do also ask for Github, but many folks use other repositories. Linkedin is one of the best sources of credibility for us, so I would recommend continuing to try to get it unbanned, or start a new one.

I think there's a dynamic where:

- Desirable job applicants get hired quickly, but people who can't get hired stay on the market

- People who can't get hired will keep applying to more and more jobs

- So every new job opening gets flooded with applications from people who couldn't get hired elsewhere

- Employers don't have time to read the flood of applications in detail, so they rely on cheap filters (keywords on resume, where they went to college, did they work at FANG, etc.)

- Which makes the process worse for everyone

What if there was some way to limit job seekers to e.g. 10 job applications per month, industrywide? Feels like that could cut down the noise and allow employers to consider each individual applicant more carefully.

(It would be hard to implement this limit, though. You could do it via data-sharing between Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, etc., but there are huge privacy concerns and it would run into the same sorts of issues as credit reports do.)

> What if there was some way to limit job seekers to e.g. 10 job applications per month, industrywide? Feels like that could cut down the noise and allow employers to consider each individual applicant more carefully.

Beyond the actual difficulty in doing this without a completely centralized hiring process, this feels incredibly immoral. People have families to feed.

> People have families to feed.

People would submit fewer applications, but each individual application would have a higher chance of success, because everyone else would _also_ be submitting fewer applications. The number of job openings is the same either way, so the same number of people get hired in the end, right?

I don't know? I'm mostly arguing against the industry-wide comment, and thinking from the perspective of someone who has been laid off.

I think individual companies should do whatever they want (within legal bounds), but such a big overhaul just seems ripe to screw people over.

repeat of my comment above: -

I sometimes think requiring people to telephone and navigate a voice system to get an application ID before they can apply might help.

Tiny barriers can have disproportionate effects.

This, and a few more dynamics, including:

- The better applicants usually have several warm leads and often don't bother with high-effort application processes, since they have a pretty decent chance of getting hired wherever they apply, and they're also not bothering to apply for things they're wildly unqualified for

- The worse and more desperate applicants have the time and motivation to stick through the most bizarre and convoluted application process until they get kicked out, with no regard to how well they actually match the requirements

So thus, the more hoops you put into your process to try and stem the tide of the hoards of desperate unqualified applicants, the more you disproportionately screen out the highly qualified applicants who have better things to do and better opportunities to pursue.

> So thus, the more hoops you put into your process to try and stem the tide of the hoards of desperate unqualified applicants, the more you disproportionately screen out the highly qualified applicants who have better things to do and better opportunities to pursue.

Exactly. Asking me to upload a resume, and then data entry all the facts from my resume into form fields, just so that a company can not even reject me, basically tells me that I will be expendable drone #88238875 if I get a job there.

I feel a little bad that sometimes the recruiter probably fills the form out for me if their process requires is, but at least they actually intend to follow up on me as a lead.

The shortcut around this problem is for companies to rely on networking/recommendations rather than a large net, but that comes with its own downsides.

A video came across my feed recently talking about this in tech. Was talking about how the advice for getting into tech that worked really well 1+ years ago isn't as effective today. Basically, the idea was that tech was hiring so voraciously, that they couldn't keep up with hiring by relying on networking bringing in enough candidates, so they needed a lot more recruiting efforts to fill the pipeline. This meant, that just grinding leet code and applying was enough to significantly increase the odds of getting hired. Basically the proportion of random application hires to referral hires was high. Today, not so much. I'd expect to need to jump though a lot more hoops today (not that leet code studying isn't it's own major hoop) to get hired. And of course, this proportion will shift again with the next major tech hiring boom.

This is also how 80% of companies can believe they’re hiring mostly top-1% programmers.

No, you’re hiring top-1% of applicants, not top-1% of employees!

All companies share a common pool of bottom 99% applicants.

> If you're here mate I hope it worked out for you

I hope it didn’t, contaminating the applications like this and automating it will only hurt the ones who’s applying, because now authentic resumes and legit knowledge will be overlooked by other fake auto generated resumes. This try hard wannabe attitude is always going to ruin the experience for everyone else, either in jobs, blog writings, dating, gaming, and basically everywhere.

Yeah. With the genie being as far out of the bottle as it is though, I opted for empathy for the unemployed guy in this case.

I can see your point, absolutely, and the new normal is unfortunate and probably unsustainable.

Careers boards are just another early battleground where we're at a bit of a wait and see moment as for how we're going to deal with all of this cheap, coherent noise.

People aren't as smart as they think.

I also automate part of the process, and I think everyone should be or soon will be, but having received many CVS/cover letters as well, the ones with too much LLM are glaringly obvious and an easy rejection.

These days with companies receiving hundreds of CVs, you only need 1 reason to reject an application. Don't make your application so LLMy that you give the hiring manager an easy reason