I job searched for 8 months with many of my smartest friends with good jobs helping me write resumes and cover letters for each job. I applied to jobs nearly every day, usually having some experience in the field and a relevant college diploma. Even the “urgently hiring” positions that were up for months didnt reply to me.
I ended up getting a job at a local business through word of mouth that they were hiring. When i submitted my resume the team said they didn’t even read it. The algorithms and AI used in hiring are probably hurting these companies more than they are helping.
People get annoyed that “people hire their friends”, but the reality is, when you have a sea of random people all lying in various forms on resumes, HR on job postings, etc it’s so much easier and usually better for a company to have ‘vetted’ candidates proposed by current employees. Ie networking.
It’s still the best way to get a job even with all of this fancy HR algorithm bs.
I didn’t know anybody at the company i got hired at. I was giving them some business and asked them some pretty specific questions. The secretary joked wow you want a job and i said well maybe and went from there. Months of writing resumes and cover letters then i get a job the old fasioned way by walking in with a smile and a handshake.
You are right in many ways still, there is some truth to the saying “it is not what you know, but who you know.”
I got one job the real old-fashioned way: going through classified ads, printing resumes and cover letters, and mailing them out via postal mail.
Both jobs since then were because someone I worked with found out I was looking.
Same person each time. He has a lot of connections.
“The truly infuriating part was that I consistently talked to them asking for progress and they always told me that they had some candidates that didn’t pass the first screening processes (which was false).”
The real reason they got fired. A typo caused their system to reject all applicants and for 3 months - an honest mistake maybe, yet nobody thought anything was wrong, then lied about having found candidates at all.
That’s not a typo - they were looking for people with a skill set in a non-existent software, because HR are lazy bureaucrats who can’t be bothered to understand what their company is actually looking for.
Details, specificity matter, and too many people in the world can’t be bothered to put the effort into understanding the details.
In almost every interview I’ve ever been on for IT, I’ve had to educate the first interviewer on what they’re actually looking for, because their listed requirements found me, but after interrogating them about the position I found the requirements to be very different.
Details, specificity matter, and too many people in the world can’t be bothered to put the effort into understanding the details.
One additional detail of import: this entire story is based off of a single Reddit post, so take it with a Himalayan quarry of salt.
Since the [ATS] was auto-rejecting profiles without AngularJS in it
This is stupid even if it said “Angular” as intended. You never benefit from restricting to people that have used exactly your tech stack anyway.
I have had the opposite experience…as a network engineering lead, I would send a job listing for an engineer to HR, HR would post it and forward it out to their network of recruiters, 24-48 hours later I would get a email/phone call from some head-hunter saying, “Hey, your resume was a match for this networking engineer position!”
Glad to see these asshats getting called out.
Now let’s see 80-90% of HR get canned around the world. They’re mostly useless.
That being said, this isn’t a new issue - the hiring process has been broken for a long time, as in decades. I ran into similar issues in the mid/late 90’s - submit resume after resume, exactly matching the job description to get no response. At a time when IT was so desperate they’d take almost any warm body.
Harvard published a study in the 90’s demonstrating that the current process of hiring (then) is no better than picking names out of a hat.
Humans are not a resource therefore the human resource job is null and void. Fire em all
You are about to be told one more time that you are America’s most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources?! Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don’t ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They’re going to strip mine your soul. They’re going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!
- Utah Phillips
