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From college to dating to jobs, no one in history has been rejected more than Gen Z
This is an interesting article about the trend of mass-applications that has become increasingly normalized across many areas of life. If you've applied for a job in the past decade or so, you'll know that the signal:noise ratio is very bad, and as such you're kind of expected to mass-apply to dozens or hundreds of jobs. Each job will get bombarded with something like 1000 applicants in the first few days, and while many of those applicants will be junk, there will probably be at least a few dozen high-quality candidates that you're competing with. This has led to companies becoming extremely picky. In my specific area of tech, its led to an expectation that you need to do dozens of hours of "leetcode", which are little toy problems that are ostensibly used to make sure you actually know how to program, but which actually do a terrible job at this because real programmers will usually be somewhat bad at these, while people who grind leetcode but know little else can do quite well. There's also a further expectation that you might be asked to do other ridiculous feats like have 8+ rounds of interviews for an entry-level position, and you might be ghosted at any point in this process, even after you've interviewed with real people. Heck, you might even be ghosted after you've received and accepted a formal job offer, then if you show up to work the company will just lie and say they have no idea who you are. While there's theoretically some recourse by suing for promissory estoppel, it's almost never worth the effort so it rarely happens. The accepted answer is "that's just part of the game now, swallow your pride and move on".
Dating, and to some extent college applications are also like this. Young people live in a world where they constantly have doors slammed in their face. While I think a little bit of rejection can be good to build resilience, I doubt humans are psychologically well-equipped to handle the barrage of rejection that's become commonplace. Getting rejected hurts even if it's just a small annoyance from not receiving a response. It makes you feel like you're being treated like garbage a little bit, which would almost certainly prompt some amount of nihilism after a while. It might also lead to some amount of risk aversion. I myself simply refuse to deal with online dating at all, which has dramatically limited my romantic options. But if dying alone is the price required to remove this nonsense from at least one aspect of my life, that's a deal I'd gladly take.
Strange. A few hours ago I was checking this thread in the phone and I swear there was a short and witty response wondering just how unique the historic experience of Gen Z is. By now it disappeared.
If it was mine, I deleted it because on second read I didn't feel like it added a whole lot to the conversation and was essentially navel-gazing. Here it was, just in case:
It's funny, as I make this post I got an e-mail response from a job application telling me in automated corpospeak that, yes, my resume is being reviewed by an AI bot and yes, I will be ghosted if she doesn't like it.
I applied to this job not because I really need it, but because I am essentially a perfect fit that checks 14/15 boxes on their Preferred Qualifications wish list. Funny to think their unicorn candidate might not even get a screening call because they are too lazy to review resumes.
Or maybe it isn't that. Maybe they won't reach me because they are flooded with resumes that look just like mine, not because there are so many people like me out there, but because so many are using their own AI bot to generate the perfect resume for every job in a 100 mile radius and aren't particularly concerned if they're full of lies.
What a horrifying tragedy of the commons. While it's always been horrible, I'll agree that things have clearly gotten worse. Somethings gotta give. Regulation, or something. In the meantime, maybe this is a good indicator that it's time to abandon any remaining vestige of K-selected application strategy, no matter how promising the outlook.
Why do you say this? I mean, I wish it would, but why do you think someone is coming to save us?
I suppose that things could get worse than I could (or would want to) imagine before they get better, but at some point things get so pathological that they outright stop working. There are a lot of very powerful parties that have a strong interest in things actually working (both employers and employees alike) and I don't see a whole lot of strong beneficiaries of dysfunction that could resist such motion. It's just that the two major parties who have an interest in the system working well have a typically adversarial relationship, and the problem hasn't yet gotten big enough for them to set aside their differences.
But eventually it will.
It's really only dysfunctional for employees, who have to spend the effort applying to dozens or hundreds of jobs filled with broken interfaces and astrology quizzes. For employers everything's working fairly well, or at least it's not materially worse than it's ever been. It costs next to nothing for them to filter out more candidates, especially if the process is partially automated.
No, it's broken from both sides. Employees are presented with job listings that are mostly junk, either pure junk (no real job behind them) or inappropriate jobs without enough information to determine that. Employers get resumes which are crap or pure lies. Both sides employ filters, but the amount of junk is so high, the amount of information easily available so low, and the filter-makers so incompetent that the filters have low selectivity and sensitivity.
The basic problem is just that the market is too big.
I really don't see why employers would see that as a big problem. Filtering out junk is not expensive or hard. ATS exists, and this is one of the tasks HR uses to justify its existence. Big companies like being able to grab talent from all over the world.
Of course it is.
Yes, but it doesn't work very well. You've got a job. You post it somewhere. You get 10,000 applicants. 10 of them are good, the rest are bad. You need to cut that somehow using very cheap filters. Say you get your cheap filters to cut you to 100 applicants... but unfortunately while they've filtered out over 98% of the junk, they've also filtered out all the good applicants.
Grabbing talent from all over the world exposes them to junk from all over the world.
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As someone who has gotten a first-hand glimpse into certain hiring pipelines, I'm not at all convinced this is the case. Resume stuffing and spamming seems to be a serious issue, one that has even managed to waste some of my non-HR time, and while I didn't get to see what it was like before, it's difficult to imagine that GPT et al hasn't made it worse. I think hiring agents are turning to AI bots for a reason.
I can buy that things have gotten worse faster for job seekers, but I think that ultimately only delays the inevitable. Like any market, while the buyer and seller have a large adversarial component to their relationship, it's ultimate a cooperative exercise because they both want the deal to close. If one party is so disadvantaged that they begin to drop out, both parties lose.
But sure, that doesn't mean that whatever new equilibrium asserts itself has to be a good one. Perhaps the endgame really is AI agents screeching at each other, producing a barely functional market with a large, profiteering new middle man. Maybe that reality is already here, and I'm an old man who needs to get with the times.
I've considered feeding Claude an omnibus resume with all reasonably delineated units of experience on it, and asking to to pare that down for individual listings. But I'm honestly afraid that might be too honest for today's meta, and I'm nowhere near desperate enough for new employment for change that radical.
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