I’m getting sick of the invasive questions
"Gender?
Sex at birth?
Are you trans?
Are you gay? Bi?
Ever been depressed?
Abuse alcohol? Drugs?
Ever been arrested?
Ever been in the military?
Well what about your spouse?
Ever work for the government?
That degree you mentioned, we can’t ask your age but uh, when did you earn that bad boy, huh?"
NONE OF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE POSITION.
This is 100% occuring in the USA. Where I live and work.
Right out of college, I went through an eight hour long hiring process complete with a proctored exam, three different interviews, a psychological screening, and a meeting with the CEO. All for an entry level position that paid $25k. By the end of the day, I was the only candidate left to be considered and they didn’t give me an offer.
I got a call and a quick phone interview two days later from a small independent IT company that quoted me $30k on the spot. I said I was considering a second position and - over the phone - the guy raises it to $35k. Took the deal. Started a week later.
Two months after that, I got a postcard in the mail saying I was no longer being considered for the first job.
This was in 2006 and its only gotten worse since.
Gender?
Sex at birth?
Are you trans?
Are you gay? Bi?
Ever been depressed?
Abuse alcohol? Drugs?
Ever been arrested?
Ever been in the military?
Well what about your spouse?
Ever work for the government?
That degree you mentioned, we can’t ask your age but uh, when did you earn that bad boy, huh?
I’m just trying to get an egg loan! There’s people in line behind me!
Where are you that has questions like these?
5 of those questions aren’t asked in the US.
I am in the US.
Those questions are 100% asked.
Source: over 1000 job applications this year so far.
i totally believe you…
Aren’t asked for now. I’m pretty sure in certain states will become mandatory…
They are. I am in the US.
What is the “correct” answer for the ever worked in the government/military ones?
The truth. Depending on the context they will either report how many military veterans they employ (so just tabulation that goes to a checkbox if they bid for a government contract), or it involves military benefits in some manner, which will quickly come back to haunt you if you ‘lied’ on application docs.
Oh, I assumed they were a discrimination thing. Gathering random information due to government requirements is very different.
entry level job; salary range $30,000 - $150,000 depending on qualifications and experience; 10 yrs experience required; high school diploma required, Phd preferred
apply today!
Sorry we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates (You’re not the VP’s son).
1 month later, the exact same job posting is listed again
New recruitment process, who this?
Phd preferred
Weird way to spell required
My last job had close to that range. There is a hiring range is typically 50-70% of the maximum. Below 50% is the developmental range for laddering underqualified internal hires. Over 70% is for very experienced, overqualified candidates. Generally employers won’t go more than 85% of max because they need a couple years of cushion for salary increases. If they hire at max they know the candidate is going to be back on the market in a year.
(We will always offer you pay on the lower end of the scale)
High school diploma is barely an entry barrier, completely reasonable IMO for anything other than a factory button-pusher.
You missed the point
“Our company develops AI. It has many uses and should substitute for human labor whenever possible.”
“USE OF AI BY APPLICANTS IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED!”
As funny as it is when presented that way, it does make sense. After all if a company is using AI wherever possible, and yet hiring a person, then presumably it’s because they want that person to do things they don’t want to be using AI for.
OTOH assuming the hiring process is competent at assessing job fitness, an applicant who gets through it using AI should be fit to do the job with AI.
Using AI is very different from developing AI.
And…?
Yes, developing AI is different from all sorts of things - that’s why an AI dev hiring process would assess competence at AI dev. If a candidate demonstrated competence doing that job, using tools they’ll have available at work, what’s the problem?
I don’t know why people simply say, “Thing A is different from Thing B,” as if it’s a mic drop.
Tell me you know absolutely nothing about the work we actually do without telling me huh.
The top level comment is about AI development not AI use.
Speaking as someone with more than a decade of experience developing AI: prompting ChatGPT to write your cover letter for an AI dev role is at best neutral to your ability to perform the job, at worst a sign of total incompetence.
It’s fucking funny to me how every two years people dream up new and novel ideas of what it is we do based off nothing but vibes lmao
I’m a 40-year software dev. Looks like we’re having two different arguments. I approached the “no AI” rule as a prohibition against using AI to pass a software dev competency test, not to write a cover letter. I haven’t used AI myself in coding, but several of my colleagues - also with decades experience - use it routinely, and according to them it’s very helpful. Since a software dev for an AI company would presumably be writing code, is it a stretch to assume AI coding tools would be used in that work? Incidentally, although I’ve never worked on an AI project I’ve been reading about AI and expert systems since the late 1980s, but that doesn’t seem relevant to the discussion. Anyway, there’s no need for condescension or insults - they never really make a point except about the speaker.
I’ve also noticed “competitive” seems to mean “just above what they believe the competition’s minimum is”, and together they and their competition drive the wages down.
I once saw an ad looking to hire someone with a BA that knew 3 computer programming languages for $8 an hour.
I know word, excel, powerpoint
/s
(but then again macros are a thing)
There was an article about staffing agencies spamming LLM generated CVs to companies to saturate the market and convince companies that hiring is impossibly hard
Hell even without that hiring is really really hard. Im the IT manager for my company and I’m looking to hire for some level 1 help desk type positions. They don’t need to be super experienced, but they do need to know things like “what is group policy” or “how would you troubleshoot this hypothetical issue”. Basically they should be able to pass the Comptia A+ test, even if they dont actually have it.
My God I got over 600 applications within a business week! The vast majority of those applicants were from people with no experience, lots of experience in a different field!
Like I was getting these applicants from people who have 15 years of plumbing or machining experience. Or people who clearly haven’t been able to hold down a job (if you bounce from minimum wage job to minimum wage job every other month, that’s a bad look). Or on the other end of the spectrum, I was getting people with decades of sysadmin experience applying too.
I had to start having HR filter the top and bottom out of the stack so I could actually see useful data.
One of the best ones I ever got was an ‘engineer’ who described driving around in his van ‘fixing things’ applying for a machine learning engineer position.
Real conversation, not exaggerated. Actually slightly toned down:
“We offer a competitive salary! It’s $number!”
“I have 2 offers 10% higher, from a shipping company and a finance company, in the same city”
“We don’t compete with the finance and shipping sectors”
“And 15% higher in one of the consultancies”
“We don’t compete with consultancies either”
(I think I’m going to put Reigninh Monarch of Norway on my CV. I just don’t compete with King Harald.)
LOL I hope you told them “Dude you ARE competing with those companies for my skills, so are you in or not?” It’s really that simple.
At one interview I wasn’t really sure about my answer to a question, so after giving it I asked how they would do it, and the guy who asked said, “Well, I’m not the one being interviewed.” I kept my mouth shut because I really liked everybody else I had talked to, but I wanted to go all Jules on the guy like, “Oh yes you are, Brett, yes you are!” Some employers don’t get that an applicant is also interviewing them (at least I always was).
Haha, that’s the attitude :)
I did say, in a nice way, that “they are your competitors either way”.
And yeah, companies treating interviews as a one-way evaluation is a red flag.
There was this book that was hype around 2010, called “Are you smart enough to work at Google?”. It was full of interview questions and brainteasers that I strongly suspected I’d find interesting, but I couldn’t get over the title. I wanted to scream “Fuck you, book! Is Google smart enough to hire ME?!”
We are, as a profession, systematically manipulated via these interview processes to feel stupid and inferior to drive down wages. I’d rather come off as slightly too arrogant now and then, rather than submit to that.
Well said! Many companies have the attitude, “You’re lucky we let you have this job, and we can take it away any time!” And many employees totally believe it, no matter how talented they are. But you can’t live other people’s lives for them. After switching to contract work my only regret was that occasionally there were people I wished I could have worked with longer. But that’s life.
I actually took a google screening test around 2010, and they did call me back to go to the next step, which was kind of an ego boost. Other things came up and I never followed through, so no idea if they would have hired me or not. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
Poor people always land the most competitive salaries…
The salary competes with the bills
We need to have 4 years expirenece on techology version {current_year}
Fuck that! I just hired two people and during the screener I told them the base and comp plan so we don’t all waste our time in a mutual ruined-orgasm masturbation session.
A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect.
Hiring is working as intended*
I’m just glad I never had to put up with corpo shit like that. I only work for smaller businesses with like at max 20 people. Pay is usually a bit worse at the start, but it’s easier to ask for raises down the line and at least I’m treated like a human, not a number in lexware.
i wonder if family structures will change to be closer to that of India as children are forced to stay with their parents longer and longer
