Tbf, I'd rather get a "we didn't review your CV" response than a template "we are continuing with other candidates :)" response. It softens the blow considerably and helps me as an applicant better keep track on which variation of the CV is working best because I can just remove this datapoint.
I had a hiring manager tell me a couple weeks ago that I probably made it further because I applied late. All the people using AI and automation to apply are hitting the apply button early, and the laggards tend to be humans.
Its a perpetum mobile. Hiring managers use automation to filter candidates, coz its too many. Candidates see they dont even pass automatic filtering, so they apply with tailored CVs x10. This means even more CVs and more filtering and more CVs and more filtering and more CVs etc etc etc
Im curious at which point ppl will understand its counter productive.
Never, because they already know it is but fixing it requires both sides to deescalate in lockstep while individuals on both sides would benefit from not descalating
Unfortunately, "we didn't review your CV" is a great way to get sued in the US if the name of the applicant is in any way potentially indicative of the applicant's gender, race, religion, or any other protected status.
And we now see a lot of proof that that is warranted: lots of people in the US are now openly racist and/or have other prejudices. It is fair to assume many people don’t get a fair chance because of this.
The first company I worked for (a smallish business) interviewed a guy who seemed normal and knowledgeable enough in the screener call. At the time, they just asked that people being in code samples to discuss in the second interview (this predated GitHub) and he brought in some obviously copy-pasted code that didn't fit together.
He then, without prompt, in the middle of a conversation mentioned that he was the second coming of Christ. The interviewers ignored the comment and continued the interview.
When he didn't get the job, he sued the company for religious discrimination. Fortunately, the interviewers could honestly say they didn't discuss or ask about his religious beliefs, and he lost. It was said he did this elsewhere as a a scam, though I never verified it.
The simple matter of fact is that it doesn't matter how neutral you are; there are enough people out there who will look for any way to perceive and benefit from a grievance that you must assume they will.
Of course you're right, there will always be people that try to abuse the system. But the bigger picture here is that more people are truly being discriminated for their color, religion, sex, etc, than there are people abusing the system. A system that improves live for many should not be removed because some people try to abuse it.
We are discussing whether or not it is safe for a company to reply to an applicant with "we didn't review your CV".
The crux of my point is that the potential for a perceived grievance is sufficient to trigger legal action. Whether bigotry was involved or not is entirely beside the point, because even if the company absolutely was 100% not discriminating, they are still vulnerable for creating a situation where they could be perceived as having done so.
In no way am I advocating for removing protections for disadvantaged groups. I'm not arguing that bigotry doesn't exist. There's no point in bringing up the fact that it does.
You know what's cheaper than getting hundreds of baseless court cases dismissed? Not replying to someone with "we ignored your application".
Yes, there even exist whole department, organizations and industries of people for the sole purposes of hiring people based on race, sex and other non work related characteristics rather than merit which is the very definition of discrimination.
For good or ill -- probably the latter -- headshots are expected with CVs in most of Europe. It's a local custom.
Source: I worked in Germany and had to deal with this. (In fact, one of the ways I made my application stand out from other North Americans was to learn this ahead of time and include a headshot in my original application)
Tbf the other summer recruitment practice in AI this summer is Zuck running round offering engineers with some sort of reputation $100m+ windfalls, so maybe all the OP needs to do is add "author of computer interaction library used by Anthropic" to his LinkedIn profile to acquire that garage full of Ferraris
To be fair with Anthropic, they probably get unfathomably many applications for everything, on top of the cold calls/emails. They're one of the hottest companies in the world, so I'd expect tens of thousands of applicants. Media writing about $100m+ hiring deals in AI does not help, either.
Aren't they an AI company? Couldn't they sort it out? If Anthropic, of all companies, can't sort out incoming job applications, what exactly are their tools for?
The world is also full of totally delusional people who dreamed up the idea of using winzip to compress VRAM on the GPU, and now Anthropic will definitely hire them for $1M year for this genius solution, so better write up a glammed up resume and auto-send it once a day for any open position.
Opportunity also is a precious resource. Redirecting resume to /dev/null is wasting it. I have a hard time believing that LLMs, with all their sophistication, aren't ideally suited for this task.
I don’t know how slighting customers who want to work for you works out in the long term. You end up getting fewer opportunities from them and their friends in the future.
Seattle is full of people who will tell you what it’s like to work for Amazon and how you don’t want to work there. I guess if you’re big enough though the money papers over a lot of sins. The smaller you are, the more people you can piss off before you run out of prospects. Anthropocene still has a long way to go before they are Facebook, who struggles because something like 50% of the people who would work for FB already have.
Is it? What I've been marketed is that AI is widely available for every task I could conceptually think of, and that I should be using it for everything.
IDK, compute isn't really that precious. If $20/mo can get you many (?) invocations of their research agent, I feel like it could pretty easily be worth it to screen applications for jobs that pay $350K/year -- and that's just "entry-level"![1]
That said, their career page puts this at the very top of the details section:
We value direct evidence of ability: If you’ve done interesting independent research, written an insightful blog post, or made substantial contributions to open-source software, put that at the top of your resume!
This guy seems rad, but his GitHub[2] and this blog are both light details or links, which is odd considering that his LinkedIn[3] is detailed+professional. Perhaps Anthropic does have Claude screening resumes, but he didn't express the nature of the situation clearly enough for it to catch it?
Otherwise, the only other explanation I see that doesn't look terrible for Anthropic is they didn't see a need for more Rust expertise...?
Nah, if there was ever a time where making meaningful contributions to open source was important to land you a good paying job in a hot tech company, that died a long time ago. The people making these decisions don't care, unless you have someone inside to put your resume first it doesn't matter that you wrote all the code that makes their product even possible, the hiring manager won't care.
I might just be old but i really haven't felt like contributing to open source at all lately because i've bills to pay and kids to care for and taking time out of this just for the sake of enriching some billion dollar corp that will eat me and spit me out doesn't feel like a good investment for my time.
Sometimes i feel sad that it came to this but this is the place we're living in right now.
they should have used their AI to scan through resume... they are AI company afterall. shame they missed this guy. it shows their resume-scannign AI is useless.
Poor poor... I always felt that too many people in hr decision making underestimate the role of talent. Many awesome software products stem from teams with extraordinary talent. Average people create average software.
I can almost guarantee that they didn't even read that application / cover letter and auto-magically rejected it.
"the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications"
Zero effort. They probably didn't even realize the relevance of that specific application for that role. Unbelievable, I swear!