Instead of having more people at the supermarket, have the customers work as if they were employees, the only thing missing is fetching stuff from warehouse when missing on the shelves, but still pay the same or more.

Instead of paying to artists, do job ads using generated AI images with code magically showing off monitor's back.

Instead of paying translators, do video ads with automatic translations and nerve irritating voice tones.

Gotta watch out for those profits, except they forget people also need money to buy their goods.

Ultimately applicants will endure whatever companies put in front of them with a job market that is this bad.

If the government made this illegal companies would come out with ever increasingly silly filters, such as demanding specific college degrees, handwritten applications by snail Mail etc.

I felt so bad afterwards that I swore them off forever.

It's not like the 'interview' was terrible or anything. I knew it was AI from the start.

It was just that when I got done with it, I realized that I had talked at a computer for ~45 minutes. And, yet again, I was going to be ghosted by the company (I was), and that I was never going to get those 45 minutes back. That was time I could have used to apply for another job, or cook, or sleep, or exercise, or spend time with family. But no, like an idiot, I talked at a bot for that time for literally no reason.

Like, sure maaaaybe the company is going to use it as a screen for 'real' people. But the odds that it's not just another hoop they have for you to jump through are nil. If they send an AI 'interview' at you, that's the exact same as an email requesting yet more portfolio submissions. Pointless.

Thus in any situation where a company is offloading internal effort but still requiring the candidate to put in time & effort, that's a company I would not want to work for. This is the ultimate expression of that bullcrap.

They're seeing the opposite because people are desperate. When HR teams use tools like this interviewees have no choice. Braintrust are literally holding people hostage with this. Of course the numbers look good. But you didn't ask the people being interviewed by your product what they think of it or how it made them feel.

And of course Mr. Jackson doesn't care. His company's bottom line is his performance bonus.

> While some worry AI will dehumanize the hiring process, we believe the opposite. Deploying AI will enable more quality interactions, more quickly for the candidates who are the best fit for our jobs– without unnecessary administrative tasks or distractions. We fully believe in AI’s ability to build depth and breadth in our selection process, while acknowledging that the road ahead will have its challenges. Let’s face it: the candidates who want to work at Coinbase are as enthusiastic about AI as we are. They, like us, are optimistic about the future of this (and all) technology.

That is quite rich coming from Braintrust. The founder should spend less time doing press interviews and more time listening to feedback from his own community. I was from the outside intrigued by the unique way of working and signed up to learn more about it.

The thing that immediately jumped out is community members complaining about failing the initial screening without any feedback at all. This initial screening is apparently an AI interview. If the AI is so great, it should be trivial to get it to explain why it rejected interviewees. Unless it has serious shortcomings that would be risky to publicize.

Alternatively, this could be a sneaky way of collecting training data for the AI by preying on unsuspecting humans.

Yikes. One thing that's incredibly important about reaching the interview-stage of a job application has been that there is a parity, or even an imbalance favoring the candidate, in human time usage. The company's people (often multiple people at once) have to spend time with the candidate to conduct the interview, so there are stakes for scheduling an interview. The company is investing something into that interaction, so you as a candidate can have some faith that your time is being valued. In the very least, your 45 minute interview is valued at 45*n minutes of company labor for each interviewer.

Admitting right off the bat that you're going to waste the time of 90% of your applicants without these stakes is just wildly disrespectful.

> “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,” Adam Jackson, CEO and founder of Braintrust, a company that distributes AI interviewers, tells Fortune. “If there were a large portion of the job-seeking community that were wholesale rejecting this, our clients wouldn’t find the tool useful… This thing would be chronically underperforming for our clients. And we’re just not seeing that—we’re seeing the opposite.”

Great. So he is explicitly telling us that a boycott will work. There you go folks, you have your marching orders.

You're doing it wrong if you're considering "thousands" of applicants.

First of all ask your current good employees if they can refer anyone.

If you need to go to resumes, sort by qualifications. Screen out obvious robo-applications, you know them when you see them just like you know spam email from the subject line alone.

Hint: if you're an insurance or financial services company in Chicago and getting applications from people with a degree from Stanford and 10 years of amazing experience at FAANG companies, they are fakes.

Hire the first candidate that has acceptable experience and interviews well. Check their references, but you don't need to consider hundreds or even dozens of people. Most people are average and that's who you're most likely going to hire no matter what you do.

Your job is also nothing very special. Have some humility. Very few companies need to be hiring the top 1% type of person, and your company is almost certainly of no interest to those people anyway.

The CEO of Braintrust, a company that offers AI interviewers, is quoted as saying “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,”. Let's see how they react to the founding of 'Trainbust', a company offering AI interviewees to respond to AI interviewers. The truth is, if they want to use AI interviewers, they’re gonna have to go through this thing.

It's all Just in Time, with a residual amount above the main shelves. If you can't find what you want, they don't have it 'out back', because apart from an unloading area, there's no 'out back'.

Do they? Money is simply the accounting of debt. You do something for me, and when I can't immediately do something in return for you, you extend a loan to me so that I can make good on my side of the bargain later. If we record that I owe you something at some point in the future, we just created money!

But if I don't need anything from you — because, say, magical AIs are already giving me everything I could ever hope and dream of — I have no reason to become indebted to you. Money only matters in a world where: You want/need people to do things for you, they won't do something for you without a favour returned in kind, and you cannot immediately return the favour.

Mainly they listen to the interview, and write down answers in an overlay for you to repeat. They ace leet code, etc...

I guess this is already pretty close.

Amateurs, IKEA solved that one decades ago ;) But that's Scandinavian practicality or whatever they use to sell themselves these days :)

Applicant count for similar positions by year:

  23 - 2025 (the position I mentioned)
  31 - 2025
  10 - 2019

I do think the market is very rough right now for software developers. I also know for a fact that "attractive" hiring companies can get a crazy number of applicants for each opening. SAS was famous for getting 1,000+ applicants per job just after the dotcom bust in the early 2000's.

This means no 8 hour tests, no talking to computers, no special little projects for me to evaluate me.

You get equal face time and no more than 45 minutes of me doing anything by myself (that's the max leeway).

If you want me to do anything else either I'm getting paid short term contractor rates or making you make a sizable donation to charity.

Dystopian, infuriating, unethical and immoral.

Yet Anthropic didn't want people to use AI as part of interviewing for them.

"Now you gave me two bad feelings about the company."

"AI will create jobs instead of destroying them."

"AI will solve the climate crisis despite doubling or tripling humanity's energy footprint."

At some point it became acceptable to lie to the public with a straight face.

You want to have an AI interview me? No. It can interview my AI agent if you want, but not me. You want to interview me? Put a human on the line.

Some companies genuinely don't care though; they're a meatgrinder that just need to get warm souls into the machine. Ironically: These are the companies that are being eaten alive by AI right now.

2. If you get a lot of generally-competent employees after applying reasonable filters (e.g. matching skillset, expected salary), don't give them a long automated test, pick a smaller set randomly. All of them have demonstrated competence, and the likelihood that the test will give you more the more competent employees is offset by the likelihood that they'll move forward with applications more respectful of their time.

3. Do final-stage (human) interviews with the small set of employees, where you test specific skills relevant to the job. Here you can also throw a couple general-skill questions to ensure the applicant really is generally competent; it's not disrespecting their time, because it's part of the interview time and you're spending it as well (maybe it is if the entire interview is especially long, but then you're wasting also your own time).

The important part is 1). Otherbranch may not be good or popular, but at least if/when employee supply falls below demand, "mass interview" seems like something employers will need to filter out bad applicants without wasting good applicants' time.

Once again proving that somehow HR has become captured by bug people

The power imbalance is already so far tipped to the employer side. This verbiage doesn't even consider the applicant a human with time worth saving or worth having meaningful conversations!