AI Job Seeking Bots - Oh Goodie

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Oh, good grief. When Tuesday Triage mentioned AI job seeking bots are a thing, I groaned. Having hired people in the past, I know it's absolutely no fun wading through tons of resumes from people who were absolutely not right for the job.

Photo of a room full of humanoid robots wearing headsets and staring at computer monitors

On the flip side, with the recent tech layoff surge, I imagine job seekers could be desperate enough to try. Hopefully, they'll learn from the experiences of others though, and not waste their money, because a journalist gave it a go. Good thing she wasn't actually looking for a job

The last time I personally had to hire somebody, the garbage applications had really gotten to me, so I told HR that I would NOT be using any of the job sites. Instead, I crafted a job advertisement to run on Craig's List. Because we were looking for a Junior Developer, I put together a very simple programming puzzle (think Fizz Buzz level difficulty). The puzzle was in the ad, and you had to solve it if you wanted the email address that you should apply to.

I got a tiny pool of responses. Most were qualified candidates in the area who were actively seeking work. There was one person from the West Coast who wrote to say they weren't applying for the job, but had fun doing the little puzzle. All in all, it was a great success, and I ended up getting a great minion. (He works for airbnb now.)

I would love to see how the AI bots coped with that strategy.