It had already been like this long before widespread LLM adoption: quality hiring was only really possible through manual candidate scouting on LinkedIn, at conferences, through word of mouth, and so on.

Sending a CV had already become mostly useless 3–4 years ago because of the huge amount of noise: candidates applying from all over the world, often even spoofing their actual location, FAANGs firing, flooding the market with (in theory) great candidates with great resumes.

The solution is the same one that has been successfully used forever: a trial period.

Luckily, a video interview with a senior developer is still enough to spot a good candidate.

Go through real code: add a bug to a branch of your codebase, have the candidate share their screen on TeamViewer, and let them debug and fix the issue. Ask questions live to understand how they reason about the system, how they would test whether the change works, and so on.

This will filter out 99% of candidates. But it is still possible to get lucky, which is why the trial period matters.

I’ve never had major issues and have always hired very strong engineers. I only had to terminate someone after the trial period twice.

> Companies are increasingly filtering resumes/candidates in a sufficiently aggressive fashion to the point that they're strongly incentivizing, if not actively selecting for, people that are gaming the system in some way or another.

Which itself is a symptom of companies getting drowned in AI generated resumes. It's becoming more common for people to use AI tools that will operate browsers to mass-submit resumes for them. When you receive 1000 resumes you have to start filtering somewhere.

What I'm worried about now is that we're moving to a situation where some level of proof-of-work that an AI can't easily do is going to become necessary to have some filtering. I don't know what that looks like, but I don't like it.

> Quite odd this is all happening when ostensibly the unemployment rate is very low, which should make it an employee's market.

Unemployment rate is not evenly distributed. If you were a licensed electrician or qualified as a home healthcare aid then you could walk from one job to another in many cities.

If you're trying to get a $200K or more tech job, then you're competing with everyone else for a shrinking pool of openings.

> Companies are increasingly filtering resumes/candidates in a sufficiently aggressive fashion to the point that they're strongly incentivizing, if not actively selecting for, people that are gaming the system in some way or another.

The gaming of the system has been happening for a very long time. When I was a teen looking for my first job, companies were being flooded by resumes due to cheap laser printing (either custom to the employer, or simply duplicated en mass). A few years after that, it was being flooded by online applications or applications via email. Each time businesses had to take a more aggressive stance at filtering since they had more applicants per opening than before.

I suspect that we are going to have to go back to the bad old days of relying on real social networks (not the imaginary ones people create build around finding work) or applicants walking door to do with printed resumes in hand (simply because it is going to be easier to vet someone who walk in the door than false positives from software that filters applicants out).