The Entry-Level Hiring Process Is Breaking Down (theatlantic.com) 113
The traditional signals that employers used to evaluate entry-level job candidates -- college GPAs, cover letters, and interview performance -- have lost much of their value as grade inflation and widespread AI use render these metrics nearly meaningless, writes The Atlantic.
The recent-graduate unemployment rate now sits slightly higher than the overall workforce's, a reversal from historical norms where new college graduates were more likely to be employed than the average worker. Job postings on Handshake, a career-services platform for students and recent graduates, have fallen by more than 16 percent in the past year. At Harvard, 60% of undergraduate grades are now A's, up from fewer than a quarter two decades ago. Seven years ago, 70% of new graduates' resumes were screened by GPA; that figure has dropped to 40%.
Two working papers examining Freelancer.com found that cover-letter quality once strongly predicted who would get hired and how well they would perform -- until ChatGPT became available. "We basically find the collapse of this entire signaling mechanism," researcher Jesse Silbert said. The average number of applications per open job has increased by 26% in the past year. Students at UC Berkeley are now applying to 150 internships just to land one or two interviews.
The recent-graduate unemployment rate now sits slightly higher than the overall workforce's, a reversal from historical norms where new college graduates were more likely to be employed than the average worker. Job postings on Handshake, a career-services platform for students and recent graduates, have fallen by more than 16 percent in the past year. At Harvard, 60% of undergraduate grades are now A's, up from fewer than a quarter two decades ago. Seven years ago, 70% of new graduates' resumes were screened by GPA; that figure has dropped to 40%.
Two working papers examining Freelancer.com found that cover-letter quality once strongly predicted who would get hired and how well they would perform -- until ChatGPT became available. "We basically find the collapse of this entire signaling mechanism," researcher Jesse Silbert said. The average number of applications per open job has increased by 26% in the past year. Students at UC Berkeley are now applying to 150 internships just to land one or two interviews.
feedstock (Score:3)
Re:feedstock (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends on grading... are you testing knowledge, in which case an A from an Ivy has the same value as an A from a middle of nowhere state school (ie, a Medical Terminology class where you simply have to memorize 5000 medical terms...)
Or are you saying "this student mastered this subject and performed better than their peers"? Because if that is the case, a C at a MIT engineering course may well equal an A at middle-of-nowhere-U. Because the "average" MIT engineer should maybe be "better" than the average or above average engineer from MNU ...
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Re:feedstock (Score:5, Interesting)
Harvard has offered remedial reading since 1940 or 1941 [thecrimson.com]. They recently started offering remedial math. Stanford started offering remedial math (though they don't call it that -- MATH 18) in 2022.
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considering how hard it is to get into an Ivy league college why wouldn't most of their students get As ?
How hard is it if you have a parent who is an alumnus and/or donates heavily? Do you really think Trump deserved to get into Wharton?
Re: feedstock (Score:1)
Do you really think Trump deserved to get into Wharton?
Interesting use of the word 'deserved' - and the answer is he probably 'earned' his spot at Wharton, yes, he probably did earn it.
I've seen/worked with graduates from top MBA programs, they aren't all that impressive as a group - individually there are, of course, standouts, but as a group, not so much.
Re: feedstock (Score:5, Informative)
He didn't. His older brother got him in [theweek.com]:
In 1966, Fred Trump Jr. called his close friend James Nolan, then working in Penn's admission office, the Post reports:
"He called me and said, 'You remember my brother Donald?' Which I didn't," Nolan, 81, said in an interview with The Washington Post. "He said: 'He's at Fordham and he would like to transfer to Wharton. Will you interview him?' I was happy to do that." Soon, Donald Trump arrived at Penn for the interview, accompanied by his father, Fred Trump Sr., who sought to "ingratiate" himself, Nolan said. [The Washington Post]
Nolan said he was the only admissions official to talk to Trump and he gave him a rating, but the final decision rested with his boss, and "it was not very difficult" to get into Wharton in 1966, easily higher than 50 percent if you were transferring from another school. "I certainly was not struck by any sense that I'm sitting before a genius," he told the Post. "Certainly not a super genius." Former Wharton classmates say Trump was a middling student.
This is on top of lying about graduating first in his class (he didn't), never being on the Dean's list (the school provided a list of everyone on the list in 1968), or his SAT stats (someone took it for him according to Trump's niece).
So no, he didn't earn anything.
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considering how hard it is to get into an Ivy league college why wouldn't most of their students get As ?
How hard is it if you have a parent who is an alumnus and/or donates heavily? Do you really think Trump deserved to get into Wharton?
If "elite" universities hardly needing the money even suggest they allow and support buying someones admission, then they've just admitted they're not an institution that exists for the sake of providing an excellent education to those who deserve it.
They're now a common whore merely negotiating price.
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If "elite" universities hardly needing the money even suggest they allow and support buying someones admission,
If you don't think this happens, I have a bridge to sell you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Apparently, it has got cheaper recently:
https://www.commandeducation.c... [commandeducation.com]
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If "elite" universities hardly needing the money even suggest they allow and support buying someones admission,
If you don't think this happens, I have a bridge to sell you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Given the many scandals of recent times (a certain Hollywood power couple and their spoiled daughter turned USC rower come to mind), I absolutely believe this happens. The point I was making is reducing admission down to buying it makes a university a whore simply negotiating price. Why do thy cheapen themselves like that? They measure with grades and expect their graduates to be awarded with merit for four years of hard work. Selling admissions means I’m going to assume they sell degrees too. If
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considering how hard it is to get into an Ivy league college why wouldn't most of their students get As ?
That's an argument for employers not to care what the grades were, if all Harvard grads are good enough, and I'm sure there are plenty of employers who will take any Harvard grad.
But for the employers who wish to be even more selective, hiring only the best of the best (and obviously offering appropriate compensation because they're competing with the other employers who want the best of the best), it's useful for them to be able to use GPA to discriminate between the mediocre Harvard grads (who would pre
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Employers need to accept that they have to train and develop people they take on. Grades should be an indication of ability to learn.
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Employers need to accept that they have to train and develop people they take on. Grades should be an indication of ability to learn.
Somewhat. I think it's reasonable for an employer hiring a person with a degree to assume they come with a significant amount of knowledge in their degree field. But, beyond that, sure. I'm confused as to why you felt the need to post this reply, though, since I never claimed otherwise.
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But what keeps other schools from claiming they are wonderful and doing the same?
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Because it makes the grades meaningless.
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Do you actually interact with Harvard students/graduates on a regular basis, or are you saying this because TV man told you?
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Yes, yes I have twice, and one was a CIO.. and lost us the biggest deal we had, and then bailed and joined one of our auditors as their CEO. The company was then purchased and absorbed by a much bigger entity, and I was out on the streets.
A degree from Hah-vahd means shit if you lose us business and then bail out on the mess you made.
I form my own conclusions made on my own experiences. I don't even have a TV, and I get info from many sources. Some online, some real-world, none from Facebook or Twitter o
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That Harvard graduate sounds pretty smart, as he kept moving upwards despite his failures. You, in contrast, got pushed out of your role, which doesn't sound very smart.
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That Harvard graduate sounds pretty smart, as he kept moving upwards despite his failures.
And yet, you would be foolish to hire him.
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Actually, your indictment is properly aimed at 'one of our auditors' who hired this CIO (I refuse to assume their chosen gender) 'as their CEO'.
You've described this former CIO as a failure, and ignored that the auditors your employer trusted must not be a good judge of performance or character, or both.
ps - They were your employer, and owed you no more than compensation for services rendered and fair treatment. The 'much bigger entity' unfortunately would not have had the same priorities or organizational
Re:feedstock (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, you mean like the children of the wealthy? Like Trump? Or Barron Trump?
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Now it's hitting colleges, and boo-hoo, our students can't read or math, we'll still pass them anyway.
Uh, those aren't "students" anymore. They're valued customers. Also known as how we got here.
It's similar to interviewing IT people for a job, and the guy with the MSCE lapel pin and the MSCE logo pasted on his resume will invariably do worse than the less-paperworked but better-educated peer.
Look on the bright side. I'll bet that nerd wearing all those pieces of flair would do great in Marketing.
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They didn't fire the white employees, but they did severely curtail the hiring of white men for entry level and mid level positions
Wrong. The data show the fact: white men (and white women) are less likely to be unemployed than black men and black women. It's not even close. You can look at all the tables you want right here: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat... [bls.gov]
The employment gap between men and women is very, very small. Negligible.
In terms of medical school admission, the admission rate for men is HIGHER than the admission rate for women. That is to say, men are more likely to get admitted than women. Now, way more women apply to me
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I'm not sure that's a valid argument.
Parent was arguing companies have "severely curtail[ed] the hiring of white men for entry level and mid level positions". I am pointing to the FACT that white men still have a lower unemployment rate than black men (and both of those numbers are lingering near historic lows). So if companies truly are hiring white men at a lower rate, it is not showing up in the unemployment numbers. And if they are, in fact, hiring white men at a much lower rate, then it is STILL a higher rate than for Black men (who have
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The points are not contradictory.. Both can be true since the article made a different kind of claim than what you're making. It's fine to not want to read it, but maybe you wouldn't argue with it in that case.
And I don't appreciate the unkindness.
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Did you or the data account for the fact the black population makes up only 13% of the total US population?
Yes, the unemployment RATE is the percent of people who are wanting to work but are not able to find employment. Rates already account for the varying percentage of people in the population.
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Hired a hell of a lot less Asians too. Is that still a racist problem, or do they still "not count" somehow?
Asians also have near historic low rates of unemployment. It's in the data.
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As I said in another post, you missed the point. Absolute rate of employment isn't part of the problem. But you'll understand if I'm not feeling like spoon feeding you the analysis after you've spoken to me so disrespectfully.
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But you'll understand if I'm not feeling like spoon feeding you the analysis after you've spoken to me so disrespectfully
Looking back, "racist, bigoted rant" was a bit over the top and not super helpful. I'll withdraw that line.
But I do stand by my other points - people use anecdote after anecdote to try to claim that white men are the victim in the "DEI" wars; but if you look at the data it is very clear - they aren't. And much of society is built around the goal of keeping white men at a place of prestige and power.
The story about Hollywood and screenwriters being a fixed game, no arguments from me there. But those who ar
Cover letters have been dying for a long time... (Score:5, Informative)
It has been almost 20 years since I was in the entry-level hiring pipeline, but even then cover letters were on their way out. They seem to mostly be a relic from the time that people applied to jobs via snail mail. You needed a cover letter to explain what job you were applying for. Once employers switched to online portals, the need went away.
When I was on the other side of the interview a few years later, HR would rarely even send the cover letter to the hiring manager (if one ever existed). It doesn't take Chat GPT to write a droll form letter that says nothing (and there really is nothing interesting you can say in a cover letter that your resume won't). Career services used to have cover letter templates, and you'd see the same variations over and over. I've changed jobs twice in the last year (unusual circumstance due to a corporate buyout). In neither application did I send a cover letter.
Re: Cover letters have been dying for a long time. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ancient history, but the same theory (Score:4, Funny)
The form said apply in black ink; if you applied in blue you were quickly culled...
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There is still value to cover letters. I worked at a company where we put a very simple prompt in the job req which told the applicant to do something trivial im their cover letter. If they failed to do it, we threw the application away. It was to screen for the most basic skill of observation and to know whether or not the asshole sending in the application had even read the job req, which many folks don't do any more. I'd think we culled 30% of applicants from the go.
I'm going to guess the job was a make-work job you expected to receive an exceeding number of applications for.
Re: Cover letters have been dying for a long time (Score:2)
I once applied for a job, got a rejection letter from the president of the company, telling me there was a typo in my cover letter, but didn't tell me where/what it was.
After reviewing my cover letter several times I couldn't find it, and it pissed me off that this fellow (a name many here would recognize) took the time to tell me I made a mistake, but stopped short of actually pointing out the mistake...
I'm positive he thought he was helping me, and maybe he did long-term, but at the time it came across as
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I once applied for a job, got a rejection letter from the president of the company, telling me there was a typo in my cover letter, but didn't tell me where/what it was.
After reviewing my cover letter several times I couldn't find it, and it pissed me off that this fellow (a name many here would recognize) took the time to tell me I made a mistake, but stopped short of actually pointing out the mistake...
I'm positive he thought he was helping me, and maybe he did long-term, but at the time it came across as an F U power-play.
Since he was trying to be helpful with a response specifically lacking in detail, perhaps you should have granted him the same by politely informing him that you are retracting your application immediately due to some alarming deficiencies in leadership you've recently discovered.
I'm certain he would have found some value in that feedback at the 3AM executive emergency meeting targeting every skeleton in every corporate closet..
Re: Cover letters have been dying for a long time (Score:5)
I once applied for a job, got a rejection letter from the president of the company, telling me there was a typo in my cover letter, but didn't tell me where/what it was.
After reviewing my cover letter several times I couldn't find it, and it pissed me off that this fellow (a name many here would recognize) took the time to tell me I made a mistake, but stopped short of actually pointing out the mistake...
I'm positive he thought he was helping me, and maybe he did long-term, but at the time it came across as an F U power-play.
Sounds like it might have been a test to determine:
1) If you had enough concern/confidence in the quality of your work to review it and determine there was no error.
2) If you had the personal confidence to point out mistakes to upper management.
3) Your ability to communicate and negotiate with people on your team when there's a disagreement.
4) How you respond to criticism.
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Or 5) How you respond to stupid mind games.
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There are plenty of ways to see if someone read the job requirements without a cover letter. Besides, silly "gotcha" prompts can end up screening good candidates while letting bad ones get through. Job applications for many applicants/job types have become a numbers game. It is not profitable to spend too long on any specific application. Some already employed candidates won't put much energy into their search because they don't need a job. But those may be the most desirable candidates.
I've personally neve
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"There is still value to cover letters."
No there isn't, this is 2025 not 1985. The vast majority of job applications now come from agencies who field candidates to the companies, and personal experience has shown me that applying direct through a company portal is a waste of time. You either hear nothing or it goes via an agency favoured by HR anyway.
Re: Cover letters have been dying for a long time. (Score:2)
I landed several jobs (last century) in large part because I used my cover letter to connect my personal job experience with the job description provided - but nowadays, I suspect they go nowhere, since software invests, sorts and filters resumes...
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I've seen it used as a sign that some effort was put into it (as long as it wasn't a form letter). It is nice to know that an applicant spent a few minutes looking into the company.
Jobs can get a flood of applicants nowadays. A tailored cover letter can be a way to differentiate. However, I also get why someone wouldn't bother as they probably will need to put in 100 resumes to even get an interview somewhere. The process really is breaking down, in part thanks to how much automation is happening at both en
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I've seen it used as a sign that some effort was put into it (as long as it wasn't a form letter). It is nice to know that an applicant spent a few minutes looking into the company.
Jobs can get a flood of applicants nowadays. A tailored cover letter can be a way to differentiate. However, I also get why someone wouldn't bother as they probably will need to put in 100 resumes to even get an interview somewhere. The process really is breaking down, in part thanks to how much automation is happening at both ends of it.
We may soon find the real failure is the fact that a Recession has been going on for years now.
Automation, is a convenient excuse. Much like publicly-traded companies posting ghost positions for the sake of maintaining stock price.
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there really is nothing interesting you can say in a cover letter that your resume won't
Disagree. A cover letter is the applicants chance to tell me why I should hire them instead of the other applicants with the exact same qualifications. Especially if you are a recent graduate with limited job experience -it may be the only thing you have going for you.
Getting the cover letter past the HR-bot to someone who may actually make use of it... that is a problem. I don't know if modern application-portal systems even have an option for handling anything beyond fill-in-the-blanks.
SATs for grads (Score:3)
Companies need to get together and hire someone to produce an exam given to all graduates in a particular field, sort of like an exit exam to graduate, but really an entrance exam to get a job.
Re:SATs for grads (Score:4, Insightful)
If there was any difference between racial groups, or between men and women, on such an exam, it would be lawsuit-bait. A lot of the difficulty in hiring is coming up with measures which will easily pass Civil Rights Act scrutiny while still giving good signal (it has to pass _easily_ because even if you win lawsuits every time, the cost of defense will be ruinous). A college degree in a related field is generally accepted. Things like programming tests for programmers are. But the more general your test is, the more likely its relevance will be challenged. And the more widely your test is given, even if it passes CRA muster, the more pressure there will be to water it down to reduce racial and gender differences -- and also reduce useful signal.
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Scotus is fixing that nonsense.
Let's call it the graduation exam... (Score:4, Informative)
The UK is blessed with centrally set and marked exams at 18 that determine which university you get to attend. This means that our 'A levels' are a real record of achievement, though there's some evidence that there's been grade inflation over the past 40 years.
Unfortunately by contrast universities get to set and mark their own exams, and we have seen appalling levels of grade inflation as a result. My own preferred solution would be to deprive almost all universities of the right to grant degrees, instead having a few universities which set all the exams and mark them, in effect like A levels.
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I mean yeah, but everyone knows which are the good universities and which aren't.
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Math teacher here (9th to 12th grade). I wouldn't call centrally set and marked exams a blessing. It reduces teaching in classes to "teaching to the test", so you spend all your time practicing again and again the problems that will be on the centrally set exam, which can only test a very limited subset of your overall math knowledge.
Luckily, I can set my own exams and they consist of a good mix of problems the students have practiced (to test if they learned and are able to follow a specific set of steps),
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Other math teachers also set their own exams. And their principals want to be sure that their school ranks high, so their exams better yield a lot of As. The result is meaningless exams, and teaching nothing.
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That's nonsense. Who would "rank" schools based on their grade average on a non-standardized test?
A non-standardized exam is not meaningless at all, it provides the students feedback whether they sufficiently understands the topics taught or not and if they pass, tells them that are ready for the next level of education.
Challenging reply, thank you (Score:2)
My experience of 'A' levels is pushing 50 years old, and so probably dates to a period when the tendency to 'teach to the test' hadn't become so endemic. A particular feature of the exams we did was that we were allowed to take standard formula books into the written exam, ensuring that we didn't have to put massive amounts of effort into learning trigonometric formulas, merely demonstrate that we could use them to offer proofs...
Here's the sort of paper I must have taken, at age 17. I'd be interested to he
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This looks like difficult stuff. Age 17 seems very early. When I started studying math at ETH Zurich in 1994, I was 19, and we had barely covered all of this during my earlier school career (but then, we also covered some other topics which seem not to be part of the A level syllabus, see below).
These days, students finish school a year earlier, and few of my students would be capable of solving these problems without some extensive preparation.
But then, here's the crux: How much preparation did you get on
To give you some context (Score:2)
The English system of A levels has pupils usually aged 16 - 18, so year 11 and 12 in US terms, doing three major areas of study, and a fourth more general education. In my case this meant I did Maths, Physics and Chemistry all but full time for those two years. That's a lot more focused that US kids do, I believe. For those of us who are only good at a small range of subjects and know what they want to do there, this is great preparation for university. As it happened for me this did not work out great, as
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Medical fields have it (state licensing board exams), law has it (the bar exam), etc.
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Medical fields have it (state licensing board exams), law has it (the bar exam), etc.
Rather ironic both of those fields still require a fucking obscene amount of internship.
Grades are worthless information (Score:4, Insightful)
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I've had about ten jobs since I left school and not one has ever asked for proof of my grades. I didn't even bother getting my degree certificate until I had to send a copy for a visa application; they're the only people who've ever asked to see it.
That said, it may be different now that HR has taken over running so many companies.
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The college I work for requires transcripts for almost all of its positions, including career service type jobs like admin assistants, etc.
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Incidentally, you don't get to see the academic record of your doctor, choose your surgeon by their GPA or even the engineer that signed off on the new bridge by your house. You can only trust the certificate they got. You could be getting the guy who was straight-A near-genius autist, or you could be getting the doctor that was on academic probation twice and squeaked his way through med school.
For what it's worth the best doctor I had was a retired US Army doctor who went into the Army without a high sch
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The worst EE I worked with was self taught.
Reinforcing that is the individual which matters, not the certificate or lack of one.
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Statistically, engineers from podunk colleges tend not to be as skilled as engineers from MIT. BUUUUUUUTTTTTTTTT... If you need someone who knows how to solder a joint, work a ratchet wrench, etc., you might well be better off with the guy from Podunk. Gotta match the skills to the job.
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Q: What do you call a doctor who graduated bottom of their class?
A: Doctor.
Interviews and Probationary Period (Score:3)
The only way to hire is to interview candidates and then see how they do in the 90-day probationary period. An in-person interview is the only way you are going to be able to get a feeling for how someone is going to integrate into your team anyway. As for picking who to interview, just select randomly amongst the applicants who look like they meet your experiential requirements.
This isn't exactly hard or particularly complicated. Entry-level positions mean you are already expecting someone to be coming in green and will need to learn your processes and what your business does. If they seem overly obsequious, obnoxious, annoying or whatever in the interview toss them out and interview the next one.
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The only way to hire is to interview candidates and then see how they do in the 90-day probationary period. An in-person interview is the only way you are going to be able to get a feeling for how someone is going to integrate into your team anyway.
"In-person"? How do most companies afford to fly candidates in for an in-person interview?
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The only way to hire is to interview candidates and then see how they do in the 90-day probationary period. An in-person interview is the only way you are going to be able to get a feeling for how someone is going to integrate into your team anyway.
"In-person"? How do most companies afford to fly candidates in for an in-person interview?
By preferring to hire locally, of course. These are entry-level jobs in this article, there is almost zero legitimate reason to need to cast so wide a net as to require flying a bunch of people in for interviews for an entry-level position. If you actually do need such a specific skillset that you have to look say nationwide, then you are only flying a few people in who are going to be work talking to anyway.
When I've needed to fly for an interview it was always because I do a narrow specialty job, and ever
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Given that hiring locally is the rule, how do engineers end up choosing, and affording to move to, a city in which to find their first job after university?
You could pay someone to write a cover letter (Score:2)
Saw it years ago. (Score:4, Interesting)
college GPAs, cover letters, and interview performance -- have lost much of their value as grade inflation and widespread AI use render these metrics nearly meaningless.
Attended a high school graduation a couple of years ago. The school was practically bragging about how 90% of the graduating class were honor graduates. Really wanted to stand up and ask the Principal to define "bell curve" for the audience that knows damn well how they get their funding.
Not to mention Leave No Child Behind. Reducing education down to the lowest common denominator has real consequences. Employers are feeling that now.
Regarding interview performance, speaking to a candidate in person should convey at least a sense of applicant compatibility if you know how to conduct an interview and not merely have a "chat". If they bring their Mom to the interview, you likely already know how compatible they aren't.
What's "breaking down" exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've heard that everyone and their dog now requires people to use the "AI". So, getting an "AI" resume should tell you your prospective hire has that super-essiential skill that nobody can do without. Even better, I've heard that with the advent of the "AI" there is no need to hire people for entry-level jobs. So stop interviewing, fill that position with the "AI" that you shoot for anyway. While you're at it, fire your HR department - if you're not hiring, you don't need them.
There, you're already ahead. Shit's getting better, efficiency's going up, headcount is going down, and if you miss the 100 people you yell at every morning at the chorei, well, have that agentic whatever show up as 10 agents instead of one, or 100 and talk to all of them.
To be the king is only getting better.
Back to pre-employment testing (Score:3, Interesting)
They're going to have to start giving basic in-person tests as part of the interview process.We've already been making applicants demonstrate basic spreadsheet skills for a couple years. Civil Service exams for example. Your degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on and we tried to warn you this was coming.
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They're going to have to start giving basic in-person tests as part of the interview process.We've already been making applicants demonstrate basic spreadsheet skills for a couple years. Civil Service exams for example. Your degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on and we tried to warn you this was coming.
Employers would be wise to start eliminating that whole ringknocker mentality about college degrees being the ultimate gatekeeper to filling positions with competent people.
Just from a cost perspective, it's likely a hell of a lot cheaper to accommodate the 2-year graduate of community college and a bit of OJT vs. the four-year graduate demanding a six-figure starting salary, because student loans. Every time.
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I know of several companies who are avoiding hiring anyone with a degree for that reason; it's much cheaper to hire competent people without degrees than to hire people with degrees who expect much higher pay so they can pay off their loans.
But they're small to medium sized companies who aren't being strangled by HR.
Conflating AI and grade inflation (Score:2)
Why entry-level wehn there's AI? (Score:2)
I'm sure many corporate "leaders" are thinking that way -- "let AI do it cheaper". Since the old way of working your way to the top seems to have gone by the boards, now they just want to hire experienced workers...and pay them entry level wages...
The illogic of the above approach probably doesn't even dawn on these Captains of Industry.
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Those "captains of industry" only care about next quarter's profits and their bonus. If they actually indulged in long-term thinking, they'd probably miss their quarterly targets and get fired.
Re: Why entry-level wehn there's AI? (Score:3)
now they just want to hire experienced workers...and pay them entry level wages...
Has any employer ever WANTED to pay experienced workers higher pay?
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now they just want to hire experienced workers...and pay them entry level wages...
Has any employer ever WANTED to pay experienced workers higher pay?
Yeah. We even have words for them too. Cronies and Nepotists.
Pity the poor internship providers (Score:2)
Students at UC Berkeley are now applying to 150 internships just to land one or two interviews.
Can you imagine how many applications they must have to sift thru to fill a single internship?
Once upon a time, internships were rare, now everyone expects to get land one (or more) just because...
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15? If they did hiring like some states require landlords to hire tenants, they'd look through their applications in order and hire the first applicant who meets their predefined requirements for the job. Another option if they know a little bit about statistics and expect to review 400 applications to find someone, then they'd find the best applicant out of the first 20 then hire the next applicant who is better than that one (20 = square root of 400).
HR are supposed to be good at HRing, so they should a
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Students at UC Berkeley are now applying to 150 internships just to land one or two interviews.
Can you imagine how many applications they must have to sift thru to fill a single internship?
Once upon a time, internships were rare, now everyone expects to get land one (or more) just because...
To be fair to the applicants, an often repeated complaint is the moronic concept of requiring experience for entry-level positions. Which likely means 95% of the rejects shuffle their way down the hall to the internship department in order to try and get that experience.
Perhaps if more employers remembered the logical horse and cart order here..
If the youngster employmen rate (Score:2)
No, it's not "breaking down". It's changing, which means that people need to scramble, change their behavioral patterns, and most people find that annoying. Then, they go online and write articles about how "everything's broken" while the reality is the that universe simply isn't in a steady state. And, we should be thankful for that. Steady state means that the universe is already in heat death.
Things change. You gotta change too. Deal wi
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If I had a penny for every time I've heard this 'everything is fine, we're just making some changes', I would long be retired by now. Bonus points for 'we're making changes because we're being innovative'. Changes can be for the better, or for the worse. It feels like lately most of changes are of the latter type. It is also possible to make changes that result in everything breaking down. Such changes are undesirable so it's perfectly valid to complain about them.
Undergraduate unemployment in the US and We
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Not just entry level. (Score:3)
As a senior webdev in the agency space for the better part of 2.5 decades I can attest that the hiring process has been absolute shite for at least 20 years now. However, last year it was notably bad. I'm an experienced senior webdev with an impressive project portfolio, a very fine-tuned and optimized CV reviewed by professional career and job application advisors (highly recommended!) and a very solid personal branding (I know a thing or two about marketing and branding) with a professionally run and maintained weblog that has been going on for more than 20 years now. If you Google my name it comes up at spot #1 and comes with a solid and professional presentation.
But last summer it was notably tedious to get a new gig, even for someone as seasoned and experienced as me. I took my salary demands down 20k, applied for 60+ targeted, custom worded and spot on applications where I checked every box listed, less than 10 reactions of any kind, roughly 5 actual interviews, 4 of which with 30+ year old HR dimwitts (albeit somewhat professionally cordial) 2 of which went anywhere with one being one of the shoddiest of low-end crappy in-house web agency teams I've seen in a looong time. In short: It was total carnage.
The last one was a singular webdev staff position in a 70+ lawyer law firm which I'm at right now. I haven't written an single line of code that was mentioned in the job description (a classic thing as many of you may know) but instead was booked on a one-man product development army for an existing shitty bug-ridden jamstack application that was originally designed and built by a dev on crack, or so it seems. The job is OK, I have seniors who know a thing or two about IT and keep our internal customers off my back, the work is chill and I have 80% remote but there is no way in hell I would've gotten this gig without deciders knowing the difference between front- and backend, with solid amounts of luck and chance and yet again HR staying out of the mix.
It was bad back in 2001 after the dot bomb and in 2008, but this time it felt extra challenging.
It must be a total shit-show for some n00b coming straight from college, especially with AI and the global economic downturn we're running in to. I definitely would recommend to any young guy today to steer clear of coding and other IT work and learn a trade. That way one can still remain somewhat relevant even if AI and the bots take over.
The real problem is HR (Score:2)
A *lot* of HR is now outsource. They have NO IDEA what the hiring manager needs, or would like, and ask for years experience for entry level. (No, of course that makes no sense, neither do they have any.)
I'm reminded of an ad, what, 20 or so years ago, requiring five years of python experience... when the language had just been released three years before.
And they want degrees, *and* certifications (right, you've got $5k or so burning a hole in your pocket, for *you* to pay for Oracle, or some other certifi
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HR is basically Political Commissars for business. It's quite insane that anyone let it grow from what should be a tiny part of the business to a cancer that's destroying so many.
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HR is basically Political Commissars for business. It's quite insane that anyone let it grow from what should be a tiny part of the business to a cancer that's destroying so many.
If a business is being strangled or held back by HR, a CEO is failing at their job.
Should have recognized the problem in a department not being measured and disciplined properly. HR is supposed to be a Resource. Not a liability.
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Outsourcing doesn't matter. The last interview I had ended up being for a senior Perl developer despite me having no Perl experience and Perl not being listed on their job description. I was qualified for the job they advertised but that wasn't the job they were hiring for. They interviewed me because I emailed them to point out a mistake in their job application (could only type in numbers for a text-based answer). That was a small business where their head and only HR person also helped with their sof
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Come the Revolution, HR will be led into the parking lot, asphault tossed over them and they'll be paved into the roadway, and thereby serve some use to society.
If we feel that good about HR today, then why in the hell do companies outsource what can be the most valued department in the entire company? They literally help find the resources that run the machine.
Is it limited liability somehow? Can't sue for discrimination after not being hired because third-party outsourced finger-pointing blame game? Why DO companies trust HR outsourcing agencies if the general consensus is they're right up there with lawyers and MBAs come the Revolution?
I'd want more of a pul
Questionable premise (Score:2)
The article says: "Historically, new college graduates were more likely to have a job than the average worker.".
It's a broad brush statement with no geographical or industry scope, and I don't think it's universally true.
In many countries or professions, unemployment rates of recent graduates is way higher than that of experienced folks.
I'm for trend reading as much as the next person, but vague, "not even wrong" premises don't help their credibility.
A solution for grade inflation (Score:3)
This is just applying coming to parity with hiring (Score:2)
For decades, companies have been gradually outsourcing and automating more and more of their hiring pipeline. You might be processed through multiple layers of people who have absolutely no idea what the job you're applying for entails, but they could definitely 86 your application because it was missing a keyword or whatever. Then after the process they ghosted you, because they had a "better" applicant, but they wanted to keep you on the hook just in case, and what better way than to get back to you thr
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It's almost like the solution is to strip away all of the automation and do this stuff in person! If it's not worth employers meeting applicants IRL, maybe their jobs aren't worth filling in the first place?
Flying around the country to apply in person costs a lot of money, and I'd be surprised if most recent graduates can afford that plus the minimum student payment on Walmart wages.
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Not sure why you'd have to fly around the country to apply in person. Before Indeed or Monster or whatever, we didn't fly around the world applying for jobs in person, most people just applied for jobs in person where they lived.
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What's the next step after having been rejected by several companies that had posted entry-level positions in your specialty within 10 km of your home?
Slightly higher unemployment? (Score:2)
The recent-graduate unemployment rate now sits slightly higher than the overall workforce's
Is that really an indication that the hiring process is breaking down, or that we have a catastrophe on our hands?