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#jobhunt

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SimonM

In my #jobhunt, I had a no.1 choice for a fair while. I did 4 rounds of interviews with them over the space of 2 months. Today:

"We were impressed by your background and skill set, however, after careful consideration, we’ve decided not to proceed with your application at this time. We would like to note that we often have to make difficult choices between many high-caliber [sic] candidates so well done for getting to this stage. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide individual feedback on your application due to the high volume of candidates."

Back to square 1.
#jobhunting

Public *
Straithe

I've posted an open-access article on my Patreon for all you job hunters out there. This one is on employment references and how to choose references, get the best review from your references, and how to treat them well.

If you are someone who is often a reference, you may enjoy reading this piece and passing it on to people who ask you to be their reference. Ping me if you have any questions!

patreon.com/posts/125592927

#jobHunt#employmentReferences
Public
Paco Hope #resist

I interviewed a candidate recently where everyone on the panel is convinced the person was reading the output of an LLM in real time. It seems likely that they had the audio piped to some kind of system that heard the questions and wrote plausible replies. Of course none of us KNOW this to be true, we just strongly suspect it.

They would say things like "we implemented a privacy protocol" and I would say "I'm in security, but privacy really isn't my area. Can you explain a bit what a 'privacy protocol' is?" You know the thing they JUST said in the immediately prior sentence? And the candidate was stumped. They hemmed and hawwed and delayed with phrases like "mmm, let me think of just the right way to answer that..."

It is totally trivial to detect and defeat someone interviewing this way. All you have to do is ask follow-up questions. "That's interesting, what did you do next?" or "Tell me how you decided that was the right thing to do?" LLMs don't tell coherent stories. They're just making stuff up. All you have to do is ask for details. The details won't tell a consistent story. They told me about a situation that was a "suspected data breach" but it turned out to be a false alarm. I asked "what gave you confidence that it was not a data breach?" and they really struggled to answer that.

The other thing that was laughable was their approach to the code and design exercise. Given a problem description, they were able to—almost instantly—verbally outline the right solution. And when asked questions like "what's the computational complexity?" they could provide the right answer (e.g., "O(n)" or "O(log n)"). And then you ask a really simple follow-up question like "so what's the outermost for() loop going to look like?" and they can't answer. There is no for() loop in their head.

They didn't want to be obvious in their copy/pasting of code from an LLM, so they typed. But since they didn't understand actual Python syntax, they used the wrong quote marks (e.g., ` instead of ') and they didn't take care with indentation.

I'm told this is a problem in lots of roles at lots of companies. Heaven help us all.
#employment #interview #jobinterviews #jobhunt

Public
Paco Hope #resist

The problem is not that these lists exist. The problem sounds like the lists get abused. If someone is terminated for cause (maybe they committed a crime, or a seriously bad behaviour) the company needs to remember not to bring them back.

But for privacy reasons (I suspect) they can’t write down WHY the company won’t rehire. Imagine seeing not just a “do not engage” flag, but also some label like “crime: fraud” or “HR: sexual misconduct” next to the do-not-hire flag. A recruiter, who needs to know NOT to interview this person, is staring at the person’s personal details and now also some really sensitive info about them—that the recruiter really has no business knowing.

But like many secret things, this cuts both ways. The US’s famous “do not fly” list works similarly. Can’t find out if you’re on it, can’t find out WHY you’re on it, no path to legally challenge it. No clear criteria or process for putting people on it or reevaluating whether they need to remain on it.

Secret lists are really problematic. If companies didn’t keep these lists, they might rehire bad people the way cops with disciplinary records just move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. I don’t know how to do the good blocks while preventing the abuse of bad blocks.

#employment #hiring #jobhunt

businessinsider.com/how-block-

Business Insider · How block lists silently affect your job search and career advancementBy Pranav Dixit
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