Yeah.... nah.
It's bad enough when hiring is outsourced to a company with humans (let's not discuss that, I'd grant most the benefit of doubt). Sure, make it even more of a box-ticking exercise. Sounds like a great plan, doesn't it?
Mega HR, a Florida-based human resources startup, today launched an AI agent service called Megan that the biz claims can automate most recruiting and hiring tasks while improving communication with job applicants. While we're disappointed the firm didn't go with the spelling used in the title of the 2022 horror film M3GAN, …
m3gan: You show no employment for the last 4 years, what were you doing?
Rocco: I was in jail.
m3gan: And what were you studying at Yale?
Rocco: Survival of the fittest.
m3gan: Evolutionary game theory, excellent. I bet you are quite the analytical whiz! i believe you are a good fit for this position.
Rocco: When do I get the first check?
I'm conflicted. On one hand less HR staff, especially on the recruitment side means the worlds a better place.
But AI (LLM) just means more of the same pattern matching of exagerated CVs to unrealistic job specs.
Infact how does this end if candidates are using AI to write the CVs, and companies are using AI for hiring?
Badly I suspect.
To: My User
From: Job Junt AI
Hi, We were accepted for a position at Big Tech Inc and I've finished negotiating the renumeration package.
I started last month and have already had our pay (15 new GPUs and some RAM as a signing bonus) installed in my data centre.
Regards, J.H.AI
PS your bank called, something about rent cheques bouncing; please update your contact details with them as this is the third month they've sent me this message and they got annoyed when I replied with a CV.
The only problem this solves is "Founder lacks sufficent bank balance to buy a yacht."
An HR LLM will begin hallucinating new requirements that simply, flatly, do not exist. Dev specs demanding 25 years for a "Binary" language (the language droids speak in Star Wars) will start popping up en masse.
It'll be even more fun if it starts hallucinating with regards to violations of company policy, or starts hallucinating as to what company policy is.
"Hi Joe!
Please find attached a written warning as wearing shoes on both feet is against company policy and once again you have failed to do so!
Have a wonderful day!"
I know how this will end. Many years ago, working in a large aerospace co. in the UK, HR offloaded initial CV filtering and hiring to an agency. This was great for those of us recruiting cos instead of getting dozens, or hundreds sometimes, of CVs to read and filter, the deal was that the agency would do this initial sift and we'd get the best 8 CVs for each position. It worked OK - we'd get the CVs, the potential recruits were good, we employed some of them and they worked out. Over time I started to notice that the CVs we were getting were looking a bit similar and the candidates were getting a bit variable and having a hard time in the final (engineering-led) interviews. Sometimes we were needing two or three rounds to find people for some roles. Turns out the Agency was using the successful candidates' CVs and their post interview interviews to polish their other candidates CVs. I assume that this will happen all the more quickly with AI and soon every CV will look the same and every candidate will have well-rehearsed answers to get them past the initial interviews with HR and management only to leave the engineering interviews as weeping wrecks.
Once had a guy come in who was full of really polished answers. He seemed to know the stuff thoroughly in the answers he gave my manager.
I just asked one, "compare and contrast" practical question relating to two items he had already talked about.
The result was a 55yo crying as he admitted that he had been coached with all the 'normal' questions by the agency and didn't actually know either of the items (certification standards).
That agency and its staff were placed on our "do not respond to" list.
I was pounding the virtual pavement for two years looking for a job, I'm just not close enough to the finish line to retire... But, in the end, it wasn't how good my resume\CV was, it came down to someone I knew giving me a heads up about an open position. I interviewed with people who have technical knowledge and know how. The interview was scheduled for 1 hour, and 15 minutes into it, one interviewer says to the other, he's nailing it, do we have more questions? Nope was the answer, and soon after I was working again.
I had a similar experience a number of years ago when I (rather foolishly in hindsight) quit my current employer after 23 years due to a misunderstanding with a customer over a software licensing issue. (The misunderstanding was that the customer for whom I was running their data center wanted me to acquiesce to their bold cost savings measure to license a single server for backup software while they actually ran it on close to 500 servers. Their message to me was that 'if we have to spend all that money getting right with the licensing, we won't have the money to spend with your company on the services we've contracted.' The coup-de-grâce for me was that my manager at my employer didn't see the problem with that logic.)
Anyway, this left naive me out into a job-hunting wilderness that I had absolutely no experience in. Instead of six months of unemployment while I sorted through various offers to find the best one, I spent close to a year fruitlessly applying to job after job, hearing back next to nothing except from certain recruiters who literally thought that they could hire someone such as myself with twenty+ years of experience for about what a new hire out of college would expect to be paid. Once I finally managed to breech the perimeter and talk to actual hiring managers at a firm, I was almost instantly re-employed.
In a test scenario, my wife had a quite capable friend of ours who was looking for work apply (through her company's standard HR process) for a position she was trying to fill and for which she thought he was a great fit. Imagine our surprise when his application failed to pass through the rocky shoals of HR processing and land on her desk.
IF an AI agent could be more capable than the currently standard HR vetting process, and work for less remuneration than a human HR staffer, THEN it would be a wonderful boon to both employers and job seekers. The bar seems low, to boot. But recent experience seems littered with AI assistance to HR that failed miserably, so I cannot be even cautiously optimistic about this new advancement.
That sounds like a fucking nightmare!
When you can get your CV blitzed by keyword search or AI coming along and being too stupid to understand you're in the UK & using English spelling, this is just a fucking nightmare....
It's datacentre NOT datacenter..
As someone whose looking at the moment, the market is broken. Totally broken. 100s of jobs applied for. Yet I'm seeing the same jobs advertised again and again for months.
And THEN hiring managers have the chutzpah to bitch about candidates using AI to rewrite our CVs. Or automated software throwing out CVs.
Employers are bitching about "lack of talent", I've been out for 4 months. I know REALLY good guys that have been out for over a year, some getting out of IT altogether. Whose going to be left to train the next generation of IT people? AI won't do it all. Already you're seeing outsourced support guys who literally can't map skill sets from azure to aws & woe betide finding any wintel guys offshored who are even interested in understanding how storage or networking works.
How many "devops" people are just developers who are giving themselves any any access through firewalls & using personal laptops for pron & uploading into the corporate environment?
I hope we see some really really really large outages, I'm talking UKSOUTH going down due to some idiot unplugging something for a hoover..maybe THEN we'll see some sort of understanding. Can you imagine another industry where essentially every firm now is a tech firm, yet the jobs aren't there & expertise is dissappearing.
"You're seeing the same job adverts but are they really vacancies or pimps agencies trawling for candidates who, in all probability, will be put forward for the wrong vacancies."
Companies will also troll to see if they can hook particular people from rivals or aim to drive salaries down by posting (non-existant) jobs with lower than average salaries they can point to.
"Companies will also troll to see if they can hook particular people from rivals or aim to drive salaries down by posting (non-existant) jobs with lower than average salaries they can point to."
Or constantly advertising the same woefully paid position and wondering why they can't fill it.............
"It's datacentre NOT datacenter.."
I've been feeding my spell checker so it will accept either spelling. It's up to me to tailor the version I choose depending on whom my resume will be sent. It might also be "data center" or "data centre". Compound words might not be the best example.
Some years ago my company had a slew of agents offering us *highly qualified* candidates. Now my company was a highly specialist consultancy which had mostly Chemical Engineers, plus some Industrial Chemists and some Control / Instrument Engineers, all degree qualified. The agencies kept offering us candidates with either inappropriate skill sets or no previous experience in working for a consultancy (being a consultant is not for everyone). We interviewed three. One lasted just over 20 minutes before we found out that he had no idea of how to deal with a customer face to face and that his CV was mainly window dressing, the other two had been sent to us with virtually no idea of what the job entailed. One of the two was horrified when he learned that he would be sent out on his own to customer sites (after training) and almost ran out of the door. The third wanted various benefits including a company car and health insurance that we didn't offer.
Another one of my experiences was that one of our large customers fell out with their engineering design contractor after a series of errors, poor designs and missed targets. They ditched contractor No.1 and moved to Contractor No.2 who were across the other side of the city. All that happened is that all the contract (self employed & limited company) sub-contractors were terminated from No.1 and promptly headed across the city to no.2 who were recruiting having got this big new customer. The customer got the same deadbeats wearing a different jacket.
The moral of the story is that there is only a limited pool of talent in any given area and no amount of AI spin will increase the pool of talent.
"the other two had been sent to us with virtually no idea of what the job entailed. "
Most job postings I see are to blame for that. They blather on about the company and any information about what needs doing is very generic. It might even state that the applicant is familiar with some obscure employee management app, a "scrum master", a Sigma black belt, ISO 666013 certified, blah blah. Oh yeah, it would be a good idea to know something about the chemistry of textile dyes.
"The moral of the story is that there is only a limited pool of talent in any given area and no amount of AI spin will increase the pool of talent."
And that's why Remote work is so awesome! We can hire anyone remotely* and it allows us to expand the applicant pool to drive down costs and improve quality!
* Hire remotely, but successful candidates must appear in office 4 days a week plus Wednesdays.
I've see HR use those words very effectively, just not nicely!
It's a shame we have to bring up your lack of competence, we had hoped that you would feel pity on your coworkers, who have had to clean up the mess you created, since you show no remorse, and offer no apology, we're sure you'll be happy on your next employer.
"* fluent in C, C++, C# and Albanian
* right to work in UK, USA and Slovakia
* must be a teamster clarinet player"
If you know that the key employee at a rival company has those qualifications, that might be a good list of requirements since the job will look tailor made for them.
Using odd skill groupings is also a good way to not get much in the way of applicants if you want to get foreign worker visas. If you know you could get somebody that could perform the job and will accept a much lower salary from another country, you advertise the odd requirements locally and the real requirements in that other country with instructions to provide a resume that ticks all the boxes, just in case somebody comes to check up.
3am text: Hi! This is Megan with Tenagra. We were wondering if you have Tuesday nights free? Tuesday night is our company karaoke night. Everybody here loves it! Can you just drop us a note about your availability on Tuesday nights, before our 7:30am stage two intermediate candidate maybes meeting this morning? Thx
< "For a company of 10 to 30 employees, Bounds suggested the cost might run between $200 and $500 per month..."
How many companies that size have even one dedicated HR person? If your turnover is high enough that you are hiring more than a few people per year at a company this small, you likely have more pressing issues to deal with than the hiring process.
"How many companies that size have even one dedicated HR person? If your turnover is high enough that you are hiring more than a few people per year at a company this small, you likely have more pressing issues to deal with than the hiring process."
It depends a lot on the the sort of work you are hiring for. Some jobs don't have people that stay at them for long periods of time. Every job I've had didn't go through an HR department. I was interviewed by the person that would be my immediate supervisor/manager or the person above them. Most of my working life I have been self-employed so I'm not drawing on a large data set. If I were to ever work for somebody else again, I see an interview as going both ways so talking with somebody from HR would seem a waste of time until I was hired and needed to get all of the paperwork done, badges made and all of that stuff. It's not just a question of whether they want to hire me exclusively. I have to want to work for them as well.
They don't have to have a dedicated HR person to theoretically save time and money with software that could do the work of one. If they didn't, someone would still have to do those tasks, it'd just be someone who does non-HR things some of the time. At the high end, a company with thirty employees probably does have someone who could be called an HR person, someone who mostly spends their time with administrative work related to the employees. It depends a lot on what that company does, but I don't think it's that unreasonable. If they don't, they will often contract with an agency which will do some of that for them when needed. That is probably more expensive than this is.
Of course, that probably doesn't go hilariously off the rails, well hilariously if you don't have any stake in it going properly. I'm not convinced that this software can do very much. So far, the two features I'm confident that it has are filtering resumes, which I doubt it can do properly, and communicating with candidates, which really shouldn't be difficult. You could communicate perfectly well with candidates with pre-written mails which get sent when predefined events occur, such as inviting them for an interview or telling them they are no longer in consideration. Companies who can't be bothered to send that latter message probably don't want a program, since it would have taken them about five seconds to do manually.
First, I need to state for the record, M3gan was the inspiration for what we named our agent. I'm a horror film fan and the irony is intended and part of the fun!
Second, I have to say, the comments on this post are not to be missed and I enjoyed all of them. Over the last year, I’ve spent a lot of time on Reddit in places like r/ecruitinghell, listening to or reading about some of the bigger hiring challenges from the applicant side. Nevertheless, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading these comments.
Still, while I appreciate each of you, I’m going to share my top three comments as they stand right now:
1) https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/01/15/megan_ai_recruiting_agent/#c_4996647
2) https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/01/15/megan_ai_recruiting_agent/#c_4996873
3) https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/01/15/megan_ai_recruiting_agent/#c_4996786
Bonus ⭐️: https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/01/15/megan_ai_recruiting_agent/#c_4996839
In the end; apprehension & skeptisim in AI making important decisions impacting humans is warranted as is further removing humans from the process of hiring.
So since you chose to wade into the gladiatorial pits that are this storied publications forum of record, how about we ask you a couple of friendly softball questions.
Since the proceeding article wasn't clear about it, how has your company solved the problem of wasting massive amounts of the applicants time both on each application application and by sending out hundreds of applications? You mentioned that your value proposition was saving time for the hiring team.
Since you started the next generation bot arms race, what is your companies position on applicants responding with their own systems. The predictable next move is an adversarial system. That could be discovery of a "just good enough" application for a given position on the mild side or more pointed resource and denial of service attacks. In either case your company in the unenviable position of soaking the costs of attack traffic while passing the portion of the costs to your customers that they are willing to pay.
AWS or other cloud hosts serving your LLM and infrastructure can and will squeeze any profit their is and funnel as much as they can into their own pocket? Do you have sufficient resources to in house the key infrastructure of MEGAN and still operate it to your clients SLAs? How long would it take for you to switch LLM back ends if your current model provider falls down, is acquired by a competitor, or just decides to crank their fees up to the point you are unprofitable?
The math of your business model favors candidate cramming, as you make money off any candidates that pass the acceptance criteria set. It reminds me of problems with my marketing users setting up ad-words campaigns back in the day and blowing a months marketing budget overnight due to poorly considered selection criteria. What systems to you have in place to limit unintentional spend and protect your users and their budgets?
Based on your description of your technology, it appears you are deferring the final hiring process to humans, probably partly out of your clients caution with new technology and partly as a liability shield for discrimination. Based on your reported sample size of 20 companies, you don't have a statistically sound data set to identify what kind of bias the system is inducing in the hiring process. That means you are courting somewhere between Vegas odds and lottery ticket odds that as you scale your system will be executing biased and probably discriminatory hiring at scale. Are you counting on the "unaccountable black box" defense advanced by so many sociopaths in the fake AI hustle these days, or do you have systems in place that make the decisions impacting an applicant traceable, transparent, and accountable? If MEGAN makes a mistake or follows illegal instructions, who is accountable? Are you indemnifying your customer, or are they going to shoulder the legal bills if your company is caught accidentally rejecting all applicants of a protected class by mistake. What about IP infringement issues? What if one of your upstream model providers gets taken down?
You may have built a system emulating an average under trained HR drone, but further automation of our current broken system isn't going to help much. What fundamental changes to the application process does your platform enact that will improve the problems we face? Currently we are expected to waste large amounts of time filling out a complete application before we are submitted to initial screening. The postings for jobs are often totally vague and generic, so it is difficult to showcase what of your skills and experience would be relevant, and most platforms don't require that the applicant can see the primary selection and filtering criteria that are being applied.
Lastly, I will point out the folly of using an associative inference system (aka and LLM) based on human language to tackle a complex problem set with so many legal issues around it. Brave to build a business on the foundation of a language that has radically non-deterministic behavior and structure. Solving the problems you face with engineers willing to work with you and on a "Torment Nexus" adjacent project.
Fortunately for you, you probably haven't built a good enough system to screen out your own CV when you apply for "future endeavors".
Sadly as a hiring manager I have zero doubt I've missed looking at some awesome folks! Whilst I have complete sympathy with the drudgery of reading loads of CVs, doing so has many times over led me to make some amazing hires in my career! It has never been more evident on the misuse of technology to those applying for work. The deployment of ATS software has so dehumanised the jobseeking world you're lucky to be contacted at all as shown in this article and other articles.
Fuck automation, I'm retiring on Tuesday and will be rid forever of this crap!
If any of you have tried looking for a job lately, or have been on any kind of job searching service, you know they have been run by robots for at least the past year. It's a nightmare, and will not get you anywhere. They are more about collecting and selling your information than trying to find you employment. They are AI collection depots now. I really have just one question:
WTF isn't this illegal? It's a crime. Every turn in today's society. Every thought, every move, every act.... is a crime. It's a criminal world full of junkies and lex luthors. It's like you can't help yourselves, you have to commit crime against your fellow humans to live.
"Give a monkey a stick, and he will beat another monkey to death with it." - The Expanse.
In my last job search, I make the major mistake of putting my resume on Monster. I was hired over 3 years ago, unlisted it immediately, and I'm **STILL** getting people contacting me. Not one contact through Monster or LinkedIn has been close to my field or experience. Not ONE.
Lesson learned - apply directly with the employers. Do not, under any circumstances, post your CV/resume anywhere.
(From the same AC)
Corollary: recruiters (who don't work for the company you're applying to) are just as useless. They, too, will suggest job "opportunities" that are nowhere near your field or level of experience. "I see you have 15 years experience in [x] as a permanent full-time employee. Here's a great opportunity as an entry-level [x], 6 month contract, on the other side of the country!"
I'm retired (yay) but I refused to work with either recruiters or hr. Neither one is qualified to judge technical competency, so why bother?
Get off the internet, to visit businesses, be polite to the receptionist/secretary (sometimes at lunch time the owner will be manning the front desk), and talk to them like a human being.
Also get off your ass and engage with the wider community (volunteer work, etc).
It's harder than just sending off resumes, but it works BECAUSE it's harder than sending out resumes and people are LAZY! You'll end up getting jobs you never even considered but that are interesting.
"You'll end up getting jobs you never even considered but that are interesting."
I wound up in a few feature films, TV commercial and Infomercials by keeping my antennae up. I was doing electrical work for an acting school and a director said I have a good look and might want to sign up at a local casting agency. Two days later I was on set and the next week sitting in front of Rodney Dangerfield. I wasn't going to wait tables for the rest of my life, but it was fun to be an extra now and then. Alfie Boe (singer/actor) got into musical theater in a similar way and hasn't done too poorly from that. Better than staying a mechanic in Blackpool.
The most useful comment among all the verbiage was that he doesn't have a metric to measure success.
Why buy something you don't know how to measure.
It is also through the process of hiring and onboarding that relationships are built. Taking the routine out of the human process leaves less to work with.
I guess we are stuck with this, but it is workers who will get paid less for the chairman's pension scheme!
1st meeting with HR and IT Manager. Confirmed I could walk upright and talk at the same time and didn't drag my knuckles on the ground.
2nd meeting. HR person takes me to a side office.
"Here's your task description, login details, manuals and a terminal. We'll see you in 2 hours. It runs, you're in*."
Obviously that took effort to set up but it very effectively separated those who can do the job from those who can just talk about doing the job.
Never really understood why that's not the normal way to do these things. Obviously there are situations where that cannot be made to work or the setting up of the task is going to be very demanding but I think a lot of the time it would be a viable option.
*I said I was an AP. They said they needed an AP so they decided to see if I could prove it. I could.