Another misuse of AI

[jsburbidge]

 One of the signs of the progress of AI through some areas is the visible degradation of what has before been, not great, but at least competent. Sometimes one sees signs of this where one least expects it - though in retrospect it is certainly something one should have expected.

 

Like most technical people who have a LinkedIn profile I reasonably regularly get relatively random e-mails (originating as messages on LinkedIn) from recruiters who want to know if I might be available for a position.

 

Usually these are not very good matches. People who promote positions with required skills that appear nowhere on your CV because you do development work in the financial sector are executing the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass by spamming a long list of targets which are marked with only general tags in a context where good matches are hard to find. However, they are humanly understandable queries. They read like form letters, but they contain concrete details which show that a human mind was behind at least the general form of the template, or they are clearly a standard form that was broadcast to a large mailing list.

 

Recently I've had a trickle of something else. They come from real recruiters - i.e. not scammers - who have several years in their positions and have a reasonable history on LinkedIn. But the texts look different.

 

They don't have any information about the client, or position, in question. If it weren't for the background of the senders, this would lead me to suspect scam attempts. (Those usually offer very vague positions, frequently "at the executive level", to people with skillsets that in no way would match the offered position.)

 

What they do have is details scraped from my CV scattered through the first paragraph or two. But the details don't quite fit, semantically.

 

Consider "I'm reaching out on behalf of our client who is looking to bring on board an Engineer II. They are impressed by your background in application development". Nobody wants to bring an Engineer II on board; that's an internal title at TD with no meaning outside that context. What they would want would be a senior software developer. Likewise, from the same email "Your expertise in C/C++/C# and work on transaction processing really caught their attention" just isn't what anyone would say. Nobody actually wants all three of C, C++, and C#; if they aren't interested in only one, it will be C/C++ (for optimized close to the metal development, or large legacy codebases) or C++/C# (enterprises with large blocks of both in their current codebases). Plus, clients don't recommend candidates to recruiters; it goes the other way, and recruiters don't let them know about you until you have expressed interest.

 

Or consider, from a different e-mail "Our client is currently hiring for a position that aligns with your skills, particularly in Unix and Software Development." That's not how anyone would promote a position. A sentence like that requires really concrete, and usually slightly rare, skills for it to make sense. If you replaced "Unix and Software Development" with something like "LALR Compiler design" the sentence would make sense, even if it still sounded rather buzzwordy and vague. Usually, the recruiter aiming at a senior hire focusses on describing the position, not the applicant, something like "Our client is expanding their automated trading system on a C++/Linux platform and needs several strong team leads to spearhead the project".

 

These are, of course, AI generated. Established recruiters who used to spend days identifying and contacting candidates for their clients are now clearly telling AI agents to generate "personalized" contact letters for matches from probably AI-driven searches and then sending them out without doing any sort of detailed editing. And those e-mails are almost indistinguishable from scam e-mails, because the generalization characteristic of AI slop wipes out the sorts of concrete details which used to reflect the attention recruiters had to pay if they wanted to get placements. With this approach, the recruiter can replace quality (such as it was) with quantity.

 

I don't think it will work. The problem with this sort of use of AI is that the hit taken from sounding "off", even very slightly, and by poor coordination of detail, will drive off more potential applicants than you might gain from being able to spam more such targets.

Comments

[graydon]

It strikes me that the plan, overall, has to be applying the same "pay us to live" approach to all other businesses that has already been applied to individual persons. (there's just no other way to make enough money to justify the scale of investment.) Which would imply an intent to make interacting with at least one LLM inescapable in a "no other way to get hired" sort of way.

(The recruiters are just being told that they have to meet otherwise impossible numbers.)

Which makes me think not of the Tulip Mania or other classic bubbles but of the South Seas Bubble; there's a new financial system afterwards.

[jsburbidge]

Brad deLong seems to think that it resembles the can bubble if the early 19th century, with the critical difference that because the infrastructure required for most current AI will decay pretty quickly there won't be the residue of useful infrastructure left over when the bubble bursts.

(Definitely a bubble, because the valuations and the money being thrown around require massively greater effectiveness than anything generated by LLMs to begin to justify the money involved.)

AI in this area won't get anyone anything other than maybe a slight reduction in work. At any time there are N positions a given headhunter will be looking to fill, and no use of AI in generating contact e-mails is likely to significantly speed up the job of matching candidates to positions. And with what is happening with current pricing models for AI use it may well be more expensive. My guess here is simply lazy individuals.

[graydon]

There's a take that the 2008 hold-the-economy-hostage approach to getting the banks bailed out might be a deliberate plan, here; legislatively convert the economy into one that's compelled to use AI. (There is some evidence that there's an elite consensus that "winning" AI is important, which is troubling. The people making legislative decisions may not realize how completely the cost-benefit analysis doesn't hold up.)

I hope not, but it would be consistent with the general approach to IT as a thing.

And while I agree that the approach won't work with recruiting, LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and I could easily imagine they making use of AI tools a requirement for the recruiter accounts.