Our job application form has exactly one free text field that we ask you to fill out, saying why you want to work here. > 50% of applicants are leaving it entirely blank. I do not understand.
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I’ve run into some challenges with things like this when applying on my phone, since it is a little harder to be clear in my writing in a text box where I can’t really see everything I’ve written already (although Notes app is the workaround).
Argument is, “don’t apply on your phone” I suppose :)
You mean there's no place where you're forced to tell what year you graduated from high school, so you can be rejected out of hand for being too old without it looking like overt age discrimination? That's refreshing.
Respectfully: 1.) because that is no different than asking for a cover letter, which we all hate and 2.) I hypothetically probably have no particular interest in your company specifically. I have interest in receiving money in return for labor so that I can afford to live and the market is awful
also 3.) at this point we've been conditioned to assume that all application forms are reviewed by some bad AI tool that rejects or passes you based on keywords in the resume, so why would it matter
It didn’t autofill any of the url fields from my resume, but if the parser does catch those sometimes, it would be very easy to be scrolled to the submit button and not notice the field.
(Sometimes I’m helpful as well as irritating - hire me and you could learn more. 😂)
The things that make me excited about a job are almost always things I discover after getting the job, or because I’ve been actively courted by the company.
People cold filling out job applications are doing it because they need to pay bills, have insurance, etc.
Must be nice to work in a company of your choice. The reality for most of us, however, is that to find one job you need to apply to a hundred companies. Most of them you've never heard about before seeing the open position. Most of them you won't hear back from.
What's a good answer to this? Genuinely - I've never understood what companies want from that question, and I always think negatively of those who ask for it.
Are you supposed to say how great the company is and it's been your life long dream to work there? Or the truth (to pay rent)?
Interesting question. I use it more when somebody's experience or skills are marginal and I'm looking for something to put them over the top into the next round.
For instance, I would write something like "I really love teaching developers and am very excited by the potential of AI, so this job is a good combination of my skills and interests". Obviously if you're *not* excited about the job you can't say that.
You don't think you learn that by people applying for a "teaching developers" role at an AI company?
I think most candidates would just unconditionally answer "I'm excited by the future of COMPANY_FIELD" regardless. I'm really skeptical this becomes a useful razor for genuinely assessing applicants
Applicants have been (in most cases, rightly) trained to put minimal effort into the parts of an application that are likely getting fed straight into hiring software and never seen by a person. Curious if you emphasize that every application is read by a human being?
I mean almost every job I've applied for in the past four years has been just auto denying applications due to a single missing qualification that is either irrelevant or made up for by my work experience
The hiring process across the board was made nearly impossible
I changed careers years ago, in part, because when I filled out online job applications, there was always a place where you had to put the year you graduated from high school...for jobs that required college. It was a backhanded form of age discrimination. If you left it blank, it was rejected.
I notice you did not respond to the actual assertion but instead deflected back to the applicant. Do you in fact have a human screen every application? I doubt it, and there is your answer.
Adam is correct. I was going to say nearly the same thing, until I saw his reply and felt it wiser to simply add my own commentary here.
Most job seekers know 95% of the time they will be filtered out via machine before any human sees their response. Hard to remain ambitious and creative.
Oh no! the poor peons who need to be employed in order to have health insurance aren’t taking the time to craft a bullshit story about how much they want to generate shareholder value with AI.
I mean how dare you apply for a job you are probably qualified for without making the employer feel that it has been their lifelong dream and mission to join your company, who, obviously, must be well known to be the street's darling and the next Amazon....
As if proposing to put your skills, time and efforts at the disposal of a business with vacancies in exchange for decent comp & conditions was enough... pffft...
Are preferred answers in the form of long devout incantations and pledges of undying loyalty? Or just simple ego stroking?
Are you referring to "Which excites you most about working at LlamaIndex?"
My impression from perusing the company page is that the evangelism reads like it's for VC eyes and not "hey regular person here are examples of how you'll improve the world"
I’ve read in an article that only 5% of recruiting companies read the cover letter (which is what I understand your blank field is).
Recruiters in general spend 30 seconds per resume and a lot of candidates have understood that statistic as being in a numbers game.
I’m not shaming number’s game people.
They’re tired, busy, they have a lot going on.
Sometimes they need a break and just the feel good part of submitting them out without the hard work.
I hope they can get their peace someday.
I’m number’s game people sometimes.
Honestly to me that seems more like an interview question. Also people often miss exceptions in patterns when focusing on specific tasks so having just one space where applicants need to input something may be getting lost.
Yeah for sure pretty much everyone works for that partly
But saying it in a free text for a recruitment is not really appreciated usually from my experience and guessing they expect something more “profound”
It's because the answers are money, being able to eat, etc, and that is inappropriate to answer. Maybe shift the question to what parts of the job interest you most?
It's hard to write a little ditty espousing one's exceptional yern for a particular company when one has 4 open tabs of other jobs in line to be applied to.
One understated reason is probably how harsh the market is now. It'd be hard to hype yourself up into sincerely explaining this when there's an extremely high chance of no response
Of the remaining 50% about 25% are pasting in chatGPT-generated garbage. Pro tip: people who work with AI all day can tell when you have put no effort into using the AI.
A year ago when I was hiring I got an applicant who left this in a form field before the answer: "As a large language model, I don't have any desires, but here's a response to the question why do you want to work at Netlify" 😅
We added a little open ended question just to ask what tooling you’re currently working with daily. Lot of empty, or copy/paste a chunk of their resume, and some that just said ‘in resume’.
When I looked at a rejected app the resume was clearly generated directly from our job description. It was so obvious when they managed to use the EXACT tech stack we use AND their summary hits all the same points.
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Argument is, “don’t apply on your phone” I suppose :)
Is the funnel to get to that point leading applicants to be excited to work there?
Does wanting to work there specifically make them a better candidate?
(Sometimes I’m helpful as well as irritating - hire me and you could learn more. 😂)
People cold filling out job applications are doing it because they need to pay bills, have insurance, etc.
Are you supposed to say how great the company is and it's been your life long dream to work there? Or the truth (to pay rent)?
If I saw your app and you explicitly stated you read every application, I would be inclined to go the distance if I were in the hunt for a job.
I think most candidates would just unconditionally answer "I'm excited by the future of COMPANY_FIELD" regardless. I'm really skeptical this becomes a useful razor for genuinely assessing applicants
The hiring process across the board was made nearly impossible
Most job seekers know 95% of the time they will be filtered out via machine before any human sees their response. Hard to remain ambitious and creative.
What are you going to do?!
Are preferred answers in the form of long devout incantations and pledges of undying loyalty? Or just simple ego stroking?
My impression from perusing the company page is that the evangelism reads like it's for VC eyes and not "hey regular person here are examples of how you'll improve the world"
the vision is expressed a bit abstractly
Recruiters in general spend 30 seconds per resume and a lot of candidates have understood that statistic as being in a numbers game.
They’re tired, busy, they have a lot going on.
Sometimes they need a break and just the feel good part of submitting them out without the hard work.
I hope they can get their peace someday.
I’m number’s game people sometimes.
But I'm usually wrong.😎
But saying it in a free text for a recruitment is not really appreciated usually from my experience and guessing they expect something more “profound”
It was a bit wild.