Archive for the Q&A Category

Question

First we had to learn to cough up the key words some Applicant Tracking System (ATS) wants to see when we submit a job application. Now we have to use ChatGPT to write our resumes and applications because employers are using ChatGPT to write job descriptions and postings. Where does it end? Why don’t they just hire the ChatGPT?

Nick’s Reply

(In this column, I will use ChatGPT as a catch-all term for all generations and competing products of the underlying technology, because this is not an analysis of the technology itself.)

An L.A. Times story tells how to write a cover letter and resume using the artificial intelligence of ChatGPT. The technology is credited by users with the skills of a professional coach or editor:

“The aspects of using AI to assist — it’s a tool,” job seeker Jesse said. “Imagine you had an expert next to you telling you how to get better… It wrote [a cover letter and resume] better than I ever could.”

Seriously? An expert?

Is ChatGPT an expert?

Human experts like Noam Chomsky describe these A.I. systems in The New York Times like this (emphasis added):

“Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought….ChatGPT and its ilk [are] a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question.”

“…machine learning systems can learn both that the earth is flat and that the earth is round. They trade merely in probabilities that change over time.”

What game are we playing?

Employers and the Employment Industry at large are creating an increasingly complex game of recruitment advertising and hiring. Of course, now job seekers are learning to play the game by deploying ChatGPT against ChatGPT. (We warned you 7 years ago: Send a robo-dog to interviews.)

But how does this approach of gaming a system that is itself a game play out? Who gets hurt? Who benefits? Will Jesse get the right job? Will you?

What’s the outcome?

The proliferation of job boards and ATSes doesn’t seem to have fixed the talent shortage for employers, and it hasn’t fixed unemployment for workers. But we still use them, perhaps because we keep avoiding an outcomes analysis. Maybe it’s because automating it makes job hunting less painful, even if that doesn’t really work.

So let’s automate some more! But let’s check the outcomes, eh?

Does reliance on ChatGPT improve:

• the quality of applicants or candidates,
• the quality of hires,
• the quality of a job match for the job seeker?

Or are we just getting better and quicker at pushing a square peg into a round hole before anyone realizes the damage that may be caused?

ChatGPT: Everybody can do it

Then there’s the problem of needing to use a cheat-checker to avoid getting caught cheating. Though Jesse lauded ChatGPT for cranking out good cover letters, saving him work, “there was one additional step involved: running the letter through online A.I. scanners that have popped up to detect A.I.-generated writing to make sure it passed the test in case companies checked.”

The L.A. Times story cites other job seekers who report that “tapping ChatGPT to write their cover letters was a no-brainer…. ‘A bot reads them,’ they said, referring to cover letter and resume-scanning software that many employers use to filter out candidates. ‘I’ll get a bot to write them.’”

Everybody’s doing it.

Interview the glove!

Kind of sounds like a nuclear proliferation treaty will be needed before real information about workers and jobs disappears in a mind-numbing hall of machine-learning mirrors.

Players on all sides of the Employment System have adopted a virtual process that creates avatars or surrogates to conduct the business of matching workers and jobs. Maybe another analogy is more apt: the old complaint about “washing your hands with rubber gloves on.”

Just hire the ChatGPT

Of course, what’s wrong with hiring someone who used ChatGPT to produce their cover letter, if this new employee will use ChatGPT to do their job, too?

Play this out, though: Who needs this new employee? The hiring technology could also be used to do the job.

Well, at least a lot of people other than Noam Chomsky seem to think so.

(Does anyone see what I see? ChatGPT is just the next level of keyword matching that drives sincere job seekers mad as they lard their resumes and job applications with strings of letters they know the algorithm is searching for. While the new tool is certainly more powerful — it will lard your resume for you — is it actually any different?)

What does the use of ChatGPT tell us about how the employment system works? If employers are going to hire based on auto-written cover letters and resumes, what does that tell us about how they assess job applicants? And of course, what does it tell us about job seekers who use ChatGPT?

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Question

Some states are removing the requirement for college degrees when posting most of their government positions. Do you have any thoughts on this and how it will affect recruiting, and how it might affect the commercial world if it adopted the same rule? For instance, if a recruiter can’t rely on a degree, what can they look at?

Nick’s Reply

I know you’re referring to the controversy in the labor market about whether job descriptions that specify a college degree actually require one to do the job. Is the degree really necessary? But let’s get underneath that: What can an employer — whether government or commercial — rely on to make a sound hiring judgment?

What do college degrees mean to recruiters?

What good does a candidate’s college degree do a recruiter if they don’t verify it? We’ve seen enough of this in the news — and by the time phony claims of degrees and fake resumes are exposed it’s always too late! The damage has been done to the individual’s reputation (and career and income), but also to the employer’s credibility. (Who wants to invest in, buy from, or work for a company that embarrasses itself like that?)

Removing a degree requirement will make little difference to a good recruiter who relies on more meaningful and reliable assessments of job candidates. On the other hand, it will drive inept recruiters nuts because now they actually have to do the hard work of qualifying applicants. Likewise, college-educated job seekers may find themselves having to demonstrate actual ability to do a job, rather than rest on their academic credentials.

Don’t get me wrong. I think college degrees are useful to a recruiter, but they are not sufficient for making judgments about candidates. The real message in the elimination of degree requirements is that employers need to do a much better job of assessing candidates directly, rather than relying on proxies like sheepskins, certifications, third-party reference checks, and indirect algorithm-driven evaluations. This goes for all kinds of jobs, not just government or “professional” ones.

So let’s answer your question.

If not college degrees, then what should recruiters look at?

Next to a demonstration of how they’d do the job, I think the single best indicator of a good candidate is their references. The best recruiters do their own reference checks. The lazy ones don’t do it all or outsource it — and I think this is a critical mistake. (See References: How employers bungle a competitive edge.) A third-party reference checker who’s just asking canned questions is not going to “read between the lines.” Even written references aren’t sufficient. You need that phone call and you’ve got to hear the voice.

I have always done reference checks myself on all my candidates – before I send them to a client employer. I want to know whether their resume and other claims they make are confirmed by people they’ve worked with. If the references conflict with any conclusions I might draw from the resume or the degree, it’s “no dice.” I’ve placed people with no degree who are stars – more expert than degreed people. And I’ve tossed out candidates with degrees when their references fail to support what their college degree implies.

What’s most interesting to me are candidates with no degrees and weak resumes. These poor people just don’t know how to portray themselves. But if their references SING! — that makes me take another look, and that’s made me lots of dough. Nothing makes me look better than finding a star everybody else has missed! But what about the recruiter who just skims the surface and misses a great candidate?

The Columbo Method

There’s something I ask at the end of every reference check that helps me test whatever I’ve already concluded. It’s an interrogation technique made famous in an old TV show, Columbo, starring Peter Falk as a disarmingly casual police detective. As I’m saying thanks and goodbye to the reference, I stop and ask, “Uh, just one more thing. If you could hire this person again today, would you?”

Like Columbo, I want to catch the reference off-guard. What I’m looking for is any hesitation before a YES. That is to say, even good references might not be enough! No automated reference check is going to give you that data point – nor will a degree.

Unfortunately, the elimination of degree requirements will likely make a bigger mess of inadequate recruiting practices. Maybe direct assessment of ability to do the job and talking with people who have first-hand experience working with the candidate will suddenly appear to be a really good idea. Which recruiters can do it?

Uh, just one more thing… College degrees, or…

Here’s an idea for a test I’d love to see. Line up 20 job candidates who have no college degree and 20 with degrees. Let employers interview all of them — for job postings that do and don’t specify a degree — without disclosing who does and does not have a degree. Who gets hired? How do the employers decide?

Have you ever gotten a good job that “required” a degree you didn’t have? If you have a degree, think you could win a job without relying on it? Ever hire someone without a degree for a “degreed” position? If you’re a recruiter, how much stock do you put in college degrees? What else do you rely on to assess a candidate?

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