Employers, please consider removing digital job application submissions and instead require job applications to be postmarked using a physical letter.
Requiring the cover letter to be handwritten may also be prudent.
Yes, hiring can get worse
I'm happily employed, but it's possible that maybe one day I'd like to find a different place to work.
Job searching has always been Kafkaesque, but each of my forays into job exploration over the past 10 years have been progressively more Kafkaesque than the last.
Note that you could use LLMs to automate job applications since LLMs got popular, but the barrier-to-entry was fairly high. Now it's trivially low.
I predict a coming barfstorm of job applications, a freefall in hiring success in an already impossible market.
Physicality can help
On paper (🥁), letters check a lot of boxes to address the problems of LLMs:
- Raises the cost of an application from $0.00 to ~$0.80, reducing junk applications
- Physicality increases the difficultly of using LLMs to automate submissions
- Requiring a handwritten cover-letter greatly raises cost for poor/fraudulent submissions, imposes a comparitively smaller cost for genuine ones
- Require a Carbonless Imprint of the letter, if you don't want to guess if it was printer-printed handwriting in disguise
- Handwriting is unique- if you're skeptical that an applicant wrote/sent the original letter, witness them write something else and compare
- Increases the "interest required" in the position, vs spamming application portals
- No (financial) cost to the employer- update the website text and outline the new requirements
You're dreaming, dude
I'm not harboring any illusions companies will use letters, but I want to throw it out there at least.
What I suspect will happen instead is that companies will further burrow into third-party application systems that offer "AI protection" (which will be a lie, though a comforting one). In the meantime, despair.
Aha! But you see...
Yeah, it's not perfect:
- people can transcribe LLM text
- people will just outsource their letters
- LA-TEN-CY 👏👏👏
- meatspace and non-digital documents scare me
- my handwriting is terrible
- I can't affort stamps
- nobody is going to do this
- LLMs have been applying to jobs for 2 years now, nothing has changed
- LLMs are already going to destroy the world so why does it matter
Fine sure, none of these are incorrect I guess. But the race-to-the-bottom of online applications will only accelerate as the barrier-to-entry of browser/email/desktop-integrated YOLOed LLMs decreases. Something has got to give.