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Part of my resume review process is trying to decide if I can trust the person. If their resume seems too AI-generated, I feel less like I can trust that candid

Part of my resume review process is trying to decide if I can trust the person. If their resume seems too AI-generated, I feel less like I can trust that candidate and typically reject the candidate. Once you get to the interview process, it's very clear if someone thinks they can use AI to help with the interview process. I'm not going to sit here while you type my question into OpenAI and try to BS a meaningful response to my question 30 seconds later. AI-proof interviewing is easy if you know what you're talking about. Look at the candidates resume and ask them to describe some of their past projects. If they can have a meaningful conversation without delays, you can probably trust their resume. It's easy to spot BS whether AI is behind it or not.

ktallett 2y ago
This, and tbh this has always been the best way. Someone who has projects, whether personal or professional, and has the capability to discuss those projects in depth and with passion will usually be a better employee than a leet code specialist.
- remus 2y ago
  Doesn't even have to be a project per se, if they can discuss some sort of technical topic in depth (i.e. the sort of discussion you might have when discussing potential solutions to a problem) then that's a great sign imo.
- polishdude20 2y ago
  My resume has a bunch of personal projects on there as well as work experience and the project experience seems to not help at all. Just rejections after rejections.
  - ktallett 2y ago
    My suggestion was in an ideal world which sadly this isn't. Your issue suggests they aren't tailored for each application, which could potentially be a reason. It is better to show why one project makes you a great fit as opposed to how many projects you have done. Sometimes the person in charge of hiring may not fully have all the expertise in the area they are hiring for.
satvikpendem 2y ago
There are much more sophisticated methods than that now with AI, like speech to text to LLM. It's getting increasingly harder to detect interviewees cheating.
- yowlingcat 2y ago
  I think GP's point is that this says as much about the interview design and interviewer skill as it does about the candidate's tools. If you do a rote interview that's easy to game with AI, it will certainly be harder to detect them cheating. If you have an effective and well designed open ended interview that's more collaborative, you get a lot more signal to filter the wheat from the chaff.
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    > If you have an effective and well designed open ended interview that's more collaborative, you get a lot more signal to filter the wheat from the chaff. I understood their point but my point is a direct opposition to theirs, that at some point with AI advances this will essentially become impossible. You can make it as open ended as you want but if AI continues to improve, the human interviewee can simply act as a ventriloquist dummy for the AI and get the job. Stated another way, what kind of "effective and well designed open ended interview" can you make that would not succumb to this problem?
    - b112 2y ago
      This is called fraud, and it is a crime. People don't really call the police, nor sue over this. But they can, and have in the past. If it gets bad, look for people starting to seek legal recourse. People aren't developers with 5 years experience, if all they can do is copy and paste. Anyone fraudulently claiming so is a scam artist, a liar, and deserves jail time. So you create an interview process that can only be passed by a skilled dev, including them signing a doc saying the code is entirely their work, only referencing a language manual/manpages. And if they show up to work incapable of doing the same, it's time to call the cops. That's probably the only way to deal with scam artists and scum, going forward.
vunderba 2y ago
Agreed. This is why - while I won't ding an applicant for not having a public Github, I'm always happy when they do because usually they'll have some passion projects on there that we can discuss.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  Also because most people are busy with actual work and don't have the time to have passion projects. Some people do, and that's great, but most people are simply not passionate about labor, regardless of what kind of labor it is.
- pdimitar 2y ago
  I have 23 years of experience and I am almost invisible on GitHub, and for all those years I've been fired from 4 contracts due to various disconnects (one culture mis-fit and two under-performances due to illness I wasn't aware of at the time, and one because the company literally restructured over the weekend and fired 80% of all engineers), and I have been contracting a lot in the last 10 years (we're talking 17-19 gigs). If you look solely at my GitHub you'd likely reject me right away. I wish I had the time and energy for passion projects in programming. I so wish it was so. But commercial work has all but destroyed my passion for programming, though I know it can be rekindled if I can ever afford to take a properly long sabbatical (at least 2 years). I'll more agree with your parent / sibling comments: take a look at the resume and look for bad signs like too vanilla / AI language, too grandiose claims (though when you are experienced you might come across as such so 50/50), or almost no details, general tone etc. And the best indicator is a video call conversation, I found as a candidate. I am confident in what I can do (and have done), I am energetic and love to go for the throat of the problems on my first day (provided the onboarding process allows for it) and it shows -- people have told me that and liked it. If we're talking passion, I am more passionate about taking a walk with my wife and discussing the current book we're reading, or getting to know new people, or going to the sauna, or wondering what's the next meetup we should be going to, stuff like that. But passion + work, I stand apart by being casual and not afraid of any tech problems, and by prioritizing being a good teammate first and foremost (several GitHub-centric items come to mind: meaningful PR comments and no minutiae, good commit messages, proper textual comment updates in the PR when f.ex. requirements change a bit, editing and re-editing a list of tasks in the PR description). I already do too much programming. Don't hold it against me if I don't live on the computer and thus have no good GitHub open projects. Talk to me. You'll get much better info.
brianstrimp 2y ago
Good interviews are a conversation, a dialog to uncover how the person thinks, how they listen, how they approach problems and discuss. Also a bit detail knowledge, but that's only a minor component in the end. Any interview where AI in its current form helps is not good anyway. Keep in mind that in our industry, the interview goes both ways. If the candidate thinks your process is bad then they are less inclined to join your company because they know that their coworkers will have been chosen by a subpar process. That said, I'm waiting for an "interview assistant" product. It listens in to the conversation and silently provides concise extra information about the mentioned subjects that can be quickly glanced at without having to enter anything. Or does this already exist? Such a product could be useful for coding to. Like watching me over the shoulder and seeing aha, you are working with so-and-so library, let me show you some key parts of the API in this window, or you are trying to do this-and-that, let me give you some hints. Not as intrusive as current assistants that try to write code for you, just some proactive lookup without having to actively seek out information. Anybody knows a product for that?
- kmoser 2y ago
  That might be good for newbie developers but for the rest of us it'll end up being the Clippy of AI assistants. If I want to know more about an API I'm using, I'll Google (or ask ChatGPT) for details; I don't need an assistant trying to be helpful and either treating me like a child, or giving me info that maybe right but which I don't need at the moment. The only way I can see that working is if it spends hundreds of hours watching you to understand what you know and don't know, and even then it'll be a bit of a crap shoot.
- sien 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure I've been in an interview with an 'interview assistant' and that it was another person. This was 2-3 years ago in a remote interview. The candidate would hear the question, BS us a bit and then sometimes provide a good answer. But then if we asked follow up questions they would blow those. They also had odd 'AV issues' which were suspicious.
yosito 2y ago
> If their resume seems too AI-generated, I feel less like I can trust that candidate and typically reject the candidate So you just subjectively say "this resume is too perfect, it must be bullshit"? How the fuck is any actual, qualified engineer supposed to get through your gauntlet of subjectivity?
- colonial 2y ago
  You'd be surprised at how good you can get at sniffing out slop, especially when it's the type prompted by fools who think it'll get them an easy win. Often the actual content doesn't even factor in - what triggers my mental heuristics is usually meta stuff like tone and structure. I'm sure some small % of people get away with it by using LLaMA-FooQux-2552-Finetune-v3-Final-v1.5.6 or whatever, but realistically, the majority is going to be obvious to anyone that's been force-fed slop as part of their job.
- alok-g 2y ago
  The strong language used aside, indeed, we should be cautious of our own potential biases when screening or otherwise. I am imagining an AI saying my CV is AI-generated, when in reality, I do not even use Auto-correct or Auto-suggest when I (type)write! :-)
RajT88 2y ago
> AI-proof interviewing is easy if you know what you're talking about. Look at the candidates resume and ask them to describe some of their past projects. If they can have a meaningful conversation without delays, you can probably trust their resume. It's easy to spot BS whether AI is behind it or not. Generally, this is how to figure out if a candidate is full of crap or not. When they say they did a thing, ask them questions about that thing. If they can describe their process, the challenges, how they solved the challenges, and all of it passes the sniff test: If they are bullshitting, they did crazy research and that's worth something too.
hibikir 2y ago
There's candidates running speech-to-text that avoid the noticeable delays, but it's still possible to do the right kind of digging the AI will almost always refuse to do, because it's way too polite. It's as if we were testing for replicants in Blade Runner: The AI response will rarely figure out you are aiming to look for something frustrating, that they are actually proud of, or figure out when you are looking for a hot take you can then disagree with.

ktallett 2y ago

This, and tbh this has always been the best way. Someone who has projects, whether personal or professional, and has the capability to discuss those projects in depth and with passion will usually be a better employee than a leet code specialist.

remus 2y ago
Doesn't even have to be a project per se, if they can discuss some sort of technical topic in depth (i.e. the sort of discussion you might have when discussing potential solutions to a problem) then that's a great sign imo.
polishdude20 2y ago
My resume has a bunch of personal projects on there as well as work experience and the project experience seems to not help at all. Just rejections after rejections.
- ktallett 2y ago
  My suggestion was in an ideal world which sadly this isn't. Your issue suggests they aren't tailored for each application, which could potentially be a reason. It is better to show why one project makes you a great fit as opposed to how many projects you have done. Sometimes the person in charge of hiring may not fully have all the expertise in the area they are hiring for.

satvikpendem 2y ago

There are much more sophisticated methods than that now with AI, like speech to text to LLM. It's getting increasingly harder to detect interviewees cheating.

yowlingcat 2y ago
I think GP's point is that this says as much about the interview design and interviewer skill as it does about the candidate's tools. If you do a rote interview that's easy to game with AI, it will certainly be harder to detect them cheating. If you have an effective and well designed open ended interview that's more collaborative, you get a lot more signal to filter the wheat from the chaff.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  > If you have an effective and well designed open ended interview that's more collaborative, you get a lot more signal to filter the wheat from the chaff. I understood their point but my point is a direct opposition to theirs, that at some point with AI advances this will essentially become impossible. You can make it as open ended as you want but if AI continues to improve, the human interviewee can simply act as a ventriloquist dummy for the AI and get the job. Stated another way, what kind of "effective and well designed open ended interview" can you make that would not succumb to this problem?
  - b112 2y ago
    This is called fraud, and it is a crime. People don't really call the police, nor sue over this. But they can, and have in the past. If it gets bad, look for people starting to seek legal recourse. People aren't developers with 5 years experience, if all they can do is copy and paste. Anyone fraudulently claiming so is a scam artist, a liar, and deserves jail time. So you create an interview process that can only be passed by a skilled dev, including them signing a doc saying the code is entirely their work, only referencing a language manual/manpages. And if they show up to work incapable of doing the same, it's time to call the cops. That's probably the only way to deal with scam artists and scum, going forward.

vunderba 2y ago

Agreed. This is why - while I won't ding an applicant for not having a public Github, I'm always happy when they do because usually they'll have some passion projects on there that we can discuss.

satvikpendem 2y ago
Also because most people are busy with actual work and don't have the time to have passion projects. Some people do, and that's great, but most people are simply not passionate about labor, regardless of what kind of labor it is.
pdimitar 2y ago
I have 23 years of experience and I am almost invisible on GitHub, and for all those years I've been fired from 4 contracts due to various disconnects (one culture mis-fit and two under-performances due to illness I wasn't aware of at the time, and one because the company literally restructured over the weekend and fired 80% of all engineers), and I have been contracting a lot in the last 10 years (we're talking 17-19 gigs). If you look solely at my GitHub you'd likely reject me right away. I wish I had the time and energy for passion projects in programming. I so wish it was so. But commercial work has all but destroyed my passion for programming, though I know it can be rekindled if I can ever afford to take a properly long sabbatical (at least 2 years). I'll more agree with your parent / sibling comments: take a look at the resume and look for bad signs like too vanilla / AI language, too grandiose claims (though when you are experienced you might come across as such so 50/50), or almost no details, general tone etc. And the best indicator is a video call conversation, I found as a candidate. I am confident in what I can do (and have done), I am energetic and love to go for the throat of the problems on my first day (provided the onboarding process allows for it) and it shows -- people have told me that and liked it. If we're talking passion, I am more passionate about taking a walk with my wife and discussing the current book we're reading, or getting to know new people, or going to the sauna, or wondering what's the next meetup we should be going to, stuff like that. But passion + work, I stand apart by being casual and not afraid of any tech problems, and by prioritizing being a good teammate first and foremost (several GitHub-centric items come to mind: meaningful PR comments and no minutiae, good commit messages, proper textual comment updates in the PR when f.ex. requirements change a bit, editing and re-editing a list of tasks in the PR description). I already do too much programming. Don't hold it against me if I don't live on the computer and thus have no good GitHub open projects. Talk to me. You'll get much better info.

brianstrimp 2y ago

Good interviews are a conversation, a dialog to uncover how the person thinks, how they listen, how they approach problems and discuss. Also a bit detail knowledge, but that's only a minor component in the end. Any interview where AI in its current form helps is not good anyway. Keep in mind that in our industry, the interview goes both ways. If the candidate thinks your process is bad then they are less inclined to join your company because they know that their coworkers will have been chosen by a subpar process. That said, I'm waiting for an "interview assistant" product. It listens in to the conversation and silently provides concise extra information about the mentioned subjects that can be quickly glanced at without having to enter anything. Or does this already exist? Such a product could be useful for coding to. Like watching me over the shoulder and seeing aha, you are working with so-and-so library, let me show you some key parts of the API in this window, or you are trying to do this-and-that, let me give you some hints. Not as intrusive as current assistants that try to write code for you, just some proactive lookup without having to actively seek out information. Anybody knows a product for that?

kmoser 2y ago
That might be good for newbie developers but for the rest of us it'll end up being the Clippy of AI assistants. If I want to know more about an API I'm using, I'll Google (or ask ChatGPT) for details; I don't need an assistant trying to be helpful and either treating me like a child, or giving me info that maybe right but which I don't need at the moment. The only way I can see that working is if it spends hundreds of hours watching you to understand what you know and don't know, and even then it'll be a bit of a crap shoot.
sien 2y ago
I'm pretty sure I've been in an interview with an 'interview assistant' and that it was another person. This was 2-3 years ago in a remote interview. The candidate would hear the question, BS us a bit and then sometimes provide a good answer. But then if we asked follow up questions they would blow those. They also had odd 'AV issues' which were suspicious.

yosito 2y ago

> If their resume seems too AI-generated, I feel less like I can trust that candidate and typically reject the candidate So you just subjectively say "this resume is too perfect, it must be bullshit"? How the fuck is any actual, qualified engineer supposed to get through your gauntlet of subjectivity?

colonial 2y ago
You'd be surprised at how good you can get at sniffing out slop, especially when it's the type prompted by fools who think it'll get them an easy win. Often the actual content doesn't even factor in - what triggers my mental heuristics is usually meta stuff like tone and structure. I'm sure some small % of people get away with it by using LLaMA-FooQux-2552-Finetune-v3-Final-v1.5.6 or whatever, but realistically, the majority is going to be obvious to anyone that's been force-fed slop as part of their job.
alok-g 2y ago
The strong language used aside, indeed, we should be cautious of our own potential biases when screening or otherwise. I am imagining an AI saying my CV is AI-generated, when in reality, I do not even use Auto-correct or Auto-suggest when I (type)write! :-)

RajT88 2y ago

> AI-proof interviewing is easy if you know what you're talking about. Look at the candidates resume and ask them to describe some of their past projects. If they can have a meaningful conversation without delays, you can probably trust their resume. It's easy to spot BS whether AI is behind it or not. Generally, this is how to figure out if a candidate is full of crap or not. When they say they did a thing, ask them questions about that thing. If they can describe their process, the challenges, how they solved the challenges, and all of it passes the sniff test: If they are bullshitting, they did crazy research and that's worth something too.

hibikir 2y ago

There's candidates running speech-to-text that avoid the noticeable delays, but it's still possible to do the right kind of digging the AI will almost always refuse to do, because it's way too polite. It's as if we were testing for replicants in Blade Runner: The AI response will rarely figure out you are aiming to look for something frustrating, that they are actually proud of, or figure out when you are looking for a hot take you can then disagree with.