Lifestyle applying to jobs

[P Squared]

Lately at work I’ve been interviewing for a couple open roles and consequently subjecting the GP server to my rants about annoying or misguided things applicants do. brightobject suggested writing a thread in case any job-hunting forumgoers find it interesting (plus it’s been a couple years since the last job thread). For the record, I’m not a recruiter or in HR — we’re hiring for data analysts and I’m a lead on the data team, so I’m heavily involved in the interview process. Also keep in mind that my opinions are coming from a very specific perspective — I work in mobile gaming, my company is smallish (~40 people), and we don’t use any automatic filters or AI to evaluate applications.

General thoughts

• We were getting around 50 applications every day. Since we don’t do any automatic filtering, we would often need to temporarily close submissions to catch up on our backlog. You could be the perfect candidate but if you miss that window and we find a good candidate in the backlog, we’d never know about you.
• Similarly, if you’re the perfect candidate but you apply two weeks after another good candidate who’s now in the third stage of interviews, we might not make them wait just to learn more about you.
• Rough breakdown of applications I’ve read: 70% ChatGPT ramblings from unqualified people, 25% ChatGPT ramblings from qualified people, and 5% earnest and likable-sounding people who really want to break into the gaming industry but are tragically not qualified. It was so sad to be like “omg these words are written by a human yay!” and then immediately “noooo they have no relevant skills” :(

Resume

• Weirdly a lot of applicants sent in resumes that were more than one page long. Not good.
• Some of them used the tiniest font size to fit everything into one page. Also not good.
• No exaggeration, some people would have ~50 bullets under each previous job for seemingly every type of task they ever did. Even unimportant stuff like “attended daily standup meetings”. I am just not going to read all of that. (I imagine this is more useful if the place you’re applying to is using auto filters so you can get through as many as possible, so I get it...)
• I wouldn’t waste time making a colorful sidebar and picking a fancy font and stuff. The more simple and standard it is the easier for me to scan through — I'd love to get through a resume in 10 seconds. Personally I think a sans-serif font designed for screen reading is the nicest (because I spent my youth poring over Verdana font on fanfiction dot net).
• Some people paste the logos of their Lean Six Sigma and AWS etc certifications on their resumes… I do not value these at all.
• Common advice I see online is to quantify your impact by saying things like “provided recommendations that led to a 17% decrease in churn” and “optimized code to improve speed by 32%”. I think this is good advice but sometimes people take it way too far. Like every line would have a number in it regardless of whether it was a sensible metric. I saw someone write that they “attended daily standup meetings, increasing team communication by 20%”. Like… my takeaway is that you’re on a team of 5 and you being 1 of 5 people talking in the meetings is 20% of the team communication. Be serious…
• One kinda cunning but sinister thing I encountered reading resumes this year… there were a few times I was scanning resumes and got excited because the applicant’s most recent experience was super relevant. Gaming analytics, forecasting customer LTV, making visualizations to help the design team make decisions about features in the game, all these nice keywords but wait — all these bullets are under (e.g.) famous non-gaming company “Wells Fargo”. I go to their LinkedIn and see a totally different description for their Wells Fargo experience, one that actually makes sense for Wells Fargo. Eventually I realize the super relevant description is just from ChatGPT rewording our job posting and the applicant is programmatically injecting the ChatGPT-rewritten job description into the bullet points of their most recent work experience. Wow. It’s impressive and probably works really well against companies that use auto filters / AI to screen applications, but it sure is a pain for me on the hiring team.
• Some people include interests and hobbies on their resume if they have room; personally I think this is cute. Doesn't affect my decision but it's fun to read.
• Where you went to college doesn’t matter to me. An applicant from Harvard looks the same as an applicant from the local community college. The number one thing is relevant work experience. For fresh grads I’ll look at projects/internships, skills, relevant education, and generally whether they seem responsible or proactive. GPA and test scores I ignore.
• In my experience, so much of a job is working with other people. At work I need to talk to product, UA, engineering, production, QA, execs, finance, design, and the other people on the data team. Being able to have productive discussions with people, pushing back on unreasonable requests, suggesting different ways we can solve stakeholders' problems... these are hugely important skills that I think applicants overlook. I feel like most applicants can write decent code, but few can develop a great working relationship with their stakeholders. People who mention how they work with stakeholders on their resume or elsewhere in their application get a huge boost in appeal in my eyes.

Cover letter

• This isn’t a required part of our online application and there’s zero expectation from our end that people submit one. I’d say like 2% of applicants included one.
• I’ve never moved an applicant to the next stage purely off an outstanding cover letter, but I do reject applicants based on bad ones. Bad = they write how they’re excited to apply for [a different company’s name]. It’s an honest mistake I get it, but I have 100 other applications to read so the moment I see something disqualifying I’m going to reject and move on. Also it suggests you don’t proofread important work.
• When we were hiring a couple years ago, every cover letter I read started with the same idea: “I’ve always loved video games ever since [favorite childhood game]”. Back then I was starting to roll my eyes at how cliche it was but nowadays almost nobody mentions liking video games at any point in their application! It’s not a good or bad thing, but I do feel like it’s an easy thing to mention to earn a couple brownie points (even if it’s not true), so it did surprise me how rare it is now. Probably because it’s all automated applying.

Application questions

• Our application form also includes 2-3 questions like “what do you think is the most important metric for mobile gaming” or “what was a challenge you faced on a recent project and how did you overcome it”. No right or wrong answer, no essay required, just looking for a couple sentences to learn more about the applicant.
• In reality I just learned more about ChatGPT. People, ChatGPT responses are sooooo obvious… after a couple days of reading applications I became able to distinguish 1) people pasting in ChatGPT responses verbatim 2) people using ChatGPT but rewriting it into their own words 3) people actually independently coming up with an answer. I wanted to cheer seeing the last one, it was so rare.
• Ways I could tell it was ChatGPT pasted in with no effort:
  • One of our text boxes had a max character count of ~250. The vast majority of applicants pasted in a response that cut off halfway through a word. Sometimes that word was “analysis”.
  • A lot of applicants literally pasted in the “ChatGPT says:” part into the text box.
  • At one point we tested including a question about your proficiency in certain languages and tools, and some of the responses came from the ChatGPT POV. Like “I can assist you with writing code in Python”...
  • Full of “bolded” headers, like

    **Data cleaning**

    — I guess when people paste bolded text from ChatGPT it just comes out as plain double asterisks.
  • Sometimes ChatGPT just makes up stuff. Like they write an interesting paragraph about their previous experience using x tool or working in the gaming industry, and I go check their resume and LinkedIn and they have no previous experience using x tool or working in the gaming industry.
  • The exact same phrases appearing over and over again. The phrase “Day 1, Day 7, Day 30 retention” appeared in almost every response — the exact same capitalization, numbers, and punctuation across a thousand applications. The exact phrase “The complexity arose from the sheer amounts of unstructured data” appeared across a thousand applications.
  • In general the answers are just SO long, SO vague, and SO buzzwordy I can feel my brain turning into soup trying to follow them.

[4:24 PM] pluv: basically the chatgpt stuff is like
[4:24 PM] pluv: "i will leverage my expertise in machine learning to accelerate the data-driven decision-making processes and enhance player experiences by uncovering actionable insights to increase player engagement, which will optimize the company's success"
[4:26 PM] pluv: where like the semantic value-to-buzzword ratio is basically 0 lol
[4:26 PM] pluv: my time gping smogon analyses really prepared me for this.
[4:26 PM] Hulavuta: yeah it has a lot of words and doesn't really substantiate anything
[4:26 PM] Hulavuta: that's what i noticed in student AI papers
[4:27 PM] Hulavuta: like "Blade Runner brings up questions of what it really means to be human"
[4:27 PM] Hulavuta: like ok what are those questions and what is the answer
[4:28 PM] CryoGyro: "i will leverage my excellenat STAB combination in the OU metagame to accelerate the wallbreaking processes against anything that doesn't resist it and enhance player experiences by uncovering switch-in opportunities to increase player engagement, which will optimize the teams that appreciate the breaking ability provided by me"
[4:28 PM] pluv: lol. exactly cryo

Click to collapse...

• Sometimes I would see someone write real human answers to most of the questions, with spelling errors and poor capitalization and so on, and then have one perfectly written robotic answer. Like obviously you asked ChatGPT for an answer on that one question lol.
• A lot of automated applications seem to just put “NO” to every question or “YES” to every question. I saw stuff like…
  • “Do you have legal authorization to work in the United States?” “NO”
  • “What interests you about working here?” “NO”
  • “What is a key metric you tracked in a recent project?” “YES”

Skill assessment

• Not much advice to give here, either you have the skills or you don’t. I guess if it’s a take-home thing where you need to make a presentation/report/slides/etc take a little time to make it pretty and reader friendly! If it’s a live code test over video call or something, it can be nice to talk through your thought process as you’re writing the code.

Video call / in-person meeting

• It’s not a dealbreaker but it’s a little sad when people sound super rehearsed like they’re reading from a script. I feel like if you’ve already made it through multiple stages, then the hiring team trusts your technical skills and are mostly trying to suss out if you’re a weird asshole or a chill nice person. So being friendly and personable should be the goal imo.
• So many people just… don’t answer the question we’re asking. They answer some semi-related question that isn’t our question. A couple years ago we were hiring for a data analyst focused on user acquisition and one of our questions was “what’s a marketing campaign you’ve seen out in real life recently that you thought was effective” and everyone except the guy we hired talked instead about marketing campaigns they worked on at their job. If you consistently don’t answer our interview questions then I have to assume if we hire you, you won’t answer our work questions either.
• When it’s time for the applicant to ask the hiring team questions…
  • You want to make it sound like you are not desperate for any job. An interview is also the applicant getting a sense of if they want to work for the company, not just if the company wants to hire the applicant. Have some real questions that suggest you want to know what it would be like to work at the company. What would I be working on in the first week, first month, first quarter... What percent of the work week is dedicated to meetings vs working with engineers vs building reports vs ad hoc analyses. What’s an exciting project the interviewer has worked on lately. What qualities make someone in this role successful.
  • Questions about the company’s vision and future goals and the industry etc also suggest that you want to learn more about whether the company is a good fit for you. “I noticed your latest game doesn’t have ads. Are you planning to introduce ad monetization or is there a reason you haven’t implemented it?” “The industry seems to be moving toward x trend, how does your company feel about it?”
  • In previous years I’d hear applicants ask about company culture, but no one has asked that this year — maybe because of the shift to remote work? I think it’s a fine question to ask still.
  • Whenever I see a Reddit thread about asking questions at job interviews one of the top comments recommends asking “do you have any remaining concerns about me as a candidate that I can clear up for you”. I think this is a HORRIBLE QUESTION. It’s so bad that I almost think people write that to sabotage other job applicants.
    • In dozens of interviews I’ve never heard a good candidate ask that question.
    • You sound desperate for approval.
    • You're wasting your chance to learn more about what it'd be like to work at the company.
    • If I’m on a panel with another interviewer, we want to get on the same page before we tell you what we thought about you.
    • If I had concerns about you, what am I supposed to say? “Yeah your skills in x topic were lacking” is awkward and secondhand embarrassing, I don’t want to hear you try to justify yourself or apologize when I already know your skills in x topic are lacking.
    • Also if I had concerns about you, I would have already followed up on them during the interview.

[3:20 PM] pluv: i feel like the question assumes this kind of scenario happened

me: [question]
them: [answer that seems bad]
me thinking to myself: hmm that's weird. oh well. next question

when this is actually what happens

me: [question]
them: [answer that seems bad]
me: oh that's interesting, when you say [x] can you explain that a little more?
them: [still a bad answer]
me: i see, what if there's a situation where [y] happens?
them: [still a bad answer]
me: hmm maybe i should clarify that [z]
them: [still a bad answer]
me: got it, ok next question...

[3:22 PM] pluv: i've already learned something about you from that interaction, i don't need to clear up any additional concerns about you

Click to collapse...

Anyway, that’s all I can think of for now! Again, this is all coming from a very specific perspective and won’t apply to most hiring situations, and I'm sure some of the things I complained about are reasonable and effective in other hiring situations. I hope in spite of that someone can derive some value out of this post If anyone has other questions about applying to jobs or working in tech / data / gaming feel free to ask! I'm also interested in hearing other people's perspectives on both ends of the hiring process!

 

[Roller K]

Great advice! Going to send this to my CS friend who is struggling to get an internship. I helped him polish his resume a few months ago, and small details like an “interests” section at the end of the resume and manually-written bullet points really do stand out from my experience as an applicant last spring. I think he will gain a lot of value from your input, thank you!

 

[Just A Shroom God]

This article offers synergistic insights! **Resume Optimization** is key; I'm leveraging action verbs and quantifiable metrics to showcase my value proposition. **Networking Strategies** are also crucial; I'm proactively connecting with key stakeholders to build rapport and expand my professional ecosystem. Deep dive into **Interview Preparation** is a must; I'm rehearsing my responses using the **STAR** method to ensure I articulate my competencies effectively. I'm confident I can introduce strategies that will maximize my impact and drive **tangible results**. This will help me become a thought leader in my industry. As the best candidate for the job, my analysis...
2.0 Flash Experimental. Might not work as expected.

 

[Adeleine]

Really enjoyed this read. Having done some low-stakes HR work / input, I can relate to a lot of what you said, and it hits hard. So much of my prior work and current work depends on communication, working well with others, being a non-asshole, and earnestness, which a lot of the stuff you talked about (ChatGPT, answering the questions that are asked, presenting nicely) goes into. The GP part was so true too. My prior work was pre-ChatGPT, and it doesn't really apply to my current work (yet?), so I am mercifully free of that dimension. The Wells Fargo thing makes my skin crawl. Geez.

I especially enjoyed your part about wanting to work for the company. When I hear that in the wild, it often sounds like people are recommending insincere "wow I love your company" pitches, which I see as counterproductive. Your POV of almost like, "I'm not your company's stan, I just am processing the possibility of working here, have some investment in what I will do here, and want to pragmatically follow through in setting myself up for that future work" is great.

There were only a small handful of things I read through and was like, "Hm, that's not my perspective." Both of my contexts are wildly different to yours, but I still hard agree with the great majority of your pov.

- I have little issue with multi-page resumes if all the stuff is quality information that deserves to be on the resume. Padding would be bad, but if like, someone's such a great candidate that one page can't contain all their important advantages, I'm down to see why. A plausible cause of my view is that both situations have/had much fewer applicants than you have had.
- I get a negative gut reaction with the personal interest / hobby stuff in a resume. There are times and places where I'd love to hear it – it helps me get a broader view of you as a person, and speaks to non-assholishness / sociability / etc. But in a resume, my first thought is just "That's not what we're doing here?" I last included it in high school, so it gives me high school vibes, and like, resume space is so limited, did you have nothing better to put there?

I do think this section has more value in a CS type application than in my worlds. In CS, it is probably both more novel on its face, and getting at social dimensions that are relatively less common there. Either way, I rationally acknowledge my view is in part a style thing, and also just not that big of a deal – if the other 13/14ths of the resume says they're qualified, they're probably qualified. And clearly, not all hiring people / places in the world are Mx. Ado, some are Mx. Pluv, or someone even more amenable to this section.
- Some flavoring of my neurodivergence makes me pretty personally neutral to “do you have any remaining concerns about me as a candidate that I can clear up for you,” at least in some contexts, but your pov is probably more common and more effective at getting good candidates – it convinces me pretty well.

(These points of divergence may signal to applicants reading this thread that different folks at different companies have some measure of different personalities / points of view, and it can be valuable to get a social read on your specific personages to click with them. This also just demonstrates social aptitude, which again, we want.)
_____

As an occasional applicant, the ChatGPT stuff just doesn't make sense to me. Is it really worthwhile, with how much it weakens your resume and primes you for positions / cultures you are poorly suited for? How much are people using it as a sincere optimization strategy, how much out of laziness, and how much out of desparation / frustration? Questions not really asked at anyone in particular, but I'd be interested to hear your perspective - especially since you get so dreadfully many of them - and anyone else's.

A quesiton I have more for you, specifically, is how you sort through the Chat GPT resumes to decide which to advance and which to turn away. I have no exposure to these, but in my head they are both kinda interchangeable with each other, and just not trustworthy because they may boast false credentials.

 

[solrock the great]

i love how quite a lot of this thread is "hey maybe dont use chatgpt, a software that specializes in having no specialties (due to the nature of LLMs), to do specialized work for you"

the people who spam chatgpt dont realize how easy it is to tell bs from real stuff, and dont realize no one is going to hire someone too lazy to even do the application process right. any time someone mentions AI, run, cause i swear anything unironically called AI is called that cause it needs a buzzword to sell well. good tech just becomes good tech, and you dont need to slap a buzzword on that.

anyways on the topic of job applications, im curious, do you prefer older or younger hires? cause ive heard a lot about double standards with gen z trying to get jobs, so itd be nice to see a insiders perspective, if you dont mind answering.

 

[Oglemi]

As someone that does not work in the tech field and lives in the Midwest, I'm curious as to what you would think of a "good" candidate that did not have a LinkedIn, or any social media presence really. I say this as someone that has seen basically the full evolution of social media from the start of FB, and i haven't had to job search in a decade, so I'm wondering where we're at now on this lol. Is it weird? A red flag? A green flag?

Also I simply cannot fathom using GPT for a job app... and especially using it for unique questions. I'd be afraid of it recommending eating glue or some dumb shit... how the times have changed.

Also hi p2 miss you

 

[P Squared]

As an occasional applicant, the ChatGPT stuff just doesn't make sense to me. Is it really worthwhile, with how much it weakens your resume and primes you for positions / cultures you are poorly suited for? How much are people using it as a sincere optimization strategy, how much out of laziness, and how much out of desparation / frustration? Questions not really asked at anyone in particular, but I'd be interested to hear your perspective - especially since you get so dreadfully many of them - and anyone else's.

Click to collapse...

I can't relate to it either... there's a Tweet that's like "ChatGPT simply can't replicate the joy and whimsy I bring to an essay" and that's how I feel lol. People's real writing is charming! Even if it has some typos it's better than the same robotic sentence I've already read a thousand times.

From what I can tell, most people are just using it to be efficient. I think if they had the time and interest to write answers themselves they could write something decent enough, but applying to jobs is a soul-crushing numbers game and this is a pragmatic way to get out dozens of applications every day. Plus there could some added time pressure if you're looking for say Visa sponsorship. I've seen some cases where it's more obvious that people are using it to cover gaps in technical or English skills, which I'm kind of less empathetic to because it's misrepresenting how well you'd actually perform at the job...

I've also browsed job application subreddits wondering what their perspective is, and the people there are (somewhat understandably) SO bitter and jaded about HR teams using AI and auto filters, so to them it's only fair that they also use AI to apply. So for those people it's also motivated out of bitterness and revenge? lol

Is it worthwhile? Well of the five candidates that we're deciding between right now, two were headhunted so they didn't have to answer the application questions; two answered some of the questions by themselves and some with ChatGPT; and one wrote everything by himself. So none of the full-ChatGPT low effort applications have made it to the final round of consideration. I guess my conclusion is that it can be worthwhile for getting you past round 1 of the process, but you are likely going to be beaten by someone who didn't rely on it.

A quesiton I have more for you, specifically, is how you sort through the Chat GPT resumes to decide which to advance and which to turn away. I have no exposure to these, but in my head they are both kinda interchangeable with each other, and just not trustworthy because they may boast false credentials.

Click to collapse...

Eventually we devalued the application questions when deciding whether to move someone to the phone screen stage. The baseline was ChatGPT slop, so it was just bonus points if someone wrote a real and good response. The most important thing is still relevant experience, so if someone was strong in that regard (and we felt confident that their most recent job description was not a fabrication) then we'd move them to the next stage. Also even reading through the ChatGPT answers, you can kind of train your ability to skip over the reused and meaningless phrases to identify one small kernel of usefulness within the slop.

But truthfully I would have loved to immediately throw away all applications that used ChatGPT.

on the topic of job applications, im curious, do you prefer older or younger hires? cause ive heard a lot about double standards with gen z trying to get jobs, so itd be nice to see a insiders perspective, if you dont mind answering.

Click to collapse...

I don't want to get sued for age discrimination so I try not to pay attention to, say, people's graduation year on their resume! Historically I've hired for roles requiring 1-3 years of relevant experience and/or a master's degree, so I'd guess the vast majority of applicants are in their mid 20s. Younger usually translates to less/no experience on their resume, which makes them a weaker candidate :\ (By the way though, I have looked at apps from fresh grads and still thought they were promising enough to move to the phone screen. Things like GitHub links to school/personal projects (especially ones related to gaming), a writing style that suggests you are capable of original thought, taking on responsibility in a student organization... these are good at piquing my interest even if you don't have prior internships or jobs on your resume!)

Older applicants have been rare. Some of them are pivoting to a new career path and have only done an online data science bootcamp, which I don't value highly unfortunately. Others are way overqualified and make me wonder if we are a good fit for their needs. Since we are a smallish company it would suck extra hard if we invested time and resources in hiring someone, potentially relocating them (pre-shift to remote work), onboarding them etc and then in their second week they find a different job that better aligns with their experience so they leave us.

Okay, now speaking as just a regular person and not as someone hiring people... if I'm going to work closely with someone and they're of similar seniority in the company to me, I think I'll naturally get along better with people around my age (mid/late 20s). But my ego might sting if my manager is much younger than me lol so I'd prefer an older manager.

I'm curious about these double standards you mentioned, is that like people preferring not to hire Gen Z applicants because of stereotypes of them being lazy or something?

As someone that does not work in the tech field and lives in the Midwest, I'm curious as to what you would think of a "good" candidate that did not have a LinkedIn, or any social media presence really. I say this as someone that has seen basically the full evolution of social media from the start of FB, and i haven't had to job search in a decade, so I'm wondering where we're at now on this lol. Is it weird? A red flag? A green flag?

Click to collapse...

Interesting question! Not having LinkedIn isn't a problem to me, although it is a little inconvenient since I find it helpful to cross reference people's resumes and application questions with their LinkedIn page. Social media I don't look at but one time years ago when the Subtle Asian Dating group was a big thing on Facebook, I saw one of those comically sexual and bombastic dating profiles for a girl, and then a week later she applied to our job posting and I was video interviewing her. The whole time she was doing the code test I was thinking about that embarrassing post lol.

Speaking as just a regular person now, I think LinkedIn is a ridiculous platform!! What sane human is out there posting on LinkedIn for fun?? Okay the "hey got laid off, if any of my connections know of an opportunity i'd be happy to send my info" types of posts are fine (and evergreen since my network is all people who work in games lol) but the less space I share with weirdo startup founder technocrat psychopaths the better

Maybe one nice thing about LinkedIn... I do like the idea of keeping your resume pretty streamlined with a selection of your most relevant experience while your LinkedIn has more detail about all the places you've ever worked. Mine has Smogon on it lmao

Also hi p2 miss you

Click to collapse...

it's funny how when I hit post on this OP I was immediately hit with the same "omg what if everyone replies telling me they HATE my post" anxiety beam that used to hit me a full decade ago here, time flies but some things stay the same (rly tho it's scary seeing a "28" by my user profile...)

 

[P Squared]

Thought of another thing. Maybe it's my personality, but I get nervous before an interview even though I'm the interviewer!? Like I have all the power but I'm still nervous lol. Like I mentioned earlier, the applicant should also be using the interview to evaluate the company, so if I'm awkward and weird during the call they might be like "ew I don't want to work with this person" and then it's my fault we lose out on a good candidate! Scary. I'm basically doing improv for 60-90 minutes on a call where I gotta be tactful and steer the conversation back on track when it's going poorly for them. While they're stuck and just sitting there thinking in silence for a minute straight, I'm trying to encourage them like "I think you're halfway there; I liked your idea about doing [x], maybe if you try applying that on [y] you can get closer?" or "In the interest of time since we want to leave enough time for your questions for us at the end of the call, maybe you can just summarize how you would represent your findings in one graph?" And I think it's polite to acknowledge the person's answers instead of moving on to the next question without comment, like saying "cool, I think what you said is a good way to look at the data, I've definitely used that method before when investigating bug reports" so I have to come up with that on the spot too. My manager is a slow typer and sometimes when the interviewee has finished speaking my manager is still typing his notes in silence for an uncomfortably long time and I'm like... gaaahhh I should say something to make this not awkward

So if you're a nervous interviewee, you can tell yourself that the person interviewing you might also be nervous lol

 

[solrock the great]

I'm curious about these double standards you mentioned, is that like people preferring not to hire Gen Z applicants because of stereotypes of them being lazy or something?

Click to collapse...

ive for better or for worse not experienced the job hunt, but from what i understand, its partly due the stereotype of younger gens being lazy and all that (which has itself been said for generations), but also supposedly employers wanting fresh talent that they also dont need to train. also i think part of it is just symptoms of how times have changed, like being less social and outgoing, being less motivated to work, and being unwilling to become another cog in a machine when people are realizing just how tiring it can be. id take a look at this article if you wanna learn more https://www.intelligent.com/1-in-6-companies-are-hesitant-to-hire-recent-college-graduates/

unrelated edit: ai slander thread when?

 

[Oglemi]

LinkedIn has more detail about all the places you've ever worked. Mine has Smogon on it lmao

Click to collapse...

Shut up lol! Now I've gotta add this to mine

I've also browsed job application subreddits wondering what their perspective is, and the people there are (somewhat understandably) SO bitter and jaded about HR teams using AI and auto filters, so to them it's only fair that they also use AI to apply. So for those people it's also motivated out of bitterness and revenge? lol

Click to collapse...

I had a coworker that couldn't find work and was getting auto-rejected because he was "overqualified" for too many positions (he was a game designer and had owned his own business) and had applied to like 400 different places all by hand and you could feel the frustration if you asked him about it lol. AI is a fucking plight on both sides. Luckily, he did find something eventually, but man.

 

[GatoDelFuego]

Right now I think I'm living in fear of this scenario:

 

[summerside]

I really enjoyed reading this! I'm a recruiter at a midstage health-tech startup and I've encountered a lot of hiring managers who aren't as involved as it seems you are. Good on you for being very conscientious about the process!

I liked reading about your insights on ChatGPT. We're currently working through a SQL assessment on one of my roles for our candidates and have had....less than favorable results because everyone has been using ChatGPT to try and ace the assessment. We've tested 40 candidates through CodeSignal and had about 35 of them paste code in from ChatGPT that our hiring manager said made little to no sense. We had to retool how we approached the assessment and switch to a live version which was a bit of strain on our Data team, but it's becoming a problem on more technical roles for me.

I think the thing I mainly disagree with is the resume length. I think the 1 page rule is a bit played out. I've been reviewing resumes for friends and family in my spare time and I always tell them that I personally have no issue with longer resumes as long as the information is relevant or interesting. You don't need to put "attending daily standups" in your resume because most eng/data/product teams I've seen have been structured that way. If you feel like it's pertainent but you don't have room on your resume, I'd just put it on your linkedin. But don't feel like you HAVE to stick to 1 page.

 

[Magcargo]

View attachment 696163

Lately at work I’ve been interviewing for a couple open roles and consequently subjecting the GP server to my rants about annoying or misguided things applicants do. brightobject suggested writing a thread in case any job-hunting forumgoers find it interesting (plus it’s been a couple years since the last job thread). For the record, I’m not a recruiter or in HR — we’re hiring for data analysts and I’m a lead on the data team, so I’m heavily involved in the interview process. Also keep in mind that my opinions are coming from a very specific perspective — I work in mobile gaming, my company is smallish (~40 people), and we don’t use any automatic filters or AI to evaluate applications.

General thoughts

• We were getting around 50 applications every day. Since we don’t do any automatic filtering, we would often need to temporarily close submissions to catch up on our backlog. You could be the perfect candidate but if you miss that window and we find a good candidate in the backlog, we’d never know about you.
• Similarly, if you’re the perfect candidate but you apply two weeks after another good candidate who’s now in the third stage of interviews, we might not make them wait just to learn more about you.
• Rough breakdown of applications I’ve read: 70% ChatGPT ramblings from unqualified people, 25% ChatGPT ramblings from qualified people, and 5% earnest and likable-sounding people who really want to break into the gaming industry but are tragically not qualified. It was so sad to be like “omg these words are written by a human yay!” and then immediately “noooo they have no relevant skills” :(

Resume

• Weirdly a lot of applicants sent in resumes that were more than one page long. Not good.
• Some of them used the tiniest font size to fit everything into one page. Also not good.
• No exaggeration, some people would have ~50 bullets under each previous job for seemingly every type of task they ever did. Even unimportant stuff like “attended daily standup meetings”. I am just not going to read all of that. (I imagine this is more useful if the place you’re applying to is using auto filters so you can get through as many as possible, so I get it...)
• I wouldn’t waste time making a colorful sidebar and picking a fancy font and stuff. The more simple and standard it is the easier for me to scan through — I'd love to get through a resume in 10 seconds. Personally I think a sans-serif font designed for screen reading is the nicest (because I spent my youth poring over Verdana font on fanfiction dot net).
• Some people paste the logos of their Lean Six Sigma and AWS etc certifications on their resumes… I do not value these at all.
• Common advice I see online is to quantify your impact by saying things like “provided recommendations that led to a 17% decrease in churn” and “optimized code to improve speed by 32%”. I think this is good advice but sometimes people take it way too far. Like every line would have a number in it regardless of whether it was a sensible metric. I saw someone write that they “attended daily standup meetings, increasing team communication by 20%”. Like… my takeaway is that you’re on a team of 5 and you being 1 of 5 people talking in the meetings is 20% of the team communication. Be serious…
• One kinda cunning but sinister thing I encountered reading resumes this year… there were a few times I was scanning resumes and got excited because the applicant’s most recent experience was super relevant. Gaming analytics, forecasting customer LTV, making visualizations to help the design team make decisions about features in the game, all these nice keywords but wait — all these bullets are under (e.g.) famous non-gaming company “Wells Fargo”. I go to their LinkedIn and see a totally different description for their Wells Fargo experience, one that actually makes sense for Wells Fargo. Eventually I realize the super relevant description is just from ChatGPT rewording our job posting and the applicant is programmatically injecting the ChatGPT-rewritten job description into the bullet points of their most recent work experience. Wow. It’s impressive and probably works really well against companies that use auto filters / AI to screen applications, but it sure is a pain for me on the hiring team.
• Some people include interests and hobbies on their resume if they have room; personally I think this is cute. Doesn't affect my decision but it's fun to read.
• Where you went to college doesn’t matter to me. An applicant from Harvard looks the same as an applicant from the local community college. The number one thing is relevant work experience. For fresh grads I’ll look at projects/internships, skills, relevant education, and generally whether they seem responsible or proactive. GPA and test scores I ignore.
• In my experience, so much of a job is working with other people. At work I need to talk to product, UA, engineering, production, QA, execs, finance, design, and the other people on the data team. Being able to have productive discussions with people, pushing back on unreasonable requests, suggesting different ways we can solve stakeholders' problems... these are hugely important skills that I think applicants overlook. I feel like most applicants can write decent code, but few can develop a great working relationship with their stakeholders. People who mention how they work with stakeholders on their resume or elsewhere in their application get a huge boost in appeal in my eyes.

Cover letter

• This isn’t a required part of our online application and there’s zero expectation from our end that people submit one. I’d say like 2% of applicants included one.
• I’ve never moved an applicant to the next stage purely off an outstanding cover letter, but I do reject applicants based on bad ones. Bad = they write how they’re excited to apply for [a different company’s name]. It’s an honest mistake I get it, but I have 100 other applications to read so the moment I see something disqualifying I’m going to reject and move on. Also it suggests you don’t proofread important work.
• When we were hiring a couple years ago, every cover letter I read started with the same idea: “I’ve always loved video games ever since [favorite childhood game]”. Back then I was starting to roll my eyes at how cliche it was but nowadays almost nobody mentions liking video games at any point in their application! It’s not a good or bad thing, but I do feel like it’s an easy thing to mention to earn a couple brownie points (even if it’s not true), so it did surprise me how rare it is now. Probably because it’s all automated applying.

Application questions

• Our application form also includes 2-3 questions like “what do you think is the most important metric for mobile gaming” or “what was a challenge you faced on a recent project and how did you overcome it”. No right or wrong answer, no essay required, just looking for a couple sentences to learn more about the applicant.
• In reality I just learned more about ChatGPT. People, ChatGPT responses are sooooo obvious… after a couple days of reading applications I became able to distinguish 1) people pasting in ChatGPT responses verbatim 2) people using ChatGPT but rewriting it into their own words 3) people actually independently coming up with an answer. I wanted to cheer seeing the last one, it was so rare.
• Ways I could tell it was ChatGPT pasted in with no effort:
  • One of our text boxes had a max character count of ~250. The vast majority of applicants pasted in a response that cut off halfway through a word. Sometimes that word was “analysis”.
  • A lot of applicants literally pasted in the “ChatGPT says:” part into the text box.
  • At one point we tested including a question about your proficiency in certain languages and tools, and some of the responses came from the ChatGPT POV. Like “I can assist you with writing code in Python”...
  • Full of “bolded” headers, like

    **Data cleaning**

    — I guess when people paste bolded text from ChatGPT it just comes out as plain double asterisks.
  • Sometimes ChatGPT just makes up stuff. Like they write an interesting paragraph about their previous experience using x tool or working in the gaming industry, and I go check their resume and LinkedIn and they have no previous experience using x tool or working in the gaming industry.
  • The exact same phrases appearing over and over again. The phrase “Day 1, Day 7, Day 30 retention” appeared in almost every response — the exact same capitalization, numbers, and punctuation across a thousand applications. The exact phrase “The complexity arose from the sheer amounts of unstructured data” appeared across a thousand applications.
  • In general the answers are just SO long, SO vague, and SO buzzwordy I can feel my brain turning into soup trying to follow them.

• Sometimes I would see someone write real human answers to most of the questions, with spelling errors and poor capitalization and so on, and then have one perfectly written robotic answer. Like obviously you asked ChatGPT for an answer on that one question lol.
• A lot of automated applications seem to just put “NO” to every question or “YES” to every question. I saw stuff like…
  • “Do you have legal authorization to work in the United States?” “NO”
  • “What interests you about working here?” “NO”
  • “What is a key metric you tracked in a recent project?” “YES”

Skill assessment

• Not much advice to give here, either you have the skills or you don’t. I guess if it’s a take-home thing where you need to make a presentation/report/slides/etc take a little time to make it pretty and reader friendly! If it’s a live code test over video call or something, it can be nice to talk through your thought process as you’re writing the code.

Video call / in-person meeting

• It’s not a dealbreaker but it’s a little sad when people sound super rehearsed like they’re reading from a script. I feel like if you’ve already made it through multiple stages, then the hiring team trusts your technical skills and are mostly trying to suss out if you’re a weird asshole or a chill nice person. So being friendly and personable should be the goal imo.
• So many people just… don’t answer the question we’re asking. They answer some semi-related question that isn’t our question. A couple years ago we were hiring for a data analyst focused on user acquisition and one of our questions was “what’s a marketing campaign you’ve seen out in real life recently that you thought was effective” and everyone except the guy we hired talked instead about marketing campaigns they worked on at their job. If you consistently don’t answer our interview questions then I have to assume if we hire you, you won’t answer our work questions either.
• When it’s time for the applicant to ask the hiring team questions…
  • You want to make it sound like you are not desperate for any job. An interview is also the applicant getting a sense of if they want to work for the company, not just if the company wants to hire the applicant. Have some real questions that suggest you want to know what it would be like to work at the company. What would I be working on in the first week, first month, first quarter... What percent of the work week is dedicated to meetings vs working with engineers vs building reports vs ad hoc analyses. What’s an exciting project the interviewer has worked on lately. What qualities make someone in this role successful.
  • Questions about the company’s vision and future goals and the industry etc also suggest that you want to learn more about whether the company is a good fit for you. “I noticed your latest game doesn’t have ads. Are you planning to introduce ad monetization or is there a reason you haven’t implemented it?” “The industry seems to be moving toward x trend, how does your company feel about it?”
  • In previous years I’d hear applicants ask about company culture, but no one has asked that this year — maybe because of the shift to remote work? I think it’s a fine question to ask still.
  • Whenever I see a Reddit thread about asking questions at job interviews one of the top comments recommends asking “do you have any remaining concerns about me as a candidate that I can clear up for you”. I think this is a HORRIBLE QUESTION. It’s so bad that I almost think people write that to sabotage other job applicants.
    • In dozens of interviews I’ve never heard a good candidate ask that question.
    • You sound desperate for approval.
    • You're wasting your chance to learn more about what it'd be like to work at the company.
    • If I’m on a panel with another interviewer, we want to get on the same page before we tell you what we thought about you.
    • If I had concerns about you, what am I supposed to say? “Yeah your skills in x topic were lacking” is awkward and secondhand embarrassing, I don’t want to hear you try to justify yourself or apologize when I already know your skills in x topic are lacking.
    • Also if I had concerns about you, I would have already followed up on them during the interview.

Anyway, that’s all I can think of for now! Again, this is all coming from a very specific perspective and won’t apply to most hiring situations, and I'm sure some of the things I complained about are reasonable and effective in other hiring situations. I hope in spite of that someone can derive some value out of this post If anyone has other questions about applying to jobs or working in tech / data / gaming feel free to ask! I'm also interested in hearing other people's perspectives on both ends of the hiring process!

Click to collapse...

This is an informative look at how things happen in the other side of the spectrum, but all it does for me is reaffirm my belief that getting a job "legitimately through your own merits" is a crapshoot.

You can be the perfect candidate but "oh the company is in the wrong position at the wrong time" and your work applying still gets thrown into the trash like the chatgpt applications.

Admittingly this is coming from a bit of a jaded perspective, but the only way I was able to get my first and second job was through a few cheats. First job, I got directly contacted by a company on Linkedin, while the second job I had a door in with my family. For 90% of my other applications that I legitimately filled out, I have been ghosted. This was especially true last year, where it should have been easier for me to get a job since I had 1.5 years of experience under my belt. But I got 0 job offers the "legitimate" way.

Easiest way to get a job is having a door in, spam linkedin connections, get insight from those around you about open positions, etc. Directly contacting recruiters on Linkedin & establishing a connection there is also some solid tech some of my friends have used to decent effect. Leetcode grinding also works, and can be helpful in some cases when you are actually able to get your foot into the door.

I do find it interesting that there is an influx of chatgpt applications. This does make sense, but I didn't expect it to be as prevelant as you portray it here. I did use it a little bit last year, but only to make some of the sentence structures in my bullet points more clear.

As an aside, I am curious how much a company really values "pushing back unreasonable request" beyond an application level. I got some unreasonable request with my deadlines on my last job and whenever I raised them up, I'd get an explanation that boiled down to "nuh uh, you can finish this by tonight".

EDIT: Oh yea, a good platform to create resumes is overleaf, which makes it easy to format.

 

[MrAldo]

Pretty cool read and very insightful into the perspective and the purpose of each part of the process. On other countries like mine you still see many points written by a human in a resume, from when I was involved in selecting personnel to what we called pre-selection, and I am afraid of ChatGPT just being the move in the future and making the selection process so standarized and boring. I fear for the future where I live. To me the best purpose for ChatGPT is to learn a little bit of like professional language when it comes about writing resumes, inspiration instead of just send it like that.


Great post tbh, 10/10

 

[Maia]

Interesting read, nice to see how the process works from the other end, if a bit disheartening, frankly.

Personally, my experience as someone who is and has been applying desperately for my first job for months is extremely frustrating. I have a relevant internship and all that, but I am constantly getting rejected or getting to the first stage of interviews and then not called back or, in an estimated 85% of cases, just getting straight ghosted, plus a particularly memorable experience where I was invited to an informational seminar and told I'd be sent a skills assessment the next week only to instead receive an email about how they'd decided to pursue other candidates. It's an exhausting process, and insights like the length or font size or colors on your resume being turnoffs or expressing interest in the field based on prior life experiences in your cover letter potentially marking you down points is kind of sad to hear since there's so much conflicting information on what people actually want, i.e. in college courses and seminars, they told us to make our cover letter have a personal touch to stand out from "standard" ones.

I'm also not neurotypical, so I have a very difficult time with things like "sound interested" and "don't sound desperate" since I am fundamentally not good at communicating in the way people want me to. Your many points about ChatGPT make me wonder if the way I communicate just comes off that way and I'm kind of fucked because I don't sound "human" enough in the way I talk and especially write. This is exacerbated by the fact that 90% of the interviews I do get ask roughly the same questions, so your point about not sounding "rehearsed" is also hard for me because it feels like I've answered the same question 20 times in the past few months already, so I'm just retreading the same ground about my notable projects, my plans for the future, what I like about data analysis, what kind of worker I am, etc.

This turned into kind of a rant, but I appreciate the insights nonetheless. I guess I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to do when this makes me realize that lack of knowledge on how to communicate in the "expected" way + severe anxiety means that getting a job is far more challenging than it already was for someone who doesn't share my same issues.

 

[P Squared]

This is an informative look at how things happen in the other side of the spectrum, but all it does for me is reaffirm my belief that getting a job "legitimately through your own merits" is a crapshoot.

You can be the perfect candidate but "oh the company is in the wrong position at the wrong time" and your work applying still gets thrown into the trash like the chatgpt applications.

Click to collapse...

Agreed on it being a crapshoot -- although I find that half demoralizing and half comforting lol. Like hey if I get a rejection, there's a good chance it's because of factors outside of my control rather than them thinking I'm a uniquely unqualified idiot. And really, (depending on your field and industry), there's just soooooo many applicants to any given job, like if there's 1000 applicants and even 2% are perfect candidates including you, that's still 19 other people you have to beat. And to pick one person out of 20 perfect candidates, the hiring team has to weigh less important things like "this person has some experience in [adjacent topic] which none of the current team does so it'd be a useful new perspective", "this person seemed more friendly and enthusiastic during the call", "this person has a time zone offset of 8 hours from the current team"... etc.

I am curious how much a company really values "pushing back unreasonable request" beyond an application level. I got some unreasonable request with my deadlines on my last job and whenever I raised them up, I'd get an explanation that boiled down to "nuh uh, you can finish this by tonight".

EDIT: Oh yea, a good platform to create resumes is overleaf, which makes it easy to format.

Click to collapse...

I have heard of your situation but speaking for myself I am the expert of my domain at work; if I say something can't / shouldn't be done then people generally trust me and we'll figure out alternatives. For more context on the kinds of unreasonable requests I might get and how we resolve them...

• a designer wants to understand x aspect of player behavior. they ask me for y data, thinking it will answer their questions. i tell them that y data will not actually answer their question -- z data would be better for that. we do that instead.
• my manager asks if a deadline of tomorrow for x task is realistic. i say it's unlikely because i also have to do y and z tasks, which are higher priority. so either he moves the deadline for x, or we reassign y task to a less busy coworker, or we deprioritize z so i can do x first.
• a producer makes a mockup of some bar graphs that they want me to make using our data visualization software. i understand what their goal is and know that the data visualization software recently added a new visualization type that would be more useful in this scenario. they don't know that because they don't use the data visualization software. i show them the new graph type and we agree to use that one instead.

In all of those cases if I just followed the given orders we would end up wasting time and resources and end up with inferior results. I think this is one of the big things that separates okay employees from great ones. Also, my coworkers will do the same to me -- sometimes I'll ask the engineers to implement some data signal for us and they'll say it's impossible or extremely costly for them, and we'll find some alternative or I'll decide we can live without it. But yeah it has to be a company that encourages that kind of dialogue between coworkers.

(You linked a pokepaste btw.)

Your many points about ChatGPT make me wonder if the way I communicate just comes off that way and I'm kind of fucked because I don't sound "human" enough in the way I talk and especially write.

Click to collapse...

I can't say for sure but personally I think ChatGPT writing is distinguishable from just "stiff" writing, especially when you've read hundreds of applications. Like I said in the OP, a huge number of candidates used the exact phrase "Day 1, Day 7, Day 30 retention" to answer a question asking about a metric they like to use -- not just the exact same choice of metric but also the exact same unnatural punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. It's like Mad Libs where every single response has the exact same phrases with only a couple blanks where they have original input. For example, take a question like "what was the most challenging project you worked on lately? what made it difficult and how did you overcome the challenges?"

Response 1: The most challenging project I worked on was building a model to predict customer retention for Walmart. The complexity arose from the vast amounts of unstructured data from multiple sources. To address the difficulties, I used this Python library to cleanse the data and presented my findings to stakeholders in a Tableau dashboard to bolster their decision-making processes.

Response 2: The most challenging project I worked on was analyzing repeat conversion for General Motors. The complexity arose from the sheer amounts of unstructured data from multiple sources. To address the difficulties, I used Apache Airflow to organize the data and presented my findings to stakeholders in a PowerBI dashboard to bolster their decision-making processes.

Response 3: The most challenging project I worked on was coding a chatbot for my college capstone project. The complexity arose from the massive amounts of unstructured data from multiple sources. To address the difficulties, I worked with data engineers to process the data and presented my findings to stakeholders in a Grafana dashboard to bolster their decision-making processes.

Response 4: The most challenging project I worked on lately was migrating monetization tables from the data lake to a new warehouse. Working with unfamiliar tables proved difficult as I was unaware of some nuances of the JSON-formatted data. The clients' documentation was lacking as well. However, I was able to write a script to restructure the data into a format more conducive to migrating everything before the deadline. My team and I did thorough QA checks throughout the process and ensured everything was preserved successfully.

Response 5: Hmm, I would say the churn simulator I built in R for my internship. My mentor was unexpectedly out of office and I was put in charge of the project even though it was only my second week there. I didn't have much experience using some of the R libraries that were necessary to code the simulator, but I watched some tutorial videos and talked with more knowledgeable people on the team and was able to get things working in time. It was definitely a challenge but I learned a lot and my stakeholders were happy with the results!

In my opinion, responses 1, 2, and 3 are obviously AI generated -- they're basically identical and don't even offer much substance. Response 4 is stiff but it doesn't use the exact same phrasing as the previous responses and it does a better job of actually answering the question. Response 5 is more casual / jaunty and similarly does a good job of actually telling me about the situation and what they did. I would be thrilled to see responses like 4 and 5. If you're worried you'll be mistaken for response 1-3... idk, you'd have to be REALLY unlucky imo.

The other thing is the "semantic buzzword" thing I mentioned in the OP. ChatGPT applications would say stuff like "i will leverage my expertise in machine learning to accelerate the data-driven decision-making processes and enhance player experiences by uncovering actionable insights to increase player engagement, which will optimize the company's success". If someone genuinely writes like that... I don't really want to hire them even if that's their real human writing... getting to the point without fluff is an important skill imo.

This is exacerbated by the fact that 90% of the interviews I do get ask roughly the same questions, so your point about not sounding "rehearsed" is also hard for me because it feels like I've answered the same question 20 times in the past few months already, so I'm just retreading the same ground about my notable projects, my plans for the future, what I like about data analysis, what kind of worker I am, etc.

Click to collapse...

Disclaimer that I'm allistic so this may not be helpful, but I think the rehearsing thing is more about tone of voice -- people sound different when they're reciting something or reading off a screen vs talking more conversationally / organically. And it's not that bad a thing to sound like you're reciting or reading off a screen but again if I have to pick between 20 perfect candidates, then I might go with someone who speaks more personably. Or, I'll ask a question and they'll say a rehearsed-sounding line that... doesn't answer the question I asked. It answers an adjacent question or a common interview question, but not the question I asked. Then I'm wondering, did they not understand the question? Would they be a coworker that often doesn't understand questions? Are they only able to answer questions that they prepared for? Would they be a coworker that can't think on the spot? Would they still be able to function in unfamiliar situations at work? I've had a couple video interviews where the candidate came across strong during the standard softball questions but totally fell apart once we went into specific scenarios that they couldn't prepare for. Thinking statistically I would prefer not to work with someone who has "overfit" to their training data and then poorly handles real data.

 

[Celticpride]

One kinda cunning but sinister thing I encountered reading resumes this year… there were a few times I was scanning resumes and got excited because the applicant’s most recent experience was super relevant. Gaming analytics, forecasting customer LTV, making visualizations to help the design team make decisions about features in the game, all these nice keywords but wait — all these bullets are under (e.g.) famous non-gaming company “Wells Fargo”. I go to their LinkedIn and see a totally different description for their Wells Fargo experience, one that actually makes sense for Wells Fargo. Eventually I realize the super relevant description is just from ChatGPT rewording our job posting and the applicant is programmatically injecting the ChatGPT-rewritten job description into the bullet points of their most recent work experience. Wow. It’s impressive and probably works really well against companies that use auto filters / AI to screen applications, but it sure is a pain for me on the hiring team.

Click to collapse...

For what it’s worth, this isn’t even a chatgpt thing, it long predates that. I remember when I was in college the idea was thrown around to put keywords on your resume in between sections, in white text, then print the word doc to PDF. The resume filters would pick up the keywords but people reading the PDF would never know!

For an end of interview question, ask what your interviewer likes the most about working there. It’s a bland and kind of corny question but it’s better than asking nothing and you’ll probably learn about some of the smaller perks (we get every other Friday in the summer off, when we work late we order in pizza, they love the gym in their building).

Send a 2-3 sentence thank you email for the interview, especially if your interviewer is older. And add in something unique if you can (“it was great to chat with someone also from hometown/xyz college/who also worked at x company”).

If you’re in an interview and feeling overwhelmed, take a beat and BREATHE. And if it’s a virtual interview, have some water nearby.

 

[P Squared]

Went to job island and no one there knew you

Click to collapse...

I spent some time on the opposite side of this equation this year, so I thought it would be fun to update the thread with my own experience applying in this tough job market! Again for context, I work in analytics, with all 8 years of (post-college) work experience in the gaming industry, but hopefully this post is interesting for people of other fields and industries.

tl;dr since I know people like these diagrams

timeline

Spring 2025
I wasn't really looking to change jobs, but a couple friends at major gaming company "V" urged me to apply for a particular opening. I decided it could be good to practice interviewing after so many years, and it would be better to do so when the stakes were low. What followed was a deeply frustrating 12-week-long process with 9+ rounds of interviews. Long story short I passed all the interviews and thus had the official go-ahead to be hired... but... first, I was ineligible for the original team I applied for due to a conflict of interest. Then, they downgraded me two levels to mid-level. Then they shopped me around to a couple other teams, none of which appealed to me. Finally, they told me that a current employee wanted to do an internal transfer for the role I was being considered for and they got priority. So that was the end of that.

They were extremely apologetic and profusely apologized for wasting my time -- and at the time, because I already had a job and wasn't super committed to leaving it, I kept reassuring them that it was no big deal. But looking back at it now, if I had been unemployed and they had me running in circles for 12 weeks, told me I passed all the interviews, and then had NOTHING for me?? Suffice it to say I might understand why people call in bomb threats. Just kidding. Also, they told me that my hiring eligibility would persist for the next 12 months, so if a suitable role opened up in that time frame, I would be fast-tracked through the pipeline. Nothing ever materialized, and with them axing a bunch of teams later that year I knew they were giving priority for all openings to the affected people (and boomerangs) rather than outside candidates.

The experience left me half pleased with myself for how well I had done with little preparation and half bitter at how long it took to achieve nothing, but this was only the beginning of my interviewing adventure...

February 2026
Over the past year I had gotten severely disillusioned with my job and coworkers, and it seemed like things weren't going great financially with them either. I noticed a nice opening at major gaming company "B" and applied with a referral, thinking this could be the perfect lifeboat out of my sinking ship of a company. No movement for 26 days, and then a great chat with the recruiting coordinator, followed by the remaining 3 rounds over 3 weeks, all of which went great. When they told me they really liked me but I was their "silver medalist", I had to face the devastating reality that I would be stuck at my job for a while longer. I considered just quitting but decided to endure in the hopes of getting a nice severance when the suspected layoffs hit. (Spoiler alert: it was a paltry sum...)

While I again could feel good that I had advanced to the final round in 2 out of 2 jobs I applied to in the past year, I still had yet to see any real success, and I didn't know when I'd find another good opportunity since job openings in my field and industry were so rare.

Spring 2026
I pushed through my disappointment and applied to 18 more jobs in the ~30 days after the rejection. Since I was still employed, I felt I could be fairly picky, turning down recruiter invitations to discuss roles that were contract based or paid worse than what I was already making. Still, I was only really excited about maybe 3 or 4 of the roles I applied to, and the vast majority of my applications had to be for roles outside of my industry. On average, it took these companies 22 days to send any response back, and a few have never responded to this day. Of these 18, I got interviews with 5 but only made it far with 1 (minor gaming company "L"), getting to the third of five rounds before they ghosted me for a month and then rejected me. While that was rude, I wasn't too upset about the rejection since I disliked the hiring manager based on my call with him. I had a few calls with minor gaming company "C" but was rejected after the second round, which rattled me -- if I couldn't get past round two for a job in my field and industry with a referral, what chance did I have anywhere else?

Summer 2026
As anticipated, my company did a big round of layoffs and I was part of the 1/3 that was terminated. While it was a massive relief to not have to talk to my beloathed manager and C-suite ever again, the impending loss of health insurance weighed heavily on me. (Also, the website for filing for unemployment is so badly designed it HAS to be malicious.) I gradually lowered my standards more and more, applying to 36 openings with various combinations of decreases in seniority and pay, in-office mandates, and contracts with limited benefits. Of these 36, a little under half were for gaming companies, and I was actually interested in around 5-6 of them. 15 reached back out to schedule an interview. 2 of that 15 ghosted me after they asked for my availability, which is kinda funny and pathetic.

For most of June and July, I advanced through 5-6 rounds each with 3 companies. I also got another email back from company "L" (the job that ghosted and rejected me in the spring) asking me to resume interviewing with them since they had added a second opening. I started feeling pretty hopeful that I might have some options to choose from!

What ensued:

• I had a disastrous final interview with gaming-adjacent company "X" where they sprung a live Google Sheets test on me after leading me to believe that the interview would be about something else entirely. I don't mind improvising, but I do not use spreadsheet software to do any serious analytical work and don't really want to work somewhere that does?? Painfully awkward hour of me fumbling with Google Sheets syntax while they watched silently. They have ghosted me to this day (lol).
• Major gaming company "D" started off talks with me by volunteering that I was clearly overqualified for their opening as listed, but they would try to get additional budget approved to increase the seniority and pay for me. After several pretty smooth rounds of interviews, including the final 3-panel gauntlet, they came back with the update that they weren't able to get the budget change approved. Then they saved me from having to internally debate if I was okay with taking such a severe cut by rejecting me!
• I turned the tables on gaming company "L" and ghosted them because I didn't feel like doing their take-home assessment.
• That left major gaming company "I", my top choice. I had some worries here. For one, everyone that had interviewed me had been very icy and serious and I didn't love that vibe. I also thought my chances of getting an offer were low because the prestige and pay were so high. I thought I did okay but not incredible in the final interview, and there was radio silence for around 2 weeks afterward, so I was really doom and gloom at that point. But almost exactly 3 months after I was laid off, they called me with an offer. And as a happy book-end, although I had lowered my standards so much over the past few months, their offered salary was the exact number I had set as my lofty goal back in January

I was really pleased with the offer I got, but it would have been nice to have more than one for negotiating power! I was still (early) in the pipeline with a few other places and considered trying to stall and get a competing offer, but none of them were promising anything as good as company "I" and I was pretty sick of interviewing at that point. So I accepted, withdrew my other applications, and had a nice monthlong vacation before starting the new job this month. :D

Bonus: how my wack-ass family reacted to me landing the job
Mom: Oh thank god!!! I was so scared every day!! I thought you would never get a job!!! I've been so ashamed around my friends!!! Thank god!!!!
Dad: Ok whatever. You know, I remember we were so excited when [older brother] got into college, but we didn't really care when you got into college or graduated or got a job because that was just expected.
Brother: Oh congrats. So it took you 3 months huh. Last time I was unemployed it just took me like a week

thoughts for each stage

Finding job postings
When I was unemployed (or jobless, as I glumly repeated throughout my jobless era), my new full-time job was checking job postings. I had a lineup of job boards I would refresh several times a day, I had elaborate search strings in Google, I set alerts for certain keywords on Linkedin so I would get notified any time a relevant job was posted, and I would drop everything to apply if something good popped up regardless of where I was or what I was doing. I felt it was of extreme importance to be one of the earliest on the scene to a new job posting (moodboard: Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler). For jobs that had been open for 3+ weeks before I applied, I knew I had very slim chances of succeeding. There were multiple times that I applied to a more "stale" job posting, did an interview or two with them, and then was rejected specifically because they had already made it to the offer stage with someone else who applied weeks before I did. You gotta avoid that situation as much as possible.

Regarding referrals: I'm fortunate to have a solid network of former coworkers and friends who also work in games and are eager to give me a referral. I don't want to overstate the weight of a referral -- it's not like it guarantees you even a single interview. But any increased likelihood that eyeballs will be on your application when normally you might get lost in the sea of a thousand other applications is super valuable. Of the 6 referred applications I sent in, 5 got at least one interview scheduled and 2 got all the way to the final round, but none panned out (what can I say, I'm a self-made man... ha).

I got quite a few messages from recruiters and contracting companies hawking their job postings to me once I turned on the Linkedin "open to work" feature (not the banner, just the indicator viewable to recruiters -- I must admit my ego is too fragile for the public banner). These were mostly of low quality... the aforementioned contract positions, low hourly pay, limited benefits, in-office mandates, totally different industry, etc. I took a few introductory calls of this sort, but none went past the initial HR or hiring manager screen since it was pretty clear there was a mismatch in what we were looking for. I've heard other people have better luck working with recruiters, though (anyone here?).

Applying
Okay I know the big thing everyone says for applying to jobs is to tailor your resume to the posting. Honestly I didn't really do that. I made some small tweaks in wording or emphasis for the first, like, 4 applications, and then I didn't bother doing it ever again. Kinda out of laziness but also I felt like my resume worked well enough as is for pretty much everything I applied to. I also never wrote any cover letters (most places didn't even have an option to submit one).

Workday is a horrible antiquated platform and some of the most annoying moments of my jobless era were fighting the stupid dropdowns in Workday job applications. Why do I have to make a new account for every application? Greenhouse and Ashby were a delight to see.

Every time I selected "I do not need sponsorship" in a form I felt the insurmountable debt I owe to my (otherwise wack-ass) parents for birthing me in the US where I still reside instead of their rural Chinese dirt hovel of abject poverty. One of my fellow laid-off coworkers was on H1B and was on a massively stressful timeline to find a new job or be deported (he did find one, whew), and in my current job I found out that management extended offers for another opening to H1Bs but couldn't get the sponsorship approved so they have to start the hiring process all over. Nightmarish. Privilege checked.

Interview requested (advanced here in 22 / 56 = 39% of previous)
The average time between my application and an interview request was 12 days. For the places where I didn't progress at all, the average time between my application and their rejection was 30 days. 10/56 places ghosted me entirely -- as if I'd never even applied! (Honestly, lower than I expected?) The fact that 2 places ghosted me after they requested my availability and I gave it was also a lesson in keeping your expectations rock bottom. 39% feels like a really solid conversion rate so I'm grateful for that but it still felt soul crushing day by day. So much waiting with seemingly no prospects.

HR screen (advanced here in 18+2 / 22 = 91% of previous)
These were all pretty similar, 30 minutes of some friendly HR person rattling off some info about the job and asking a couple questions ranging from "what made you interested in this posting" (which admittedly I forgot to prepare an answer for a couple times) to "tell me about a recent project you worked on". There are benefits to not phoning in this round -- I had such an amazing, friendly screen with the recruiter from company "B" that months after my rejection they posted another job and she jumped at the chance to get me back in a call to discuss that one. On the flip side, I was really put off at my screen with entertainment company "Y" -- they were totally unfocused the whole time, spent a while fumbling setting up a video recording, slowly typed notes in silence, and were generally unprepared for the call, and I came away with such a bad impression of them. In another category: places where there's just an obvious incompatibility between us, like when they reach out to me in search of someone to work with their healthcare / marketing / financial data and that's probably not me, so things fizzle out from there.

Hiring manager call (advanced here in 8+4 / 18 = 67% of previous)
I see this advice online a lot, to prep a couple stories of projects you've worked on and use that as a jumping-off point for common interview questions. Definitely recommend. I had two main stories about major projects and "performed" them in interview after interview, continually improving the retellings by tweaking the parts felt awkward or too-much-info. I wasn't, like, writing an exact script of the story and rehearsing it and delivering it verbatim, which kept it from sounding too robotic. I think having an outline with points you want to hit but having freedom in how to get from point to point is ideal personally. And I'm not like a gifted speaker or anything, if anything I used to be a horrifically bad one, but I feel like when you actually develop a rock-solid understanding of your material it becomes really easy to talk about it.

I think I did bomb one of these calls by volunteering that I don't live laugh love generative AI. I thought it was going swimmingly until then. I did learn over the months to just never bring up risky stuff like AI and crunch.

Intermediate rounds (advanced here in 6 / 8 = 75% of previous)
Some combination of live code/knowledge tests, not-live homework assignments, cross-functional panels, and culture fit evaluations. Some of the code test sites were kinda buggy, like one had a built-in search engine for documentation that you could use, but it kept giving 404s. So that can be a fight in itself. I'm not a software engineer so I'm not tuned in to the Leetcode Hackerrank whatever stuff but it sounds bad out there for you guys. Not-live homework assignments are kinda nice because there's less pressure of eyeballs on you but it can be hard to find the time and motivation to do them. "V" asked me approximately 400 culture fit / soft skill questions, it was exhausting thinking of new stories. I see that I'm just complaining now lol but man is interviewing tiring. IDK if I have any insights here, just know your stuff and act normal I guess

Final round (advanced here in 5+1 / 6 = 100% of previous)
If not just another gauntlet of cross-functional panels, then some kind of presentation and Q&A. One of them had me prepare a presentation on my own time and then drive 2 hours to one of their offices to do the presentation in person... when they had another office 20 minutes away from me. But hey I needed a job so I did it no questions asked. When I got there, the people interviewing me were also perplexed and offended on my behalf that HR asked me to do something so nonsensical. It worked out for me though!

Offer (advanced here in 1 / 5 = 20% of previous)
After all my efforts in the final rounds, these were my results:

• 1 place gave me an offer
• 1 place said I was ready to be hired but never found an opening for me
• 1 place said I was their "silver medalist" but rejected me
• 1 place said they couldn't find the budget to accommodate my level and rejected me
• 1 place ghosted me to this day

I wish I could say I negotiated my single offer for more pay or perks but I didn't. I know you should always do it, I know I should have done it, but I was exhausted by that point and also already very happy with the offer and I get so nervous negotiating so I didn't do it. I might regret it next year.

Withdrawing other applications (7 / 56 = 13%)
I cut things off with a couple places where I truly was uninterested... but even after I signed my offer I must admit I did take a couple more HR screens out of pure nosiness. I had one with EA because I was curious if they'd reveal anything about their post-Saudi Arabia buyout situation (they did, a little), and I had one with Krafton because I was curious if I'd learn anything new about PUBG (not much). And it was kinda satisfying to hold the power and be the one to tell them I wasn't going to continue. :)

Dealing with other logistical stuff
I'm no expert in this kind of thing, but apparently you get fined if you don't have health insurance for more than 3 months (where I live, at least). Based on my start date with my new job, I would be without health insurance for 3 months and 1 week, forcing me to get some cheap temporary insurance to avoid the fine. I filled out some forms online and they said I was eligible for MediCal, and then I realized I made a mistake entering some information and fixed it, and then they said I wasn't eligible for MediCal but could sign up for something else. I signed up for the something else and was happy with the super-cheap insurance since I didn't have any medical needs. Canceled that insurance after I started the new job and secured nice new insurance. Then yesterday I get a letter from MediCal, which I am supposedly ineligible for, saying congratulations you now have MediCal! So apparently they were never updated that I'm ineligible and also I probably ignored some mail that I should have not ignored. I tried to get to the bottom of that and cancel MediCal via phone, website, and their in-person office but ran into obstacles in all three so I still have that on my to-do list. Sigh. Then there's other stuff like rolling over my 401k or something... a developing situation.

loose thoughts

What else did I do while unemployed?
I played so much Pokopia...

Also some other games (mostly Slay the Spire 2). I also realized how much I crave tasks and started volunteering at the local food bank, which was very fulfilling. I donated blood on a whim. I did a couple free trials at the local YMCA (they kept offering me more free trials). I napped a lot. I ate a giant cinnamon roll at a bakery that I usually don't have time to go to.

Now that I'm working again I wish I had done a lot more!

Interviews per week
I'm just going off my personal calendar so numbers might be a lil off.
Week 00: layoff
Week 01: 3
Week 02: 0
Week 03: 0 (I also was sick this week, so my copium was that it was good that I didn't have to feverishly cough my way through any interviews)
Week 04: 1
Week 05: 5
Week 06: 3
Week 07: 1
Week 08: 1
Week 09: 7
Week 10: 2
Week 11: 2
Week 12: 0
Week 13: offer obtained and accepted!
Week 14: 1
Week 15: 1

The zero weeks were very demoralizing. The week with 7 interviews was extremely hectic but gave me the hope I needed to keep going.

The "what interested you about this role" question
Sometimes I forgot to prepare for this question, LOL. Unforced error. What usually worked for me was 1) saying that the job description matches up really well with my experience and what I'm looking for in my next role, 2) giving two specific examples from the job description e.g. analyzing customer behavior and building dashboards and briefly relating that to my past projects, and 3) saying how I really enjoy working in this industry and optionally something about the prestige of the company. Sometimes a "I have a friend who works there and I know she really likes it" if relevant. These were generally truthful; I'm not a great liar.

My questions for interviewers
As in at the end of the interview when they ask for my questions. Here were some topics I probed that I thought were useful:

• How things have evolved over their [x] years with the company and where they see things going in the next 6 months
• Pain points and challenges they're currently facing
• Relationship with other teams
• What their day-to-day looks like
• How this company compares to their previous ones (sounds weird, but in practice something like "I see you've worked at a few different gaming companies; I'm curious what's unique about the culture / processes working on Apex Legends compared to the other places" works well. People like talking about themselves)
• Something specific about their tech stack or methodology (e.g. "I'm curious if your experimentation processes use Bayesian or frequentist methods", "I thought it was interesting how the job posting mentioned skill-based matchmaking; could you tell me how your team has been approaching that", something about the maturity of their data infrastructure)

These were okay but often didn't yield answers of much substance:

• What the onboarding process is like / what they envision for the first 30/60/90 days
• Qualities of someone who is successful in this role
• Manager's management style
• Opportunities for mentorship and career progression
• Individual impact
• Office culture
• Why the position is open (aka new position or backfill)

These ones I tried early on but would probably not try again unless there was an appropriate opportunity or an indirect way to ask:

• Anything about their AI policies
• Work-life balance

I found that asking one of the questions in the top section often indirectly revealed things about the middle and bottom sections so I could avoid directly asking about them.

Generative AI
I don't use it ever so I continued to not use it in my applications. No tweaking sentences or brainstorming interview questions. I know those things have proven helpful for others though, won't deny that.

On the company side... oof. It's a hard time to be an AI hater. Probably 90% of job postings explicitly want you to live and breathe AI. I'm to believe every company is "AI native" now. It was a relief any time I saw a company that didn't mention it on their posting. Of course, they're still using it, but it's nice when they don't have to slap it all over the job description.

Pigeonholed?
While I was on the job hunt I heard from a lot of people “don’t only apply to game companies” or “are you trying to stay in games?” I was 100% open to changing industries. Of course my preference was to stay in the industry that all of my work experience was in but pretty early on in the process I opened up my search to all kinds of places. After all, there’s only like one new gaming job posting every three weeks, so it would hardly be productive to wait for that. The reality is that non-gaming companies were completely uninterested in me — I was repeatedly ghosted and rejected by them either immediately or after 1-2 calls with them because I did not have direct experience working in healthcare, legal, finance, etc. and companies have the power to be super picky. I was the most competitive candidate I could be when I applied to game companies, and an undesirable peon to anyone else.

My perception of gaming companies as an applicant
Public consumer perception of gaming companies is one thing and it's a bit funny how perception may differ from an employee pov.

Activision: decent interview process, very friendly people... in-office mandate and really bad pay :( but I guess they get to work on Halo now?

EA: best interview process by miles and miles. Only a few rounds, super friendly people, very clear communication about what to expect from each call, no stupid hoops to jump through. Good pay. I really really liked them. But you could argue I dodged a bullet with their layoffs and Saudi Arabia buyout.

Blizzard: okay I didn't interview here but I know someone who works there and he sucks soooo much so I don't have positive thoughts

Krafton (developer of PUBG): obsessed with generative AI (as we know from headlines), wants you on a Korean schedule.

Playstation: good interview process, pay, and perks. Very... buttoned-up corporate let's-get-to-business vibes; probably the least "chatty" of all the places I talked to.

Riot: most exhausting interview process by far. The non-HR interviewers were fun to talk to though. I've had a vendetta against Riot since 2012 (you can even see it in my Smogon profile) but their incredible cafeteria food has completely rehabilitated their image for me. They pay veryyy well.

Scopely (publisher of Pokemon Go): they'd have to offer at least 3x the salary for me to consider putting up with Zionism in the workplace

Thatgamecompany (developer of Journey): high on their own supply.

This is probably too much information and maybe I'll delete some parts later but for now enjoy and I would love to hear any interview experiences, struggles, funny stories, etc. from you all!

 

[phoopes]

I didn’t know this thread existed, I’m happy I didn’t know until now though because I’m sure I would’ve used it to bitch about finding a new job (though I just started a new one last week yay).

I know we all know the market is ass but I was surprised at just how ass it is for the job seeker. While I was looking for a new job in college admissions (which is what I found) I was also applying to a bunch of “survival jobs” (this is dramatic) but I wanted to actually make some money while I was still looking for a job in my field. And I found that it’s hard to even get what should be an easy “survival job” lol.

The worst example was a position where I would’ve been working front desk/reception for a gym. Location: 20 minutes outside of Philly. Degree required. 4-5 years of customer service experience preferred. Pay: $15 an hour

Lmao

Like I can’t believe we live in a world where someone can require a degree and four+ years of experience to be a receptionist, and then have the audacity to pay so you little for all that background. Shit sucks

 

[Local Dog]

Like I can’t believe we live in a world where someone can require a degree and four+ years of experience to be a receptionist, and then have the audacity to pay so you little for all that background. Shit sucks

Click to collapse...

I legit feel sick seeing stuff like this at this point, honestly. Especially because the people who wrote the job ads and outsource the hiring process to the AI either started at a point in time when you could get a job without a degree or got there through connections

I was job searching for like a year and the entire process of writing applications went absolutely nowhere. I don't know why but there were job ads where you'd apply and get a rejection within a few hours, and these ads were around for months and months and months. There was one hyper-specific job ad that suited my work experience perfectly. I saw the job ad at a headhunter, at an external recruitment company and in two variations at the company straight. This job ad was around for 6 months and I was rejected four times from it. I looked into the LinkedIn of the company and saw that they divided the responsibilities of the position among their existing employees. I have legit no idea what they expected. There are probably less than 20 people in my area who would fit the job description and they rejected seemingly everyone

 

[adjectivenoun]

Like I can’t believe we live in a world where someone can require a degree and four+ years of experience to be a receptionist, and then have the audacity to pay so you little for all that background. Shit sucks

Click to collapse...

It's because the gig economy is now so much of the economy in general. Full-time positions of all sorts are insanely competitive because there are far fewer of them to go around for anybody who is unwilling to accept the loss in benefits and protections that comes with being a temp worker. Consequently, employers do this bullshit because they can reasonably expect a flood of applicants anyway.