I am not a replicant

New year, new…job-hunt! And boy, has the world changed since the last time I went looking for employment (2019). In five short years, the entire ecosystem has been overtaken by AI, bots, and virtual interviewers (also bots). It is very hard to find any signal in all the noise.

Some things I’ve noticed:

• Screening calls conducted by automated voice systems. I found myself in the bizarre position of reassuring a robot that I am human. A Voight-Kampff test, if you will. Or a reverse Voight-Kampff? This was, unsurprisingly, at Meta.
• A requirement that I perform a video interview…with no one at the other end. I’d have to watch an introductory video telling me what to do, and then record my own video doing exactly what they told me to do. This was for a financial firm.
• Automated job suggestions that have nothing to do with the keywords I entered – because you can’t enter compound keywords. So “information architect” will get you jobs for architects (both blueprint-type and data architects) and IT jobs, but none for actually constructing knowledge environments. “Data quality” will get you jobs for engineers and quality assurance personnel, but nothing having to do with ensuring the data in pipelines is everything it needs to be.
• Resume uploading systems that scramble the text of your document, requiring you to spend significant time re-editing the online form that the platform “easily” populates from your upload.
• Expired postings. The job landscape is littered with expired postings.
• “Ghost jobs.” From Stack Overflow: “More than 60% of companies in the Resume Builder survey who reported posting ghost jobs said they did so “to make employees believe their workload would be alleviated by new workers.” Yikes. Maybe worse? Sixty-two percent of respondents said they posted ghost jobs expressly to make their employees feel “replaceable,” a real case of the FUD coming from inside the house.”

That last bullet is flat-out dystopian. And it’s impossible to discern what’s a real job posting versus a ghost one. There are no clues, just…a void.

The obvious answer is to work the network, and my network’s pretty large. I have some hope there, and after running a successful consultancy for seven years, I can go back to that as well. I’m not panicking yet – but I worry for those who don’t have a large network or freelance experience. Finding a job is always difficult; finding one in an environment where humans are barely part of the landscape is almost laughable.

And now Sam Altman is saying that OpenAI has developed the functionality for AI agents – bots – to “join the workforce”, so are we in a world now where bots are interviewing bots?

I have always maintained that in any software system, there needs to be a human element at the last mile. Just as we’re quite some time away from drones delivering packages to our houses without sparking municipal incidents, we need the human mind to determine nuance, deeper meaning; to identify ambiguities; to perform judgment; and to manage the knowledge workers that do these things. AI can get you pretty far – but as I’m seeing in the search for my next adventure, it can also steer you straight into some stupid obstacles.