alt Hacker NewsExcellent point. And for anyone who’s been a hiring manager / recruiter, you know how many candidates you will have to sort through. And you want to waste as little of your engineers’ time making them do interviews if possible.
Internet applications have made it so easy to apply to a position, companies have to find (usually arbitrary) ways of filtering the pipeline.
It’s a very difficult problem to solve - Coinbase had 500k applications for 500 positions.
Edit: I’m very concerned about AI tools flooding the pipelines even more by sending out tons of automated applications. This is going to cause an arms race where the companies have to use more arbitrary methods to sort through candidates, and it will only make it harder to find good ones.
You made your edit before I posted.
But, yeah, it's not that, back in the day, I didn't post a ton of application resumes and form cover letters to HR departments out of school--and even got non-form responses from a number (and an offer from one sight unseen though I ended up going with someone else even after insisting on an in-person visit). But my sense is that, as you say, there's more of an arms race as you put it going on today where--if you don't have some way of cutting trough the noise, such as through your network, it's a tough slog. Which is one reason the anecdotal evidence at least suggests it's tougher for people who have't developed a network yet.