Employers, please use postmarked letters for job applications (2025)

Site appears to have been hugged to death. Here's a link to an archived version:

https://archive.ph/iTJTI

Instead, the approach that will continue increasing in dominance is hiring referrals and finding jobs through personal networks.

In a world that increasingly resembles The Library of Babel,

- the main way to know what's true is to tune into news sources you trust (monolithic old school media, or personality driven new-school media, social media, etc.),

- the main way to learn what to watch/listen/read is to take recommendations from people you trust, or received through channels you trust,

- the main way to hire or get hired is, increasingly, by exploiting a network of people you trust.

All of this compensates for ambient oversaturation by using the best available (and tunable!) desaturation filter: your trust network.

I'd really like a rejection physical letter back saying thankyou for application but no thanks signed by a human. I put some effort in to applying, they could at least exert some effort coming back, rather than simply ghosting. A reasonable barrier to bots collecting CV's.

After seeing the flood of resumes for application, I do think a small cost to apply wouldn't be a bad thing for either applicants or companies. I also realize that if someone is unemployed, getting them to pay money they don't have to find a new job is counterproductive.

However, when we wanted to hire a new Ops person at work, the flood of obviously not qualified at all applicants we got was insane.

I like this as an optional "this will be read and considered by a human" guarantee added to a job posting. That way, you can still get the reach of digital submissions but the benefits of this approach.

They already do this, listen to the radio at off hours and there will be many job ads with instructions to apply via postal mail. Of course the reason isn't to deter LLMs it's to deter Americans so the employer can claim no Americans applied in their visa and green card filings.

At this rate we just need the entire system to breakdown so we can rebuild it with some hard standards. I shouldn't need to reenter my information. Period.

I think something like an escrowed fee that both the applicant and the employer pay would be a reasonable way to solve the spam and keep both parties honest. If either the applicant or the employer are unhappy with the process (resume doesn't match, employer ghosts) - the fee is sent to charity, otherwise the fee is returned to both parties.

While time consuming, I would gladly use my otherwise underused but decent enough handwriting to carefully write out job applications. Can get really good pens to do it too. However, given my own network, that's probably not necessary anymore either way.

My mother had insanely superb handwriting, in part because her mother pushed good penmanship on her. While I can be sloppy, it was for me a challenge when I was young to copy her perfect handwriting (not for forging signatures though!) Handwriting is influenced by which hand is dominant. I am left, she was right handed... so not exactly close :)

Last job I hired for I required short video submission answering some basic questions. If you didn't submit a video you were automatically disqualified. The previous position we hired for had over 1,000 applicants this last position around 500.

2D plotters are what, $100? That's basically no cost for someone wanting to spam "handwritten" letters

Rubut will write you letter https://shop.elephantrobotics.com/collections/ultraarm/produ...

Surely few people have a printer these days? I do (a color laser printer) but I'm a bit old school. And yes, my handwriting is, and always has been, dreadful.

For every 1 LLM applicant that this idea would deter, you would also deter 50 humans who simply don't feel like having to send a letter to apply to a job.

This does nothing.

I'll just start a business that mails letters to companies for you.

Now, an APPLICATION FEE, that's interesting. Hmm.

Has anyone tried this from the applicant side? Just send in a cover letter and resume, old-school?

Introducing JobbyPasta, the service that will hand-complete and mail in job applications for a small fee of $9.99 per application. Add on a transcription of your cover letter for an additional $4.99, or have us generate one (with your approval) and transcribe it for $7.99.

Have a lot of applications to send out? Subscribe to us monthly for $34.99/mo (billed annually).

And maybe employers/recruiters should be required to include a template (but .doc is not allowed) of what format they expect, disclose if they will be OCR-ing it and with which tool/LLM, will they read it or feed it to an AI etc.

Fix the jobs problem hiring mail rooms full of people again!

No poorly paid (relative to company performance) recruitment team is going to take on sorting mail and recruitment.

So this just blows up business operations costs. Non-starter.

And before the in-person interview, the applicant is required to produce a handwriting sample in front of the interviewer of random text, which is then compared against the mailed documents.

Perhaps we just need Tinder for employee-employer relationships?

Its all in the profile - and we can all just swipe left/right instead.

Dysfunctional FAANG seeks 10X prompt engineer in hyderabad

As someone who is currently looking for a job, I don't like this idea.

All this does is increase the effort and barrier to entry to apply for a job. This is not a good thing. Applying to jobs is already time consuming as it is; nobody wants more hoops to jump through.

I understand that recruiters/hiring managers/whatever get a lot of junk applications, but frankly, it is your job to sort through them. You are paid to do this.

Could the hiring/job seeking process be better? Yes, absolutely. Currently, it's terrible, and almost everyone involved is making it worse. But the solution is not mailing job applications.

Reminds me of how it was common in France until pretty recently for employers to use graphology (pseudoscience) analysis of candidate's handwritten letters to assess personality traits etc. When I was looking for work there I was lucky that the tech sector was already a abandoning the practice.

Brought to you by the same people who think that it should be possible to sack an employee without cause and without notice.

In my last job search, I sent out a few dozen resumes utilizing snail mail. It was from a job board that searched for job descriptions that only accepted applications through physical mail. There were some big tech companies I was able to apply to. Ultimately, I didn't get a role from snail mail but it was an interesting process. I would probably expose myself if I detailed the specific service I used, but you can lookup online tools where you upload a PDF and they print it out and send it to an address for like $1 each (more for certified, priority, etc.) and I confirmed it worked. I even had companies mail me back rejection letters, so that was a first.

What about doing more to retain employees? Maybe don't layoff employees each time someone on CNBC makes a comment about the company's overhead looking a fraction of a percent too high? Perhaps even train people?

Instead, everyone expects there to be a magical unicorn out there who has decades of experience as a senior at multiple FAANGs but lives in Warm Spit, Missouri and is willing to work for the average Walmart wage in Warm Spit (locality adjustment, surely you understand why we must do this). Shrink your pool to your local area. Even if you allow remote work, require a physical interview at your office. Stop screwing up the process by worrying about edge cases involving unicorns flying across the globe to meet you. Once you stop chasing unicorns, most of the fraud goes away because it's the unicorn chute that's letting the fraudsters into the process.

But seriously, stop getting rid of good employees and stop refusing to build up employees from within. Very few are going to get hired away if you treat them well. The few who do leave will either be treated poorly at their new employer and want to return or be treated well, which means that employer isn't gaining some advantage over you by treating their employees lesser.

Of course, if you're just trying to get a bonus for cutting labor expenses a few percentage points before you parachute off to somewhere else, then you and the company that tolerates this both deserve to suffer. No doubt you'll both be at your congress critter's door to demand access to the global market because you believe skill is based on how little an employee is willing to accept in compensation. In a labor pool of over 150 million, no doubt it's true that you can't find anyone who knows React or Spring Boot.