I’ve been applying to jobs for a few months now and I’m beginning to wonder whether AI has eaten them all. Not only the jobs but the companies I’m applying to as well. Being reasonably-well organised, I started keeping track of my applications and their states from day one. I should have used the CRM I wrote back in the 2000s but I needed more immediacy in the data entry and access (todo: feature request) so I used Google Sheets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It became clear to me very quickly that a large proportion of these roles had something wrong with them – either basic details missing, usually no salary specified, or simply nobody on the other end of the application. I’m used to HR teams and processes being pretty crap most of the time, but this seems to be something else – no responses to direct applications, no responses to agency applications, duplicate vacancies clearly being reposted on LinkedIn within days of the original – what gives?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My go-to in these days of modern AI-enlightenment is that the role, the company, the candidate tracking system, or all of the above have probably been eaten by AI, but to what end? Simply harvesting details seems like a glorious waste of time, and from my many years of being on the receiving end of thousands of applications (and hiring lots of developers), the quality of a reasonable chunk of those rejected applications wouldn’t be good enough to use for model training unless you’re demonstrating what not to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, as my list of failed applications nears one hundred (since Feb 2025), I find myself with a reasonably complete, therefore reasonably decent quality dataset, albeit one with questionable utility, to screw about with in D3. Go play with it here<\/a> because wordpress is a bit naff at embedding nice-sized iframes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n