The Entry-Level Hiring Process Is Breaking Down (theatlantic.com)
- Reference: 0180397247
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/12/16/1521248/the-entry-level-hiring-process-is-breaking-down
- Source link: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/grade-inflation-ai-hiring/685157/
The recent-graduate unemployment rate now sits slightly higher than the overall workforce's, a reversal from historical norms where new college graduates were more likely to be employed than the average worker. Job postings on Handshake, a career-services platform for students and recent graduates, have fallen by more than 16 percent in the past year. At Harvard, [2]60% of undergraduate grades are now A's , up from fewer than a quarter two decades ago. Seven years ago, 70% of new graduates' resumes were screened by GPA; that figure has dropped to 40%.
Two working papers examining Freelancer.com found that cover-letter quality once strongly predicted who would get hired and how well they would perform -- until ChatGPT became available. "We basically find the collapse of this entire signaling mechanism," researcher Jesse Silbert said. The average number of applications per open job has increased by 26% in the past year. Students at UC Berkeley are now applying to 150 internships just to land one or two interviews.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/careers/job-search/the-entry-level-hiring-process-is-breaking-down/ar-AA1SrPt5
[2] https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/10/28/1520235/harvard-says-its-been-giving-too-many-a-grades-to-students
Cover letters have been dying for a long time... (Score:5, Informative)
It has been almost 20 years since I was in the entry-level hiring pipeline, but even then cover letters were on their way out. They seem to mostly be a relic from the time that people applied to jobs via snail mail. You needed a cover letter to explain what job you were applying for. Once employers switched to online portals, the need went away.
When I was on the other side of the interview a few years later, HR would rarely even send the cover letter to the hiring manager (if one ever existed). It doesn't take Chat GPT to write a droll form letter that says nothing (and there really is nothing interesting you can say in a cover letter that your resume won't). Career services used to have cover letter templates, and you'd see the same variations over and over. I've changed jobs twice in the last year (unusual circumstance due to a corporate buyout). In neither application did I send a cover letter.
Re: Cover letters have been dying for a long time. (Score:4, Interesting)
There is still value to cover letters. I worked at a company where we put a very simple prompt in the job req which told the applicant to do something trivial im their cover letter. If they failed to do it, we threw the application away. It was to screen for the most basic skill of observation and to know whether or not the asshole sending in the application had even read the job req, which many folks don't do any more. I'd think we culled 30% of applicants from the go.
Ancient history, but the same theory (Score:3)
The form said apply in black ink; if you applied in blue you were quickly culled...
Re: (Score:3)
> There is still value to cover letters. I worked at a company where we put a very simple prompt in the job req which told the applicant to do something trivial im their cover letter. If they failed to do it, we threw the application away. It was to screen for the most basic skill of observation and to know whether or not the asshole sending in the application had even read the job req, which many folks don't do any more. I'd think we culled 30% of applicants from the go.
I'm going to guess the job was a make-work job you expected to receive an exceeding number of applications for.
Re: Cover letters have been dying for a long time (Score:2)
I once applied for a job, got a rejection letter from the president of the company, telling me there was a typo in my cover letter, but didn't tell me where/what it was.
After reviewing my cover letter several times I couldn't find it, and it pissed me off that this fellow (a name many here would recognize) took the time to tell me I made a mistake, but stopped short of actually pointing out the mistake...
I'm positive he thought he was helping me, and maybe he did long-term, but at the time it came across as
Re: (Score:2)
There are plenty of ways to see if someone read the job requirements without a cover letter. Besides, silly "gotcha" prompts can end up screening good candidates while letting bad ones get through. Job applications for many applicants/job types have become a numbers game. It is not profitable to spend too long on any specific application. Some already employed candidates won't put much energy into their search because they don't need a job. But those may be the most desirable candidates.
I've personally neve
Re: (Score:3)
"There is still value to cover letters."
No there isn't, this is 2025 not 1985. The vast majority of job applications now come from agencies who field candidates to the companies, and personal experience has shown me that applying direct through a company portal is a waste of time. You either hear nothing or it goes via an agency favoured by HR anyway.
Re: Cover letters have been dying for a long time. (Score:2)
I landed several jobs (last century) in large part because I used my cover letter to connect my personal job experience with the job description provided - but nowadays, I suspect they go nowhere, since software invests, sorts and filters resumes...
SATs for grads (Score:3)
Companies need to get together and hire someone to produce an exam given to all graduates in a particular field, sort of like an exit exam to graduate, but really an entrance exam to get a job.
Re: (Score:3)
If there was any difference between racial groups, or between men and women, on such an exam, it would be lawsuit-bait. A lot of the difficulty in hiring is coming up with measures which will easily pass Civil Rights Act scrutiny while still giving good signal (it has to pass _easily_ because even if you win lawsuits every time, the cost of defense will be ruinous). A college degree in a related field is generally accepted. Things like programming tests for programmers are. But the more general your tes
Let's call it the graduation exam... (Score:3)
The UK is blessed with centrally set and marked exams at 18 that determine which university you get to attend. This means that our 'A levels' are a real record of achievement, though there's some evidence that there's been grade inflation over the past 40 years.
Unfortunately by contrast universities get to set and mark their own exams, and we have seen appalling levels of grade inflation as a result. My own preferred solution would be to deprive almost all universities of the right to grant degrees, instead
Grades are worthless information (Score:4, Insightful)
I've interviewed hundreds and hired probably a hundred people during my career thus far. I have never, not once, asked about grades. I literally do not give a fuck about GPA. School is to make sure you know how to show up, follow some directions, and fill out paperwork on time. There are intelligence and problem solving skills, and then there's academic "skill" of getting good grades. I don't give a fuck if you got an A. I have known many people who had straight A's but were utterly useless in the real world. School is not the real world.
Re: (Score:2)
Incidentally, you don't get to see the academic record of your doctor, choose your surgeon by their GPA or even the engineer that signed off on the new bridge by your house. You can only trust the certificate they got. You could be getting the guy who was straight-A near-genius autist, or you could be getting the doctor that was on academic probation twice and squeaked his way through med school.
For what it's worth the best doctor I had was a retired US Army doctor who went into the Army without a high sch
Interviews and Probationary Period (Score:3)
The only way to hire is to interview candidates and then see how they do in the 90-day probationary period. An in-person interview is the only way you are going to be able to get a feeling for how someone is going to integrate into your team anyway. As for picking who to interview, just select randomly amongst the applicants who look like they meet your experiential requirements.
This isn't exactly hard or particularly complicated. Entry-level positions mean you are already expecting someone to be coming in green and will need to learn your processes and what your business does. If they seem overly obsequious, obnoxious, annoying or whatever in the interview toss them out and interview the next one.
You could pay someone to write a cover letter (Score:2)
Don't forget that. Previously, if you had money to spare, you could game the system a bit. Now with genAI everybody can easily game the system.
Saw it years ago. (Score:2)
> college GPAs, cover letters, and interview performance -- have lost much of their value as grade inflation and widespread AI use render these metrics nearly meaningless.
Attended a high school graduation a couple of years ago. The school was practically bragging about how 90% of the graduating class were honor graduates. Really wanted to stand up and ask the Principal to define "bell curve" for the audience that knows damn well how they get their funding.
Not to mention Leave No Child Behind. Reducing education down to the lowest common denominator has real consequences. Employers are feeling that now.
Regarding interview performance, speaking to a candidate in person sh
What's "breaking down" exactly? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've heard that everyone and their dog now requires people to use the "AI". So, getting an "AI" resume should tell you your prospective hire has that super-essiential skill that nobody can do without. Even better, I've heard that with the advent of the "AI" there is no need to hire people for entry-level jobs. So stop interviewing, fill that position with the "AI" that you shoot for anyway. While you're at it, fire your HR department - if you're not hiring, you don't need them.
There, you're already ahead. Shit's getting better, efficiency's going up, headcount is going down, and if you miss the 100 people you yell at every morning at the chorei , well, have that agentic whatever show up as 10 agents instead of one, or 100 and talk to all of them.
To be the king is only getting better.
Back to pre-employment testing (Score:2)
They're going to have to start giving basic in-person tests as part of the interview process.We've already been making applicants demonstrate basic spreadsheet skills for a couple years. Civil Service exams for example. Your degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on and we tried to warn you this was coming.
Conflating AI and grade inflation (Score:2)
Article doesn't properly dissect these aspects. Also, the article seems to infer that grading 2+ decades ago was some "golden age" w.r.t. academia grading. Was it really? I seem to remember a lot of protest where high GPA vs an ok GPA was many times due to things like students shopping around for the "easy professor", and other violations of Goodhart's Law. But did anyone really care enough to change that system? It gave employers an easy threshold to filter applications, and no one cared if perfectly good
Why entry-level wehn there's AI? (Score:2)
I'm sure many corporate "leaders" are thinking that way -- "let AI do it cheaper". Since the old way of working your way to the top seems to have gone by the boards, now they just want to hire experienced workers...and pay them entry level wages...
The illogic of the above approach probably doesn't even dawn on these Captains of Industry.
Re: (Score:2)
Those "captains of industry" only care about next quarter's profits and their bonus. If they actually indulged in long-term thinking, they'd probably miss their quarterly targets and get fired.
Re: Why entry-level wehn there's AI? (Score:2)
> now they just want to hire experienced workers...and pay them entry level wages...
Has any employer ever WANTED to pay experienced workers higher pay?
Pity the poor internship providers (Score:2)
> Students at UC Berkeley are now applying to 150 internships just to land one or two interviews.
Can you imagine how many applications they must have to sift thru to fill a single internship?
Once upon a time, internships were rare, now everyone expects to get land one (or more) just because...
If the youngster employmen rate (Score:2)
is only slightly above the average, the system is doing fine.
No, it's not "breaking down". It's changing, which means that people need to scramble, change their behavioral patterns, and most people find that annoying. Then, they go online and write articles about how "everything's broken" while the reality is the that universe simply isn't in a steady state. And, we should be thankful for that. Steady state means that the universe is already in heat death.
Things change. You gotta change too. Deal wi
feedstock (Score:3)
considering how hard it is to get into an Ivy league college why wouldn't most of their students get As ?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Depends on grading... are you testing knowledge, in which case an A from an Ivy has the same value as an A from a middle of nowhere state school (ie, a Medical Terminology class where you simply have to memorize 5000 medical terms...)
Or are you saying "this student mastered this subject and performed better than their peers"? Because if that is the case, a C at a MIT engineering course may well equal an A at middle-of-nowhere-U. Because the "average" MIT engineer should maybe be "better" than the average
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because certain people get better grades because they're "protected" or "disadvantaged," not because they earned it.
For what purpose? Oh, there's always virtue-signalling, letting people skate while still nailing that football scholarship, and others.
The "meritocracy" of school has been chipped away at all levels since the 90's. Easier to score an A without working for it.
Now it's hitting colleges, and boo-hoo, our students can't read or math, we'll still pass them anyway.
It's similar to interviewing IT p
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Do you actually interact with Harvard students/graduates on a regular basis, or are you saying this because TV man told you?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, yes I have twice, and one was a CIO.. and lost us the biggest deal we had, and then bailed and joined one of our auditors as their CEO. The company was then purchased and absorbed by a much bigger entity, and I was out on the streets.
A degree from Hah-vahd means shit if you lose us business and then bail out on the mess you made.
I form my own conclusions made on my own experiences. I don't even have a TV, and I get info from many sources. Some online, some real-world, none from Facebook or Twitter o
Re: (Score:1)
An elite education should be harder, they're hopefully not teaching remedial reading like at public universities
Re: (Score:2)
Harvard has offered remedial reading since [1]1940 or 1941 [thecrimson.com]. They recently started offering remedial math. Stanford started offering remedial math (though they don't call it that -- MATH 18) in 2022.
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1940/9/30/remedial-reading-for-slow-readers-to/
Re: (Score:1)
> considering how hard it is to get into an Ivy league college why wouldn't most of their students get As ?
How hard is it if you have a parent who is an alumnus and/or donates heavily? Do you really think Trump deserved to get into Wharton?
Re: feedstock (Score:2)
> Do you really think Trump deserved to get into Wharton?
Interesting use of the word 'deserved' - and the answer is he probably 'earned' his spot at Wharton, yes, he probably did earn it.
I've seen/worked with graduates from top MBA programs, they aren't all that impressive as a group - individually there are, of course, standouts, but as a group, not so much.
Re: (Score:2)
> considering how hard it is to get into an Ivy league college why wouldn't most of their students get As ?
That's an argument for employers not to care what the grades were, if all Harvard grads are good enough, and I'm sure there are plenty of employers who will take any Harvard grad.
But for the employers who wish to be even more selective, hiring only the best of the best (and obviously offering appropriate compensation because they're competing with the other employers who want the best of the best), it's useful for them to be able to use GPA to discriminate between the mediocre Harvard grads (who would pre