The memes are true. Recruiting has gone insane.

[iloveeverykindofcat]

I've never seen it this bad. I'm an academic/charity professional. I'm fortunate that I've worked one relatively good contract after another for ten years now, and the last five years has been very good indeed. I'm well paid at the moment. But my contract ends in April. I'm very used to looking for the next thing, that's just how the industries are these days- even so-called permanent jobs are falling to redundances and budget freezes. Normally my I'm pretty sanguine about it.

Oh my God. I have never seen it this bad in my life. Jobs that don't exist, posted purely for data gathering. Five page applications for a first sift. Employers that ghost. RECRUITMENT COMPANIES THAT GHOST. 100+ applications per post. Experience mandatory, then rejected for being overqualified. Bullshit salaries for posts that are easily 3 jobs in 1. 4+ stage application processes for entry level posts.

It seems like my 2 best leads right now are based on my network - effectively, who I know. Which is sad, that's but reality right now. Anyway this is a vent post. I've built up a bit of a savings buffer over this last post, and I'm a hairs breadth from jacking it all in for a year and cleaning houses whilst listening to podcasts.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

The worst offenders for non existent jobs have been the big recruitment companies for over 30 years, I doubt that Reed (amongst others) are a front for the real owners of a nail bar and American Candy vape shop empire, somehow.

Those people saying the fake job adverts are for data collection, could anyone explain by whom, please? And why?

I can imagine it being by recruitment companies for their own future use.

Or by identity thieves.

Or by Cambridge Analytica / Facebook-style data-collectors to sell on for eg political profiling and targeting?

Or is it something else again?

All of the above. Data is currency.

May I please ask, do you happen to know something definite or are you guessing like me?

I'ts just that over the last decade I've so often found myself thinking, "WTF? That felt like a giant data-collection exercise. You've put me all the way through a webform demanding my DoB, etc, and only now at the end you tell me you don't offer that service to my postcode. Surely that would have been the place to start if this were real?"

Data is more valuable than money - money goes up and down in value, you can run out of it, you can have it taken from you. But data? That gives you power.

It gives you the information needed to extract whatever you want from a person, a group, a country, an alliance. Yes, you can get money out of them, but that's not the only thing you can get with it. You can get their allegiance, their hearts, tap into their deepest desires and needs. You can get their entire existence and use that data to control, coerce, exterminate or lift them up to a place where they would quite literally die for your benefit.

For a random website, data gives them money. It gives them a foothold with politicians, billion pound industries, it gives them information that can be sold and used for marketing, for politics, for educating, for technology, scientific discovery, forming policy, maximising opportunities for military successes, for promoting beliefs or setting discourses that affect everybody not just now, but for decades, centuries,

Data gives you not just the ability to see what way the wind is blowing, it allows you to change its direction and turn it into either a gentle summer breeze or a typhoon that destroys everything in its path - and convince people that your hurricane is the only reasonable course of action even as their world disintegrates around them.

I work with data every day. It's beautiful. It's also deadly.

Great post.

This is why you have to grant access to your data to nearly every website you visit now. They dont want your business as much as they want details about you.

Why do I imagine you are stroking a white fluffy cat like a bond villain, whilst delivering this speech.
Very true though!

But who is training the AI to do the work of those doctors? Who is inputting the data? Who is developing the algorithms? The point is that AI needs human expertise to function, and we are already at the point of feeding nonsense in and getting nonsense out, which will just increase over time as the human experts retire/die out. What will happen then is we will actually either need a new generation of actual human experts in most fields or we will need to accept widespread societal decline in favour of AI nonsense.

And your friend who is actually replacing humans with AI (not “losing” them, actively choosing to replace them) is making their business redundant within a generation. I hear so many business leaders talking about future work needing a couple of experts at the top basically overseeing the AI but what happens when every company is no longer training anybody? There will not be senior experts in any fields in two decades-what happens then? The shortsightedness of all of this is staggering, and driven by greed.

Well all these companies need to remember that their services will not be required if people do not have the means to consume their products/services, which they won’t if they are all replaced by AI. So good luck to all the companies and conglomerates striding ahead with replacing an entire workforce with AI: I hope AI will be able to purchase their goods and services as humans won’t be able to if none of us have jobs.

A mate of mine who owns a solicitors will be losing 10 staff next year replaced by AI that works 7 day s a week 24 hours a day 365 days a year

Do you mean there has been a downturn in his business which he has attributed to AI? Law has always had ‘styles’ - templates into which you inserted the relevant names etc. saving solicitors considerable time in drafting documents. Will styles have been sold for decades and may work for the most basic of situations. But my friend’s law firm makes a considerable amount of money from sorting out the mess created when lay people try to use documents they have created themselves where they have relied on such templates. I can’t see AI generated documents being any different. You need to know what to ask for and have enough expertise to know that what is generated makes sense for your situation. Even Lawyers are coming a cropper on that.