IT Hiring Is Dead. And We Killed It Ourselves
A hiring manager with over five years of experience reflects on how the IT job market has deteriorated, with AI-generated resumes, absurd job postings, and bot-driven interviews making recruitment nearly impossible.
I've been a hiring manager in IT for over five years. I've built backend, frontend, QA, and DevOps teams for companies large and small. I've worked at startups and major enterprises, conducted hundreds of technical interviews — but hiring has never been this bad.
I want to cry into the void of the internet about what's happening, hoping someone hears and responds.
The IT crisis has lasted several years — that's normal. Companies optimize and transform (firing people is the fastest, cheapest optimization method), money runs out, projects close, more people flood the market. Plus AI happened.
Job searching stretches endlessly: vacancies now get hundreds of responses instead of dozens. Processing them becomes impossible, leading to strange solutions and questionable practices.
About Job Postings
Stop cramming everything into job descriptions. Experienced specialists won't find you faster, and weak candidates won't filter themselves out. The opposite happens — less experienced people apply more eagerly.
Adding frontend, testing, UX, CI/CD, and production deployment requirements to a backend role, calling it "Senior Tech Lead CTO" and offering 300K rubles won't result in one person building your entire product. Rock stars exist, but they aren't in your budget. Accept this and create realistic requirements.
About Recruiting and AI
I understand that recruiters and HR handle thousands of candidates simultaneously. It's demanding work.
But this doesn't justify replacing human conversation with AI bots, automated interviews, and scripts. Using AI for classification and initial screening — fine. Using it for candidate communication — bad form. I won't discuss my experience with a bot, and I recommend candidates ignore such postings.
About Candidates and AI
This applies to candidates too. Stop using AI everywhere you possibly can.
Human-written resumes are naturally awkward: varying style, phrasing, presentation — that's normal. AI-generated resumes are obvious and provide no real advantage.
Same goes for interviews. System design sections can't be AI-assisted: what matters is personal architectural understanding and the ability to explain things quickly. A candidate's experience comes through clearly regardless of any prompts they might be using.
Current Results
- Enormous candidate pools with irrelevant experience
- A nearly dead market for interns and juniors
- Declining salaries
- Rising requirements across all directions
What Can Help
Honestly — who knows. But I'd try the following:
Project and Part-Time Work
During crises, this is standard. People work elsewhere, close small task scopes, and remain useful to companies.
Self-Employment and Freelancing
More complex legally and riskier, but workable with proper contracts.
Interns and Juniors
The market forgot about them unfairly. Raw diamonds. Not all juniors are useless — many handle routine work just fine, generate ideas, and sometimes outperform burned-out specialists. It's an investment, and currently a cheaper one than endless senior searches.
Ignore AI-Replacing-Dialogue
If a bot talks to you or you're offered AI-interviews — just pass. These practices will either die off or transform into something reasonable.
Recruiters: Reject Absurd Vacancies
You won't fill them anyway, you'll just waste everyone's time and overheat the market.
Find Alternatives to Job Monopolies
When services stop helping and become money extraction tools — that's a problem. Develop Telegram groups, specialized chats, direct communication. It's not perfect, but it's some alternative.
Restore Remote Work
I still don't understand the mass return to offices. Two hours commuting, eight working, two returning — people just collapse sleeping. Remote saves nerves, money, supports the regions, and doesn't hurt productivity. Let upper management commute for their complex problem-solving in evening bars; I'd rather sleep an extra hour or fix a fallen production system.
In Closing
Treat this as thoughts from a tired person inside the market. Open to comments, especially corrections.
No blog promotion, crisis solutions, or consultancy ads here — I'm not that kind of person.
P.S. I'm not an AI hater: this article was edited by a "bourgeois neural network" that also removed the profanity — otherwise moderation wouldn't have approved it.
