And why would this be the case? Maybe the solution is to ban AI from the hiring process. This seems like companies being hoisted by their own petard. This is because they are the ones who drove the hiring market to be this way. They are the ones who started using AI in the hiring process. They are the ones who decided to make applying so much work driving applicants to use AI to survive.
Also, if you are having trouble hiring right now, that is 1000% a skill issue. It is easier to hire good talent right now than ever before. So I have absolutely 0 sympathy for this POV. Go down to your HR department if you want to see who is at fault.
PS You fix it by charging $1 to apply for jobs. Took me all of 30 seconds to figure that one out.
I wouldn't pay anything to a company I'm applying to, but I would gladly send a small amount of money to a charity and show them the relevant bank or cryptocurrency proof if they explain why they need the micropayment. They could present me with a list of 10 or 10000 charities, I'd pick 1 and put "micropayment for applying to company X" in the comment of the payment.
That way I know I'm not giving money to some huge corporation and they know I think applying to their job should at least cost me Y amounts of currency.
And if they waste more than an hour of my time with the hiring process, they could similarly pay a charity some money per hour.
That was neither me nor the company will feel cheated and in the end, no matter how the hiring turns out, a charity will have benefited.
To avoid overhead for many small payments, start a platform where users can buy many credits at once by contributing larger amounts to charity. Then, you burn your credits to apply to companies (or cold message applicants) to show you're not just spraying and praying.
This could also be used for combating spam elsewhere, like posting in forums, comment sections and so on. To preserve privacy, something like zero-knowledge proofs could be utilized. I don't know how the cryptography would work exactly, but if you can't double spend a credit and you can choose whether to keep it anonymous or not, it could work, too. It would be best if for a given credit spent, you could only disclose your identity to the entity you want access to, not the credit issuing entity.
For spam, it seems like the cost of maintaining a forum like the servers are much lower than the cost of the mods that deal with spam. So instead of paying the forum directly, we lower the need for human mods to spend their time. That way we lower resources to the forum indirectly. The credits could be per post or per account creation. I assume the HN mods' time is worth a lot more than the servers and power HN runs on.
Also, we won't have the issue that PoW and other proofs-of-X's have of being easier to do on some devices, but harder on others (like the power and time it takes to run PoW on a beefy desktop with AES-NI vs an on old phone).
But we'll still have the issue with different standards of living in different places making the credits more or less expensive for the user subjectively. Companies hiring worldwide could require different amounts of credits for applicants from different countries, but for forums this wouldn't work.
A solution to that could be issuers giving credits for local volunteering work. Clean up some garbage from the shore and get a credit regardless of whether you're in the USA or Bangladesh. But if you want to prevent credits from being traded (do we? idk) and, at the same time, have some amount of privacy, how would you do it?
But now you'd have to make sure that credit issuers all over the world only issue credits for real charity-like work. And who's to say how to value picking up garbage vs volunteering at an animal shelter vs donating 1$ to a charity.
It's interesting to think about this, even though I don't have any resource to implement anything like that.
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
- for the specific forums, jobs and other things that may use something like this
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
- if the credits are treated as money
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
- that will always be an issue, but I doubt it's too relevant here
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
- if someone spends a credit for spam and they think it's worth it, it might be an issue. But most spam wouldn't be worth it, IMHO, especially if it will be deleted from a forum, anyway.
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
- well, yeah :)
(X) Sending email should be free
- this isn't about email, but I don't necessarily like having to pay to post. However, lots of forums will remain free, as not everyone will use this idea if it's implemented. And some forums have paid accounts now, anyway.
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
- why should we trust the credit system - important question, as we haven't thought out how it could be gamed or abused.
> They are the ones who started using AI in the hiring process
Aren't you ignoring the reports of companies receiving thousands of ChatGPT-written resumes, bots sending applications, and interviews with applicants being live coached by AI?
Also, if you are having trouble hiring right now, that is 1000% a skill issue. It is easier to hire good talent right now than ever before. So I have absolutely 0 sympathy for this POV. Go down to your HR department if you want to see who is at fault.
PS You fix it by charging $1 to apply for jobs. Took me all of 30 seconds to figure that one out.