Heshen, an 18th-century official of the Qing Dynasty, was tasked to manage a great famine relief. He set up a large number of rice porridge sheds and hungry people lined up to get a free bowl. Habitually wicked yet clever, Heshen scooped a handful of dirt from the ground and threw it in the porridge. He responded to the angry people around him by ordering all sheds do the same. The reason? He said, there are far more people waiting for a free meal than we can provide. What’s the most efficient way to tell the real hungry ones from those that feign? Real hungry people don’t mind the dirt in porridge but those just wanting a free meal do. We want to help the people that need food the most. Emperor Qianlong later heard of this and greatly praised him for his ingenuity, again.

What does this story have to do with a company in 2025? If you’re a hiring manager or work at the HR of a company, you’re likely suffering from resume spam. People use AI to quickly churn out beautifully written resumes and submit them to hundreds of hiring companies, which use AI to sift through all of them and filter out most, leaving a few that a real human can handle. Most work is done by AI on both ends, with little human intervention. This is bad to both the applicants and the companies. The essence of Heshen’s wisdom is in artificial addition of difficulty, inconvenience, or inefficiency. This practice appears to foul up the whole process, but the benefit outweighs the harm. If we can make job application less efficient or more cumbersome, a job applicant will apply for this job only if he thinks the extra effort is worthwhile and his skills match the requirement fairly well. His almost thoughtless resume spam will skip this job, just like a burglar will more likely skip a house that has a surveillance camera on the porch.

So, what can be done to make job application less efficient? One great strategy is to revert back to the good old paper application. You advertise a job, and require that a resume be sent through snail mail, in which the applicant can include his phone and email contact. Snail mail is a natural way to fight spam. (We’ve been fighting spam emails for 30 years but we’re not bothered with junk mail in our physical mailbox.) It takes a resume spammer a few seconds to apply for an individual job online but would take at least a few minutes to apply for a paper application-only job. When he does, he, as well as the hiring company, has a higher confidence in his match of skills with the requirement. When the hiring company receives less, probably very much less, resumes that are more relevant, the hiring manager will have more time on each resume, literally reading it, not searching for keywords. Many qualified applicants are not good at gaming the algorithm, AI, or keyword-based resume scanning system. Forcing the hiring company to read is a boon to the job applicants.

Another strategy, perhaps a little outlandish, involves money. There are various ways to implement this. For example, as I proposed before, the job applicant is required to donate money, even as low as $5, to his favorite charity, and show proof of his recent donation. Alternatively, as I proposed earlier, in case of a big, reputed company, the applicant is required to send in $100 application fee, which will be returned later, unconditionally, regardless whether he is hired. In either case, the applicant is unlikely able to massively submit his resume. Some people criticize this requirement saying only rich people can apply for these jobs. Indeed, only rich people can afford to continue to spam, but they spam at a much slower pace and less willingly. And at an early stage of this hiring experiment, there won’t be many jobs with this requirement anyway. If absolutely needed, this hiring company can exempt donation or application fee if the applicant provides certain proof of poverty, probably part of his tax returns. The whole point is to slow down the mechanical part of the job application in order to boost the quality and relevance of the submitted resumes. It’s a win-win when excluding efficient technology such as AI, because when efficiency is improved, so is efficiency in creating distractions and junk. Rather than pit AI against AI, why not temporarily forgo AI altogether?

Heshen is a bad guy in mixing dirt in porridge, but is a good guy at a higher level in saving more lives. Ditching technology or creating hurdles in job application is bad on the surface, but is good at a higher level in finding real talent more efficiently instead of more inefficiently.

July 2025

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