I'm based in the UK and have been a hiring manager pretty recently. I have seen a lot of CVs like this. This was the junior positions I was advertising two years ago, this wouldn't have made it through the filter. Because largely, we (as even a small company) would get ~250+ applicants for a single position.
My filters were roughly (in order) (a) remove anyone who didn't study their degree in the UK and didn't explicitly state their right to work / visa status (b) remove people with irrelevant/less relevant degrees e.g. people with Business Information (c) remove weaker/less well regarded Universities.
Not always, but usually even after that you'd still have 150 applicants to review, and at that point you start taking a really critical eye and anything that doesn't look quite right or isn't explained in 30 seconds of reading it gets a CV binned because you just don't have time. I would have immediately binned this one because the person has listed 4 years duration for a 3 year degree and not put an explanation of why. I don't mind what the reason is but you are splitting hairs trying to distinguish between people so stuff like this matters. Other things I would say is that the CV experience listed isn't really verifiable as the companies listed have basically no presence online. That doesn't mean it's negative, but it's not a positive - it just no bearing. The DeepMind internship appears to be an in-university internship which is nothing special.
The reality is that you get a lot of CVs like:
* 1st Class degree from University of Bristol/University of Nottingham/University of Birmingham/UCL/etc.
* Summer internship at <large company you have heard of> OR Placement Year at <large company you have heard of>
* A Level grades listed and are good (AAB+)
And even then, you can't interview all those people.
I was recruiting for junior devs in the UK back in the early 2000's and it was the same story then. One job we advertised had over a 1,000 applicants. 750+ were immediately ruled out because they had no right to work in the UK, another 200-ish were people from other professions trying to get into tech, but that still left us with 50+ people we should have interviewed but couldn't. We had to get down to arbitrary decisions on ridiculous grounds to cull the pile of CVs to the dozen or so we actually had time to interview.
And this was a small business in rural England. I can't imagine the stack a large company in a city would have to go through.
It has always been hard to get into the tech industry. There has always been a shortage of junior positions, and getting the first gig has always been the hardest step of this career.
However, I can totally understand how LLMs are making this worse. An LLM fills the exact spot in the team that would normally be taken by a junior dev. Anyone trying to get into the industry these days has my sympathy.
The media have been shouting the high salaries and IQ of programmers for nearly three decades, it was bound to satiate the market one day, with or without AI. Add to that the addictive nature of programming…
If you think that’s bad, about 15 years ago I asked a recruiter from Rolls Royce how competitive their grad scheme was and it had over 20000 applications per year at the time.
Sure, but not all applications are equal right? If you get so many applications, you can basically cream off the top % for your grad scheme, even after accounting for the fact that you won't have every student accept a new grad offer.
My filters were roughly (in order) (a) remove anyone who didn't study their degree in the UK and didn't explicitly state their right to work / visa status (b) remove people with irrelevant/less relevant degrees e.g. people with Business Information (c) remove weaker/less well regarded Universities.
Not always, but usually even after that you'd still have 150 applicants to review, and at that point you start taking a really critical eye and anything that doesn't look quite right or isn't explained in 30 seconds of reading it gets a CV binned because you just don't have time. I would have immediately binned this one because the person has listed 4 years duration for a 3 year degree and not put an explanation of why. I don't mind what the reason is but you are splitting hairs trying to distinguish between people so stuff like this matters. Other things I would say is that the CV experience listed isn't really verifiable as the companies listed have basically no presence online. That doesn't mean it's negative, but it's not a positive - it just no bearing. The DeepMind internship appears to be an in-university internship which is nothing special.
The reality is that you get a lot of CVs like:
* 1st Class degree from University of Bristol/University of Nottingham/University of Birmingham/UCL/etc.
* Summer internship at <large company you have heard of> OR Placement Year at <large company you have heard of>
* A Level grades listed and are good (AAB+)
And even then, you can't interview all those people.