Comment by bartread

The takeaway from this for me is that, using an LLM to score anything takes multiple (maybe even many) runs and the result you’ll get is, at best, a sane-ish distribution.

Which sort of sounds workable until you scale it up to larger datasets, where at some point compute/time/energy costs will render it non-viable.

I am sure there’s some reasonable rule of thumb estimation on distribution that could be applied based off fewer runs per data artifact, but you’re always going to be trading off against confidence by doing this.

Beyond this, I’d bet that almost no implemented systems that use LLMs for scoring, ranking, or decision making use such a multi-run approach. Partly because people don’t understand their behaviour is stochastic, perhaps because a lot of people without a background in statistics don’t understand what stochastic actually means, and no doubt partly because of budget concerns: if you have to ask an LLM to do the same thing 10, 50, 100 times to get a sufficiently good result, then the cost saving argument is either weakened or completely destroyed.

There is at least one more aspect worth considering in the specific case of resumes/CVs: is the inconsistency of scoring by LLM worse than the inconsistency of scoring by a human following a similar process?

Because the reality is that, even for an experienced recruiter, reviewing hundreds or thousands of resumes or CVs gets pretty fatiguing. People get hungry, bored, tired, restless, irritable, etc.

That inevitably leads to inconsistencies creeping in, so there’s always an element of “luck” (or, perhaps better, uncertainty) as to whether your resume/CV passes screening.

So is that inconsistency better or worse with LLM screening? I don’t know. But, at least, if it’s not worse maybe it doesn’t matter for this specific use case. And if it’s notably better then maybe it’s raised the bar on what “good enough” screening looks like?

(And I’m sure other use cases warrant similar, “does it matter?”, questions, with the answers no doubt landing differently.)