I’m so glad I was able to establish a career and become well known in an industry before applying for positions was so demoralising and exhausting. I worry about what things will be like in another few years when my children enter the job market.
There’s actually an easy technical fix for this. All we would need is a common format for resumes that is machine readable, e.g. an XML schema that defines what fields should be in there. Then you just need a simple tool with a nice UI for inputting the info. So what are the chances of this happening? That’s right, exactly zero.
I recently endured a job search. Applied to over 400 positions on Indeed alone. I stopped filling out the forms. Probably lost out on some job opportunities, but having to fill this shit out 30 times a day is not worth the effort.
We all, deep down, understand the exploitative of the employer/employee relationship. They are setting the tone for the rest of your life doing bullshit work that doesn’t matter at all.
As a hiring manager, I am absolutely floored how many people do not actually have this information on their resumes. So while most people would assume a lot of redundancies between the form and a resume, I can assure you that many people do not have this information readily available on their resumes.
Why do you need to know where I went to school if I have years of job experience showing that I can do the job? Education seems only to matter if someone is newly graduated and without real-world experience. And high school? Wtf?!
That’s easy to say when you aren’t bombarded with 800 resumes submitted from headhunting call centers out of India for every job.
The purpose of these forms is to figure out which resumes are worth reading. It puts all the relevant information for a first-round elimination in a standard format.
Once the 80 percent of applicants that aren’t worth any consideration are eliminated, you can start looking at the actual resumes.
I’m seeing some hostility towards you as a hiring manager which is rough, because hiring manager is not necessarily HR. It often means the manager of the person being hired. So the person on a specific team responsible for filling positions on that team. I’m not sure if you directly hire for your team or it’s an HR term in your case, but just adding this here in case it helps someone not be rude to a random person on the internet.
Also, as a person who hires people on my team (I don’t use the hiring manager title, but yea) it’s ridiculous how awful some resumes are. We don’t use hiring software, and I personally review all the resumes, but we are a small team so I totally understand why that would be used. The overlap of people who don’t like filling out the forms but who also want to be evaluated on who they are rather than what’s on their resume is a circle. I don’t want to dismiss anyone who doesn’t have a degree, but just because a degree isn’t on the resume doesn’t mean they don’t have one. Plenty of people leave off the years they worked at a specific job. I can assume months or years, but the form would help clarify that without wasting anyone’s time. Decisions have to be made somewhere and if people want to be judged by people in their field, then their full time job will likely not be hiring, so sometimes they use these forms for standardization purposes. I don’t like them either, but they are not this evil thing they are made out to be.
I appreciate your response. I am a cog in the machine and I work within the limitations of the system in which I work. My organization requires data entry into fields such as this example. I have no control over this. I would assume it is to have some sort of standardization, as there is no “standard” format to resumes. I have seen resumes come through that is a narration of their job experience, one that had a sentence or two, one that completely left off any relevant job experience, many that don’t have call back information. As I mentioned in my original post, I have been absolutely floored at what people believe to be acceptable. I hire for professional jobs, ones that require degrees and licenses, so these people should “know better,” especially as I have nothing to go off of except what you share with me. I want to give qualified people jobs! But if your best foot forward is a sloppy mess, what makes me believe you have the skills to do the job?
Sorry to say but you hiring managers don’t know jack shit about hiring people. You have zero clue as to what qualifies an employee. Always asking the wrong questions.
The reason why corporations have a hard time finding talent isn’t because a lack of talent. It’s because the hiring process is a joke. But then you’ll complain that no one wants to work anymore.
The amount of top talent you toss into the bin because you don’t know what questions to is staggering.
Because I know if a hiring manager talks to me, they are likely to hire me, but if I write down that I didn’t graduate college, then they aren’t going to talk to me.
Same. Didn’t even finish high school because credits wouldn’t transfer and I’d graduate after my peers. Got a GPD and started college while my friends were in their senior year. Didn’t finish, but I took some classes.
The greatest lie ever told to me was that without a college education, I’d be worthless. Thanks Dad. That really fucked me up in my twenties. I’m extremely qualified and I learned to recognize it, but boy did it create some imposter-syndrome for a while.
Thousands of applications and only dozens of jobs.
Imagine a world where there are countless open job reqs and only one applicant per job. That might be the case if the world population was not 8 billion.
I honestly think ATS are a pain in the ass simply to filter out the people who won’t deal with bullshit. They want people who will live with bullshit working for them because the org is (always) dysfunctional.
Alternatively… their HR technology team is just trash because it’s run by HR and not someone who knows technology. Seen it plenty of times where shadow IT is being run by people who don’t know what they’re doing beyond “we need this thing.”
I just joined a fantastic team and within a month I saw how dysfunctional it is. Nobody knows how to organize humans. Whoever actually figures it out could rule the world.
then why ask for both things? just have a checkbox to indicate that the information is in the resumé, and if it isn’t then obviously they shouldn’t be hired since they either can’t read or don’t give a shit.
They absolutely can handle data entry. This post refers to the absurdity of firms asking for a resume and then asking for all the details in a form, which is pointless.
Eh, sometimes I apply to jobs I don’t really care too much about, just to go through the process and see what the market is like without any stress. I can recommend. And once that even turned out to be a good thing and I stayed, who knows.
Before anyone complains, the companies put out job descriptions they’re not really serious about either, sometimes to just meet candidates they could maybe use elsewhere, sometimes just to make themselves look good towards their competitors. Play that game, get your time wasted for my “training”, I don’t feel to t bad about that.
There’s a technical reason they do this that has been pointed out elsewhere but it has the added benefit of filtering out people who believe they are above the process. Most jobs have processes (safety processes, legal processes, etc.). You can avoid people who aren’t ready to accept they may be exceptional, but are applying for a position that does not require them to be.
I have filled out these forms, and I have abandoned applications.
If I am being paid to follow process, that’s one thing. If I’m being forced to jump through hoops for free on my own time, before I’m even particularly interested in your company, that’s a completely different thing.
Same with coding applications. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t, really just depends on if I’m bored or not. But as a requirement before the application is even looked at, it’s fucking stupid.
This may be the case at some companies, but I think for the most part this is giving companies too much credit. Having people fill in these details in this form directly feeds into a spreadsheet, meaning the staff responsible for onboarding don’t have to go looking for the information on the resume
That’s a very pro-company spin on it. But on the other hand it definitely filters for people who don’t mind being downright humiliated by a job that doesn’t respect their time or puts effort into finding employees. This pattern of reentering your resume data is pretty brand new, and justifying it from the companies side is pretty post-hoc when it’s really just offloading labor the company used to do to the unpaid job applicant who has to do this 20 times in a row.
Unfortunately it’s why I just used LinkedIn only for my last search. I only applied at places where LinkedIn would auto-enter everything. Nobody gets paid to apply for jobs - I’ll be happy to do their HR stuff all day once I’m on the clock.
And this is exactly why you can’t find anyone with talent that will work for you. You make the hiring process a joke and push all the smart people away. They don’t have to put up with that shit so they don’t.
Companies who utilize these tactics can be ignored. Find a better company to work for. They do exist. Life is too short to put up with moronic companies.
Yes, they’re basically testing your ability or willingness to do meaningless tasks when they’re assigned to you because let’s face it, most jobs these days are 90% meaningless work.
I used to think that’s a bad thing because just like most people here, I wanted to be exceptional but perhaps it’s not the worst thing in the world to get paid for doing something so simple you could do it in your sleep, so you can save your mental energy for doing more important things in your free time.
If you ever get through to a person high enough to answer your question of: “why did you ask for my resume?”
…the honest answer is:
“There are two things that look at you, the candidate. For cost cutting reasons, we put your answers you fill in all these blanks into a computer which eliminates you if you don’t match our basic criteria. We save money by never actually even knowing your name. If you pass the computer filter, your resume is needed because actual humans look at it. So thats why we ask for both.”
Unfortunately this computer filtering step tends to be highly inaccurate and game-able, but I’m not sure what to propose instead.
Game-able, as in, entering specific answers (even if they are inaccurate) gets you through the computer and put in front of a human? Working as intended.
Ever since the social contract was broken with employers where they’d give you a job for decades if you stayed there, there’s been an ongoing “arms race” of how job applicants can get noticed, and how employers can get usable candidates out of the massive tidal waves of applicants they get. The first step computer filter doesn’t have to be perfect, if it even filters out 80% of the candidate that don’t meet basic criteria, leaving only 20% for humans to review that is massively better (to employers) than requiring humans to look at all 100% of applicants.
So yes, its game-able to get through the computer filter, but if you still don’t match the basic criteria, you’ll be eliminated by the human reviewers anyway. The difference is only very small number of candidates will figure out the game-able answers to get through even if they aren’t supposed to. This is…until the next round of the arms race where nearly all candidates are getting through. That hasn’t happened yet.
I would really like to know how to game the filters because the number of interviews I get vs the number of resumes I put in is depressingly low. My job history and experience is really extensive, but I can’t seem to even get to the initial HR interview much less get an actual interview for a job.
If you really want the job, this is a bad idea. The form is there so that HR (who usually knows nothing about the technical details of the posted jobs) can match base requirements against what the hiring manager is looking for. If they get a match, they just forward the resume to the manager. Doing stuff like this on the form is likely going to result in them just moving on without looking at your application further. And it doesn’t mean it’s a bad place to work; the company and the manager might be great.
You aren’t. I was just hired for a great position by not filling out their form. Then they emailed me and asked if I wanted to finish. I said “I won’t fill out something that is already on my resume”. They had a couple of interviews and a substantial offer. I started last week.
It depends on the position. If it’s entry level or some retail job, yes, fill it out. But management or some other position where it’s highly specific, this is an absolute waste of my time.
“It depends on the position. If it’s entry level or some retail job, yes, fill it out. But management or some other position where it’s highly specific, this is an absolute waste of my time”
It’s an absolute waste of time, period. No need to stratify it further. McKinsey & Ilk bullshit is commodifying the lowest denominator shit in the name of HR professionals using more buzzwords and less braincells in the hiring process while pretending they’re standardizing equity, in my opinion.
That the positions you are ostensibly qualified for allow for a measure of ‘hardball posturing’ doesn’t mean pseudo-hokey HR practices on non-leadership role hiring. aren’t filtering the best of the best of people–at filling out useless forms that you’ll need to train to critically think anyways.
Only way to combat MBB bullshit is for the in-house managers to grow a spine and speak truth to power after the pre-contractually safe ‘I’m so good you want me even if I don’t toe the line’ that is allowed to every leadership role hire as their moment to feel special to see that reaction.
Also, it’s hard for a computer to parse a resume, and most of this stuff runs through a computer before a human sees it, so filling a form makes sure the data is correct.
You also don’t have to worry about corrupted or unsupported files.
You’re telling me that computers are sophisticated enough to drive cars and create new antibiotics but resumes are just too much? Nah.
If that’s the case then don’t ask for a resume and only have the form to input job history that can be easily handed over to a manager using a printable template.
It’s lazy on HR’s part and on the HR software they use.
Yeah I’m pretty sure you can probably train an AI to do this quite accurately these days, and in fact, someone out there has likely already done that.
The question is whether the company you’re applying to is willing to pay for that. Unfortunately, if does, it would probably also be willing to pay for an AI to replace you as well, and if it isn’t, they’ll likely have you do similarly boring and useless tasks at your job.
You can’t. An NDA prohibits me from saying how I know this, but I know for a fact that advanced and specifically trained FMs still struggle to accurately parse resumes, even with several million dollars devoted to the project.
Really? That’s quite surprising. I understand that it’s not trivial to algorithmically parse a resume formatted for human consumption even though it’s a somewhat structured format, just because the formatting can vary quite a lot, but there’s only so many different types of information on there, and little of it has any overlap in terms of how it could be categorized, so I would think an AI should be quite effective at picking it up.
Then again, I’m not an AI expert and I certainly haven’t attempted to do anything like this.
The models can do alright for very simple resumes, but once you start getting into multiple page ones it gets messy.
While resumes follow a pattern that we’re able to easily recognize, there’s so much variation that even with AI you have to add in a ton of heuristics to control for hallucinations.
And they can’t do that with a resume? Most things seem to be able to do that automatically these days (fill out forms with info from a resume that is); just the not damned employer.
They could absolutely attempt to parse the resumes, then ask you to verify the information instead of just having you enter it all again manually, but that would probably cost slightly more.
Because filling out the data places it in identified fields that you can compile into a single table and sort. You’d have to examine each resume individually.
If your idea to make the job easier (for you) is to make it more than double the work for everyone else, then the company supporting this move deserves to go under.
Why should an applicant do everything twice just so some unknown wage slave they likely won’t even meet have an easier day?
This isn’t making your job easier, it’s just making everyone else do it for you. That’s not the same thing. Do your job and stop taking shortcuts at everyone else’s expense.
Boo freaking ho. If you’re too lazy to copy and paste some basic information into an online form, I don’t want to hire you anyway. Also discourages people from trying to apply for hundreds or thousands of jobs they are not even qualified for.
The fact is I’m an engineer, not an HR employee. I have a job other than reviewing resumes. And the absolutely will meet me if they meet the requirements. I’ll interview them. If they don’t, they are wasting both our time.
Not wanting to do double the work for no tangible benefit is not being lazy.
Being slowed down in applying for multiple positions and being upset about it is not being lazy.
If your company is small enough not to have an HR department then they’re clearly small enough to review resumes. Or just stop asking for them if everything you wanna know has to be spelled out in the exact right order for you to comprehend it.
There is a positive to there being a treshold to applying for a job. It lowers the amount of applicants that will 100% not fit the job description, while making it more possible for HR/management to actually sift through every applicant, increasing the chances you’ll get hired if you do put in the effort and if you do meet the requirements. Look at it as an overcomplicated catpcha. They’re not just trying to test if you’re a human, they’re trying to test if you are human & actually are really interested in this job & actually do think you meet the requirements (or equivalent, causing you to put in the effort). It doesn’t make much sense for very low skilled low wage jobs, but it does for higher and/or very specifically skilled jobs.
This is true, but everyone’s problem is specifically the “overcomplicated” part. I can see a better vetting process being needed for higher skill jobs, but really just testing if they’re a living breathing person and able to repeat things is kinda pathetic. But if this is now how a hiring department/manager works these days, then it seems like asking for a resume is silly. It would obviously be most “convenient” to just be able to mass apply easily, so I can see the argument for this process. It seems that most of the complaints you typically hear about though (maybe this is just personal bias and anecdotal experience) are related to low skilled applications. Minimum wage/not far above minimum wage jobs this is crazy overkill. It just feels like a huge waste of time.
It becomes more and more worth it the better the job gets.
yeah the resume is the silly part, it’s a remnant from the past. Somehow for flipping burgers they are by doing this checking wether you can neatly summarize you’re academic history and your skillset, it’s completely pointless. And for high skilled or specific jobs, you’re better off asking some in the workfield questions anyhow, instead of the “why don’t you decide what you want to tell us”-resume.
I mean, HR is being paid. They should be going through the resume and compiling the data themselves.
Instead they require the applicants to do it for free, despite the fact the applicants are probably having to do it dozens of times trying to apply for multiple jobs.
No reading every resume is an incredibly stupid way to spend time, even for HR workers (they are somewhat educated aka not cheap).
It would make sense for every joblisting to use the same format and you just filling it all out once in said format and connecting to any company / job listing you’ld want to apply to. That’s basically what linkedin does to some extent. That, but without the social network bullshit, would be pretty cool.
I don’t think HR does it by hand, they do a query for specific degree and years of experience based on what’s entered into the form. Then they take the results and send those resumes to the manager. They aren’t going to read through hundreds or thousands of resumes trying to find the key items.
See this is why nothing improves and why the process remains to be a shit show.
On your end everything seems fine. To everyone on the other end it’s a complete failure.
If someone is looking for a job they are going through this process 20-30 times. Every fucking time it’s filling out some long form repeating all the same crap that’s in your resume.
Like I get it. You do this to make your life easier. But you do it at the expense of everyone else and in the end you glazed over all the good talent because you didn’t even know it was there since the people looking at this stuff don’t know the first thing about the role they are hiring.
The problem is on your end. Not the applicants. The really good applicants aren’t even applicants because they see this shit and NOPE out since there are plenty of good companies that don’t pull this crap.
Not sure why you think I have trouble getting good talent.
This doesn’t make my life easier. I still get a mess of resumes that I have to read through and rank, then go through the interview process. It’s a lot of work. But I do get good results generally.
Because all of the big corporations out there including Lockheed Martin write articles complaining about how they struggle to find qualified applicants.
The struggle i have is that a giant percentage of applicants want fully remote work, which I respect, but a lot of our work requires being hands on with hardware, so at best we’re hybrid. Oh, and it’s of course harder when I’m looking for something very specific. If I need someone with ten years of real time control software experience who has a software degree and hands on hardware experience, that’s for sure harder. The reason so many companies are having a harder time is that unemployment is low but salaries haven’t caught up. It’s not that no one wants to fill out the application form.
I understand but keep in mind they’ve been saying this long before Covid. Long before there were labor issues or expectations around remote work.
I remember reading lots of articles about this back in 2015-2016. I’m sure it’s worse now but it was never really great to begin with.
The issue really isn’t the application form as much as it is that the folks doing the hiring and interviewing.
I can’t tell you how many interviews I’ve been in where the interviewer was clearly not technical but asked questions around your technical background. They don’t know the right answers from the wrong answers. These are KIDS asking tech questions to seniors. So even if your answer is right you’ll still be marked wrong because the answer wasn’t equal to what was on their paper.
I can’t tell you how many interviews I’ve been in where the interviewer was clearly not technical but asked questions around your technical background.
That’s just crazy town, I can’t imagine doing that. I manage software engineers, and I did real time control software for a couple decades before I became a manager. Here’s roughly my process:
I get the matching resumes from HR - I try not to ask them to assess anything besides degree and very rough background.
I read through all the resumes I get looking for qualifications and red flags.
For the top three to six, I’ll set up a phone interview with me and our top technical person. But the questions there aren’t especially technical, they’re mostly to get the person talking, look for motivations and interests, make sure we understand the things on the resume, see how they communicate, and get a sense of how they’d mesh with the team. It’s also to answer every question they have as honestly and candidly as we can; I’d much rather find out that we’re not a good fit in a phone interview than later.
For any that do well on the phone screen and are still interested, I’ll set up in person interviews with one or two groups of my team. I make sure it includes people who have been here for decades, people who are mid career, and people who have only been here a couple years. I do that in part because I think they look for different things in the candidate, and partly so the candidate can get different perspectives on our work environment. I try not to have more than three of our people in an interview so it doesn’t feel like an inquisition. I’ll talk with the candidate for 30 minutes when they come in to let them know what to expect and to make sure they take the opportunity to ask questions, and then afterwards me and the top technical person will meet to see how it went, if there are any other questions, and to get our in-person sense of the candidate.
Then that’s, no other interviews in the vast majority of cases; I get feedback from the team and then make my best call. If none are good fits, I’ll repeat the whole process.
How you explained it I would say you’re doing it right. You truly are the exception. My apologies.
Unfortunately most of what I see in the corporate world is the opposite of that. Not every company is this way. The company I am working for today follows the same pattern that you utilize. With that said I got hired through a reference which is how it always goes here for hiring.
It seems the companies that I see this the most with are the ones spamming indeed and similar job posting sites. They aren’t very good at it which I guess is why they end up using these sites to begin with.
There seem to be more and more people who are just bad at their jobs these days. Part of that, from my vantage point, is companies expecting ever-increasing productivity with ever-decreasing resources.
In my early management days, when I wanted to hire someone, an HR person would come and meet with me to go ever exactly what I was looking for, what was critical, what was nice to have, etc. They’d post the position, but they’d also attend career fairs, connect with other agencies, etc. Then they would read through all the resumes and give me what they thought were the top candidates. And they didn’t do a bad job of it. For the ones that I didn’t like, they’d ask me to explain why so that they could get better.
Now it’s more and more self-service. Same with IT, and other areas too.
It feels like ever since 2008 companies have been in a slow grind to cut costs. It truly feels like the economy is going down the tubes and this is all just a sign of the current times.
It’s been a lot longer than that. Here, take a look at this graph comparing productivity to average worker salary. They were completely in sync up through the 70s, then in the 80s worker salary flattened while productivity kept on the same increasing rate. 1981 was when Reagan took office and we started with “trickle down economics.” Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that was supposed to “trickle down” to the worker. Conservatives still tout it today, but it’s never done anything other than make rich people richer and screw the economy.
The problem is that those two lines are continuing on their respective paths, and businesses are expected to grow their productivity at that rate while keeping costs (including salaries) down. So we get squeezed to do more and more with less and less.
I don’t know what to tell you - I just know that I’ve never known an HR organization that used something like that. All the corporate websites I’ve ever seen have you fill out a form an attach your resume. Maybe that’s changing, but not where I am.
A lot of those systems suck, AI might have improved in the last few years since I got out of HR so maybe it’s not like that any more but they always crazy inaccurate. We use to see brick layers making it through the auto screens for finance roles when we just used the software. When the software makes that crazy of a mistake then HR can’t see people actually qualified for the roles their recruiting.
Honestly I wish there was a standard resume format. It would make it easier for the software and for the humans rather than everyone flexing their creativity on resume formatting.
The fact that you have people that know nothing about the technical requirements of the role means you have an idiot deciding on whether or not you fit. Your chances are crippled from the get go.
These are red flags to me. This is just a tip of the iceberg and a great indicator as to how dysfunctional the company is.
If you’re THAT detached from the hiring process then you’ll never find a good candidate because you don’t know what a good candidate is.
All that means is that if you some how manage to get hired you’ll be working with idiots that can’t do their job because they were hired by an idiot.
I work for a company that makes rocket engines. It makes no sense to teach the folks in HR about all the disciplines that go into the business - mechanical design, combustion devices, materials and properties, electronics, software, etc. It makes way more sense to make sure they know how to do their own job, and for a hiring manager to be able to tell them something like, “Send me all the applicants who have a computer science degree and at least five years of experience.” Then I can evaluate which of those applicants is the best fit based on the resume. The form facilitate that.
That attitude is precisely the reason why you struggle to find good people. There is no shortage of good applicants. You just don’t know what you’re doing and can’t see the difference.
It’s a real shame. All the more reason why my hatred for corporations grows on a daily basis.
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