Tell HN: "Upload your resume and then type it out” is hurting your company
Some possible solutions and suggestions:
-Use a list of checkbox options for candidates to click skills/requirements that you want for the role. If you need SQL, JS, Python, and you believe a CS degree is necessary, then let candidates click which ones they have. No more messing with text! Bonus: You could add some kind of percentage of skills match metric when reviewing applicants (you should still review resumes, however).
Bonus #2: You can autofill the job posting with a list of desired skills instead of needing to type them out - just select which ones you need when creating the posting.
-You don't need user-entered text fields for keyword matching. Extracting text from PDFs and Word Docs is trivial. If your text extract fails or misses a min word count threshold, just trigger a secondary step for HR to review and manually copy the text and enter it. Point is, stop making users manually enter the text when applying, just pull it out yourself.
-If you insist on candidates typing out their resume, stop trying to extract text from resumes to autofill the application form. Personally, I'd prefer to just type it out rather than review it and fix all of the inevitable mistakes (or more likely, clear the fields and just enter it myself).
I have considerable experience hiring engineers, and I can tell you concretely that:
1. Strong candidates are hard to find.
2. A single bad hire can sink a team.
3. Technical interviewing is hard and far from solved.
Given these three things, why make it harder than it has to be by using a badly designed system when a few changes to the logistical process can fix so much?
And if the bosses balk, maybe sell it like this: the existence of your company depends on good hiring, so maybe assign an engineer or two to spend a few months building this out. Not to be all "Dropbox is easy build" - but the basic functionality for something like this is not terribly more complex than a CRUD app with file uploading. I know that's oversimplifying, but I bet you get my point.
97 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadWhy not standardise cv's in a json format and have companies accept them?
Platforms with one click apply like LinkedIn flood companies with irrelevant CVs.
If you make applying a lot of work then you’re only getting the desperate.
Are you sure this happens on LinkedIn, or are you just guessing that this happens? The best recent interviews I've had were from LinkedIn, since I was able to target my search there with filters for specific jobs. Companies are also able to set their own filters. While clicking apply might have only been a click or two, the filters that brought the opening to my attention and qualifying questions acted as a match between companies and applicants. LinkedIn also has badges for assessments you can take right on the site.
I played around with this a bit. Being able to apply themes seems like a cool concept!
The vast majority of companies don’t have an in-house solution.
I’ve noticed there is some other SAAS a lot of companies are using lately for their hiring portal where there is a single page for both the specific job, all the fields you need to enter to apply (notably not including rehashing all your past experience) and a link to upload your resume + submit. It might be white labeled lever, but I’m not sure.
Please just use easy apply from linkedin as an option.
Ed: autocorrect fix s/east/easy/g
I put effort into keeping my LinkedIn up to date. It's not there to attract recruiters. Read it.
Do recruiters even read resumes anymore? I am genuinely not sure at this point.
Did they ever read resumes?
Anyone I know who is technical isn't looking for a 6 month contract role in helpdesk halfway across the country that requires on-site presence.
Anyone else I know, even those who are unemployed, is non-technical and unqualified for the role.
Would you want a person with no understanding of football in charge of drafting for your football team?
This is an exaggerated example but not far off from the reality.
No, no one read it. They used some sort of keyword search and then sent out spam to the result list.
BUT, the phone calls are just as bad. Is it really that much trouble to look at the resume you got the phone number from? Java isn't on my resume FOR A REASON. (Or .net, or Wyoming, or something)!
At a certain point, no matter how well paid, you're going to want your future employee to do something that seems pointlessly redundant to them, and to do it as conscientiously as possible in spite of not knowing the importance of the task you want them to do.
Might as well get that test out of the way as soon as possible, with their own document that they can supply to cross-validate it, right?
/steel man argument
Is this actually good? Are you going to needlessly turn away really smart people who should be objecting to seemingly pointless tasks? Should really good employees object outright to doing things they think are a waste of time? Maybe they should? Or maybe they should acquiesce after a bit of pushback even if they don't understand it?
Maybe this is an adequate speed-bump for applicants - if simply accepting resumes means that you get a much greater percentage of unqualified applications, perhaps it's worth it to select for those willing to tolerate the exercise?
For which they have to pay you. That does not apply when the company is marketing itself to you.
But I also think this explains the status quo.
If I really like a place, I'll apply at their native portal as well as their Easy Apply.
My new grad job hunt, I received minimal responses cold applying online.
My second job hunt was a one and done poach.
The most recent one, I received a substantial percent of follow throughs. I cold applied to 6 well known SV companies and received a response from 5 of them.
I don’t have any other insight I just wanted to provide an additional data point.
The best part is a Stripe recruiter then contacted me over 6 months later on linkedin, apparently unaware of my application and I had to decline since I just started a new role in the meantime.
A suggestion to recruiters. Find where the inbox for these applications goes. Clearly no one's checking.
At many companies they have quotas or are paid bonuses based on how many candidates they source. I can imagine a policy whereby candidates that approach the company directly aren't counted as "sourced" by any particular recruiter.
Except for that offer, I get all of my jobs through boutique recruiting firms and some larger recruiting firms or connections.
My impression is that the main issue is stale listings - you probably applied for an opening that they were effectively done reviewing applications for but hadn't taken down from their website. One recent user-hostile trend I've noticed in job application platforms (including Stripe's) is that they don't tell you when a listing was posted or updated. So you can't distinguish between an opening posted yesterday (that they're probably actively reviewing applications for) and one posted six months ago (that's almost certainly a black hole).
They ask for a resume and tell you when to be there.
You show up at the appointed time with the resume. After waiting half an hour. a secretary hands you a generic Office Depot tear-off employment application.
After another forty-five minutes to an hour, you get to see whoever's in charge of hiring. They're looking at the Office Depot sheet, and about half the time they don't even have your resume, which was probably round-filed by the secretary.
The hiring person isn't sure what job you're applying for, so they leave the office to consult with someone else. Twenty minutes later they return and either tell you they're not hiring, or they'll call you next week. (they don't)
My usual response was to send them an invoice for two hours of office workflow consulting at my entirely reasonable rate. None of them ever paid up, of course, but they stole two hours of my time.
What's wrong with .docx format? You can create it using open source office software. In my experience most forms are smart enough to parse .docx just as well as the obsolete .doc.
Besides, what other formats do you want them to accept? PDF, sure, TXT, sure. It seems silly to avoid word documents.
I write my CV in HTML, as that's just the easiest way to get my CV to look exactly how I want it, and then "print" it to a PDF in Firefox. I also have a little JavaScript to redact personal information if I add "#redact" to the URL, and send a PDF of that too to recruiters after I noticed that a recruiter had completely massacred my pixel-perfect CV that I obsessed over by copy/pasting it in some ugly crooked layout and sent that horrible thing to companies :-/
All of that said, I haven't used recruiters for many years, but back then my "redacted" PDF solved the issues for me.
Any recruiter who trusts their clients so little is probably not worth your time, however
To me that means their hiring process is extremely formal and not worth my time.
I know they're popular to hate, but I really rate IT recruiters for removing the pain out of job hunting.
Perhaps I've just been lucky, but my involvement with recruiters seems to be little more than an introductory chat about my CV, and they line up interviews.
I've found them hassle free.
I'm currently job hunting, and a bit tired of sending out 3 - 5 apps a day via indeed or $COMPANY_SITE. Actually talking to someone would be nice.
Look at Slack, Discord, IRC channels, forums, mailing lists, subreddits, or whatever community spaces exist for your field.
Outside of that, my experience is hit-and-miss. Usually the larger the recruiting agency, the larger the size of a "miss".
The two companies I'm thinking of recruit only for IT. If you have a local IT recruiting company, give them a call. If they take the time to understand your motivations and skills, it's probably a good start.
I've noticed a huge difference between specialist IT recruiters and regular firms. I don't bother speaking to firms not focused on IT. At list the specialist firms actually know what it is you're offering and understand what their clients are after.
Tooling could also be built to sync that with LinkedIn or generate a humane readable PDF version if you need it.
Edit: huh, from another thread, apparently it does: https://jsonresume.org/
I think this is largely self-inflicted - for the reasons you mentioned as well as others.
...and you get back (paraphrased) "Hi KB, I would look forward to receiving your application."
I am not wasting at least an hour of my time writing a cover letter, touching base with my references (which they demand in the application - are they fucking joking?), and tailoring my resume to the job....
...if the hiring manager can't be bothered to indicate in the slightest way that they even so much as glanced at my profile, or spend 10 minutes on the damn phone for a position that's been open for 6 months.
[1] https://www.sovren.com/
You might say, "well if the person is a Y, then just look for skills for Y." But people change careers all the time. They may start off as Y and move into Z, where "go" in Y and Z meant different things.
No algorithm can perfectly parse a resume like a human can.
It doesn't have to. It just has to produce a decently better outcome than not trying at all.
A lot of HR people and bosses are evil and want to know not just where you worked and about how long, but what months you were there. Why? Because it's a way to figure out if you're disabled. A resume shows what the candidate wants them to know, but these portals are a way to ask the questions they want to know without revealing (as would occur in personal interactions) the degree to which they want to know.
Also, to a large degree these horrible job portals are a way of filtering out the "prima donnas" who balk at being treated poorly or having to do something mindless and unpleasant.
The hostile design is kinda the point, because it's capitalism after all.
This can be concealed to some extent if people only put the years of employment on their resume. Which is why the resume portals ask for months. It's a way of figuring out if someone has a history of getting flagged for depression, anxiety, or long COVID and then PIP'd over it.
I spoke to someone recently who was bragging about all the contractors who had to suck up to him to land the project. I met a guy who purposely leaves out contact details from a job posting, saying that he automatically rejects anyone who wouldn't go to the effort of searching what they do and where they are (it was a 4 man startup).
One company I applied for needed a video cover letter. I met the HR at a job fair once and told her I didn't apply because the video cover letter wasn't worth my time. She told me that engineers didn't need to do that; it was more for other jobs that were easier to recruit for.
TLDR: why not have a standard microformat for CV data, so job-seekers can upload their data instead of having to manually enter it over and over again? (Also: CV-parsing software sucks and gets everything wrong.)
I like your checkboxes idea too.
Please, stop spreading this. It’s not true. Every team out there has good, regular and bad team members… and teams don’t sink. Members come and go. Same in IT. This silly “fact” is what is making tech interviews so dumb and hard to pass: companies are afraid of doing a “bad” hire that they reject average candidates like there is no tomorrow.
If you are saying it would be no good for improving the application process, I'm curious to hear why you say that.