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This strategy doesn't make any sense to me. As the article points out, many (most?) recruiter software platforms aren't going to show a human your original Wor
by StevePerkins 3y ago
This strategy doesn't make any sense to me. As the article points out, many (most?) recruiter software platforms aren't going to show a human your original Word or PDF file. They're first going to show a human the contents that were extracted from your resume, and converted into the same canonical format as all other candidates.
In that scenario, your Lorem Ipsum-esque paragraph of buzzwords will stand out like a sore thumb with the font taken out of the equation. Using invisible metadata for SEO is only effective when it truly stays invisible.
- supergeek133 3y agoThat's the point, if the "canonical conversion" is messy BUT gets you past any automatic word rejection filters (or lack of word rejection filters) mission accomplished. At least a human sees it, even if they then reject it because of whatever crummy Oracle system converted it into. Not to mention having to put all the information in AGAIN even after you upload your Resume.
- Buttons840 3y agoOn this note. Do I even need a resume in Word? Can I just make a plain text resume and expect it will be parsed all to hell before anyone sees it anyway?
- dheera 3y agoI never used Word for resumes, and turned down hiring departments and recruiters that asked for my resume in Word format. I don't even have any Microsoft products on a personal machine. I only do PDF or plain text if PDF is a problem.
- coding123 3y agoIt is actually possible to have create a "word" document using libreoffice
- dheera 3y agoI would still have to redo the whole thing in LibreOffice, and I don't wish to. It's also a terrible format because I want to control the layout with precision and ensure it renders on the other end exactly as I intended it to.
- Buttons840 3y agoHow did you produce the PDF without Word or LibreOffice?
- dheera 3y agoWith real desktop publishing software? I use Scribus for my resume, personally.
- earthling8118 3y agoPersonally I use https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoThat can create pagination issues when the fonts don't match on the recipient's side because you used a libre font with different metrics than what Word ends up substituting. It's safer to stick with PDF.
- arbitrary_name 3y agoYou can save in .doc or .docx format using Google docs, and read those formats as well, although it sometimes fails to parse correctly
- fatfingerd 3y agoI'd expect actual potential coworkers (real interviewers) to see the format I submitted so I usually do PDF.
- JohnFen 3y agoI always use PDF.
- legohead 3y agoWe use Greenhouse at my work. I don't know how ubiquitous it is, but I see the resumes how they were originally uploaded.
- jagged-chisel 3y agoIs the original resume the first this that is presented to you?
- jrockway 3y agoThat's been my experience with Greenhouse. I don't know if tech hiring really corresponds much to general hiring. I never look at people's resumes for buzzwords. I just want to know what sort of projects people have worked on, and whether they are willing to learn the tech du jour that we happen to use.
- JohnFen 3y agoI think the issue is that computers are used to pre-screen resumes. That's where the keyword matching comes in. The human reviewing applicants is only seeing what wasn't already filtered out by the machine.
- jrockway 3y agoI don't do hiring at $CURRENT_JOB but I think most of our hires came through the network / Who's Hiring on HN. At $PAST_JOB, I was hiring a junior frontend engineer and got about 1000 resumes. I read them all. They were all boot camp templates, though. (The thing that made me mad was that boot camps bill their projects as work experience and tell candidates to list each textbook exercise as a past job, but given that different applications had line-for-line identical projects, I'm pretty sure that it's just a package of Github and PDF artifacts you just pay for. Not impressed!) We ended up not hiring anyone.
- legohead 3y agoAs far as info about the candidate, basically yes. I'm presented with a workflow of the hiring process, and then various links: resume, scorecard. There is a "Details" tab but it's not even fully filled out by whatever process the system uses. And regardless, I ignore most of the site anyway and go straight to downloading the resume, then go back to fill in the scorecard after the interview.
- j45 3y agoApplicant tracking systems mostly are extremely .. basic. Have worked around too many HRIS. Imagine someone coming up with a brilliant insight of searching for keywords 20 years ago and dibbling down on it. There is little if any subtlety in the filters most of the time. Very little language understanding of synonyms. LLMs could be really interesting in this regards.
- sidewndr46 3y agoAs someone who has been in charge of reviewing candidates before approval for an interview, I never looked at the "canonical form" because it was crap. I went to what the candidate submitted and evaluated based off that.
- hartator 3y ago> As the article points out, many (most?) recruiter software platforms aren't going to show a human your original Word or PDF file. I disagree. 80% of businesses are small businesses that don't use this kind of softwares.
- aitchnyu 3y agoIf candidate makes a 2 column PDF and at ATS allegedly reads it as "box1 line1 box2 line1 box1 line2 box2 line2..." then the human will give up.