3 ms·

I must be missing something - what is the plausible deniability? If someone does a raw text dump of a pdf and gets the hundred new keywords, surely someone woul

I must be missing something - what is the plausible deniability? If someone does a raw text dump of a pdf and gets the hundred new keywords, surely someone would recognize what you did? Or do you just mean, it will silently pass the white text test?

tombert 2y ago
I'm saying have an invisible blob in the PDF that wouldn't print out, but would still be in the metadata. I don't think "humans" look at raw text dumps of PDFs do they? I mean, I don't know, when I've interviewed people I only looked at the rendered output. The goal would be to full the robots; for the visible text I would be complete honest. Again, I never actually did it.
- fbdab103 2y ago
  I get the trick, I am just disputing that you have any deniability if caught. As to the text dumping -I have no idea. I could believe some of the HR screening tools select all text and dump into some structured fields for review. Probably not, and the trick will go completely undetected.
- walteweiss 2y ago
  What if you add your text back on white, but outside of your PDF bounds? Some software (I know Adobe Illustrator has it for sure) allow you to design it so, that the visible part would be one, and everything outside the bounds would be in the document, but isn’t visible neither to a person, nor to the printer. The software would see it. I bet it should work, and I think I’ll try that when I’m at the job hunt myself.
netsharc 2y ago
I suppose OP can claim "Huh, I don't know, must be a bug in the software I'm using." (there's been cases where MS Word kept deleted text in the Word file, yes I know a CV is usually PDF, but hey, maybe my homebrew PDF generator is buggy!) And I wonder if this argument would fly, e.g. in a court of law: "the information I would like to convey to HR is the one that is readable by human eyes when my CV is rendered by a normal PDF reader (e.g. insert known PDF readers here), anything that is not readable by the human eyes should not be considered part of my CV.".

tombert 2y ago

I'm saying have an invisible blob in the PDF that wouldn't print out, but would still be in the metadata. I don't think "humans" look at raw text dumps of PDFs do they? I mean, I don't know, when I've interviewed people I only looked at the rendered output. The goal would be to full the robots; for the visible text I would be complete honest. Again, I never actually did it.

fbdab103 2y ago
I get the trick, I am just disputing that you have any deniability if caught. As to the text dumping -I have no idea. I could believe some of the HR screening tools select all text and dump into some structured fields for review. Probably not, and the trick will go completely undetected.
walteweiss 2y ago
What if you add your text back on white, but outside of your PDF bounds? Some software (I know Adobe Illustrator has it for sure) allow you to design it so, that the visible part would be one, and everything outside the bounds would be in the document, but isn’t visible neither to a person, nor to the printer. The software would see it. I bet it should work, and I think I’ll try that when I’m at the job hunt myself.

netsharc 2y ago

I suppose OP can claim "Huh, I don't know, must be a bug in the software I'm using." (there's been cases where MS Word kept deleted text in the Word file, yes I know a CV is usually PDF, but hey, maybe my homebrew PDF generator is buggy!) And I wonder if this argument would fly, e.g. in a court of law: "the information I would like to convey to HR is the one that is readable by human eyes when my CV is rendered by a normal PDF reader (e.g. insert known PDF readers here), anything that is not readable by the human eyes should not be considered part of my CV.".