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I wouldn't say it's a "myth". My experience is a lot more like the OP's than what you describe. A few job sites, like WorkDay, have mangled my PDF resume ever

I wouldn't say it's a "myth". My experience is a lot more like the OP's than what you describe. A few job sites, like WorkDay, have mangled my PDF resume every time I upload it. Like the OP, I've had to massage the layout and formatting to make it more compatible.

hackable_sand 2y ago
Same. Instantly got two hits back after reformatting. I also simplified my experience section by reducing technicals and focusing more on role responsibilities.
hobs 2y ago
It's not a myth (I wrote ATS systems, and you usually just pay some third party to do the core parsing job as a library or a service and take your failures on the nose) but at the same time most recruiters are NOT going into past resumes and filtering through them, and most of the wide shot resume hits you get on linkedin are for the lowest tier of jobs. Almost all recruiters are "most recent resume in" type of folks or "curated long term list" type of folks - they'll either circle you for years trying to get you hired for something or they'll forget your name in 25 minutes.
itake 2y ago
My sense is _most_ resumes are actually reviewed by a human. Most job postings aren't getting 1000s of applicants. If they are, 3 people can review 1000 applications in 2 hours (30s look).
- coffeebeqn 2y ago
  Most companies are not Google. I did some hiring (3 or 4 positions) at a 10 year old stagnant growth “startup” and we got at most 10 applications per day to these engineering positions. This was 2022-2024 so not just the good years.
cm2187 2y ago
Same experience from me. Most website will show you the result of the CV parsing and in the end I find it takes me less time to populate the different parts manually on the recruiter's website than to try to correct the mess those systems made with the risk of errors it introduces. I wish there was some kind of json/xml standard for CVs.

hackable_sand 2y ago

Same. Instantly got two hits back after reformatting. I also simplified my experience section by reducing technicals and focusing more on role responsibilities.

hobs 2y ago

It's not a myth (I wrote ATS systems, and you usually just pay some third party to do the core parsing job as a library or a service and take your failures on the nose) but at the same time most recruiters are NOT going into past resumes and filtering through them, and most of the wide shot resume hits you get on linkedin are for the lowest tier of jobs. Almost all recruiters are "most recent resume in" type of folks or "curated long term list" type of folks - they'll either circle you for years trying to get you hired for something or they'll forget your name in 25 minutes.

itake 2y ago

My sense is _most_ resumes are actually reviewed by a human. Most job postings aren't getting 1000s of applicants. If they are, 3 people can review 1000 applications in 2 hours (30s look).

coffeebeqn 2y ago
Most companies are not Google. I did some hiring (3 or 4 positions) at a 10 year old stagnant growth “startup” and we got at most 10 applications per day to these engineering positions. This was 2022-2024 so not just the good years.

cm2187 2y ago

Same experience from me. Most website will show you the result of the CV parsing and in the end I find it takes me less time to populate the different parts manually on the recruiter's website than to try to correct the mess those systems made with the risk of errors it introduces. I wish there was some kind of json/xml standard for CVs.