Submitted 1 day ago by ComicalMayhem@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Structured data vs. unstructured data. The form is structured data and it can be manipulated easily and reliably with code. With unstructured data it’s a lot of guesswork and chance.
Also sometimes HR can’t use the resume because the name could reveal gender or ethnicity and they need to blind that. And it’s not trivial to manipulate any part of the resume to do that masking.
Use auto fill in your browser for all.
If you’re typing that shit manually, you don’t deserve the job.
Wrong people.
Do not copy paste resume details. Tailor each submission to match the job. There’s no other waycto beat the AI right now other than to regurgitate job details back at them.
For the same reason that when you research and buy a product, the computer starts telling you to buy the product you just bought. Absurdity.
Old school human readable and machine readable. Redundant now but the sufferring is funny to some, so it must continue.
It isn't redundant.
You want your resume for humans to read, which means your respect their time (remember they have the power and you as unemployed have time) so they don't throw you into the trash. That means you ensure that the things in your background that make you look good to them are easy to find.
You want the forms to be things that the machine is looking for, even if they are not interesting. The machine might verify so don't lie, but a lot of things the machine is looking for are boring things that the box needs to be checked - since they are boring you don't want them on a resume - but not having them someplace means the machine rejects you.
It’s redundant because machines can read human readable resumes and cover letters.
People are hearing this as defense of a crappy system rather than the strategic idea that it is.
Yes this sucks, and everyone hates it who has applied to a job i n the last decade. Form duplication is just part of a huge problem with how hiring is done.
Even if you hate it, you can game the system using this info. Make your resume for humans the highlight reel and the form version a deep dive. They don’t have to be the same.
The advice from the comment above that you’re missing because you don’t like the system is how to cope if you’re looking for a job right now. Be angry at the stupidity of it, but use the tools provided you if you want a better chance at getting in the door.
Except it is, if you have the machine readable fields you can export the ones you’re interested in into a human readable document. Instead you have what the candidate thinks you want to read, which is essentially all of the information you had on the other fields.
To make you jump through hoops. How else can they know for sure that you follow directions no matter how stupid they are.
Because fuck you, that’s why. You’re not a human being to them.
How it feels to be part of a union that negotiated so hard my employer backed down from all compromises and just accepted a 3% raise retroactive to last year, as well as this year, along with a massive increase in benefits.
A retroactive raise? Goddamn those are some beautiful words
It started with basic indifference and became a feature.
In the beginning, people were manually receiving and reviewing resumes given to them in person.
This moved online and, for a time, normal humans continued to upload their resumes. Humans continued to review them.
Eventually someone decided they wanted to spam resumes, like someone swiping right on every potential Tinder match, then turning people down later. This spam became problematic, so companies needed a way to automatically filter folks. Extracting info from PDFs is (wasn’t) easy at the time.
Having a from to fill out prevented some spam and let them do keyword searches and following, but more importantly now it gives them two things: It prefilters people who don’t care enough to complete it and add a sight sunk cost bias to folks who are on the fence.
HR reads the forms. The hiring manager reads the resume.
Free labor. Gotta know early if you’ll do redundant useless tasks without compensation.
OCR is fallible. The forms are for the robot to quickly filter based on tags. The resume is for the human to quickly filter based on vibes.
OP was talking about pasting the text from the resume into their forms, so OCR shouldn’t even be involved.
The company still wants the resume. They just want the information extracted accurately. OCR may not be involved because it isn’t accurate enough to associate specific chunks on the resume with specific questions. If companies just had the form they would have three accurate info, but would have to generate a resume internally for human use (which isn’t a bad idea necessarily). If they just had the resume uploader then they would have to have a person manually extract the information.
So they ask for both–because they want accuracy and the original document and there aren’t tools around to give them both today.
The resume does put on emphasis on specific stuff. Whatever the applicant has found most relevant to tell.
I still don’t agree that the extra workload for the applicant is justified.
Or you could just filter based on the job being applied for?
I’m not sure what you are proposing or how it’s relevant to what I said.
Because your experience as a job applicant is not high on their list of priorities. Their job application portal was made by an intern 25 years ago, and has been updated in a haphazard fashion by other interns according to the whims of random middle managers who wanted X or Y information at some point through the years. How seamless and enjoyable your experience is literally doesnt matter at all to them up until the point where they start failing to attract mid-tier applicants because of it. If anyone is aware of how shitty it is at all, they don’t care, because fixing it requires time that that person could instead spend on (1) things that will look good on their resume to get a promotion or another job, (2) things they were actually told to do so they won’t get fired, or (3) going home and having a life.
Why don’t they just use AI to read the resumes and categorize applicants? Well, because AI is often wrong. And because implementing an AI solution takes someone’s time, and (again) all those someones want to spend their time elsewhere.
Job applicants that they actually want to hire don’t go through that portal. They find out about the job via networking, then their interview consists of a hearty handshake.
Because fuck you, that’s why
It’s the first step in you accepting the fact that you are a useless piece of meat for them to abuse. If you can’t accept that first step, you could not possibly accept everything that comes afterward. and it will always get much worse after that.
To make sure you will follow directions without question even if they don’t make any sense
One is for HR to use to immediately reject your application. The other is to train their AI model.
My conspiracy theory is that it’s a plausibly deniable way to filter out disabled people
To let you know how the relationship is going to go.
It’s easy to make you do it, that’s all.
Some are saying that it’s to have both human-readable and machine-readable data. I don’t doubt that some places do that. But others don’t.
I worked at a college HR and we asked candidates for a a bunch of stuff, including both a CV and a form.
The CV was given to whoever decided whether that person was hired or not.
The forms were given to HR, so that we could independently verify information and manually add information to the college’s records.
Why didn’t HR use the CVs for that? Can they not read?
It may sound baffling that people ask for information that may be duplicated. But for us to understand what was really going on, it’s worth explaining what was in the forms.
The forms asked for information that often were missing in CVs. Here’s a list of things that CVs usually didn’t have:
Bureaucracy-friendly considerations:
Medical considerations:
Specific information:
There’s also the following practical consideration: reducing the time it takes to hire.
Here’s a way to think about it: Colleges have seasonal hiring sprees. In a matter of weeks there can be dozens of CVs coming HR’s way. HR needs to handle this. From HR’s point of view, receiving a CV with incomplete information means HR needs to send your application to the back of the line and ask you to give HR the information it needs to hire you. These errors increase your time-to-hire, HR’s workload, and everyone behind you’s time-to-hire.
Am I saying the system is perfect? Am I saying the system is not annoying? Am I saying we cannot improve it? No.
I’m laying out the problems, the constraints of the problems, and the existing solutions. As it stands CVs solve for different problems than forms. I don’t doubt we could arrive at better solutions over time, but I think that would require a different set of constraints than the ones we currently have.
CV has a lot of fluff that HR doesn’t require.
For example, your previous employer’s name and maybe your post there is sufficient. They don’t need to know what your projects were.
Has it happened to you that there is something that you don't know how to put in the limited set of options they give you? They don't know what the proper fix would be either without fixing the forms. Of course they don't want to fix anything, so you better figure out a way to make that data fit in if you want it there.
It’s for the Dept. of Redundancy Dept.
Pretty sure it’s because we live in hell and are being tortured by malevolent entities. I’m unclear on whether we are being punished for long-forgotten sins in our past lives, or whether it’s more of a feeding off our suffering for sustinance situation. Could be both.
The only thing I know for sure is that whatever beings set things up that way are not recognizable to me as human.
Whatever HR systems they’re using are designed one way, and they aren’t designed to interface with whatever file type your resume is. And they likely never will be.
Or further will auto parse your resume and then do it wrong and then appear to allow you to make changes only for those changes to revert once you you confirm the application.
Laziness because it is literally their job. I’ve done it a hundred times and I have no other explanation.
To make life even more of a hassle. Ugh
Poorly designed process. Would you want to work for that company?
HR is a parasite that’s infected every aspect of corporatica
There shouldn't be the same data except for intentional or trivial duplication. Your resume is for humans to read. The form is for machines to verify you can do the job and that you really have experience for the job level. These are different purposes and need to be treated differently.
Write your resume for humans to read, so figure out what they are looking for and give them that. sometimes 5 years in a job is just one line "I wasn't letting my experience rot but otherwise you don't care so I won't waste you time", while a single year of interesting to them work can be 15 lines.
Write the machine forms to be honest - they might check that you really worked those dates and had the job title so don't lie. They will flag a gap in dates but the 2 years fast food is just as good as anything else. They know what java is so if that is a checkbox item you better have it, but they don't know the difference between 10 years extensive experience and I saw java for 15 minutes every year for the last 10. (don't lie about your abilities, but if you know the job won't be writing java you just need to convince the machine you have enough java to check the box and move onto the humans who make decisions).
Note that I assume above you have done some research. You can't always figure out if a job that wants 10 years java really is writing java, or if java is a buzzword - but often you can. Don't submit any resume until you have 15 minutes research into the job/company, but time limit your research to no more than a couple hours (set a timer at 1 hour and decide if either the research is interesting anyway; or you know you have a good chance and are learning things that give you a better chance).
I was told that AI could read whatever resume I submit and perfectly extract all the relevant information from it and put it in the correct database fields.
So they don’t have to.
ApollosArrow@lemmy.world 47 minutes ago
For us it was design.
The form submission and info would go to HR for background checks and systems, I usually didn’t look at that information, just the resume. My department was about animation and designed, so the first step of the process was seeing how much attention to detail you gave your resume. All that design would also throw off some of those resume scanning apps as well. It may have gotten better at doing so, but at least for me it did help.
Every once in a while people would forget to add obvious information on their resume, like their website, address, etc (usually the first red flag). That’s when that redundant info would also help.