If you really want the job, this is a bad idea. The form is there so that HR (who usually knows nothing about the technical details of the posted jobs) can match base requirements against what the hiring manager is looking for. If they get a match, they just forward the resume to the manager. Doing stuff like this on the form is likely going to result in them just moving on without looking at your application further. And it doesn’t mean it’s a bad place to work; the company and the manager might be great.
Pretty much.
Maybe I’m some rare unicorn. But I have NEVER successfully got a job filling out forms like this. It’s a huge waste of my time.
Places like this probably get 2000 submissions so they are indeed a waste of time.
I’m a hiring manager, and every single person hired at my company has to fill out a form like this.
Then I sneak through the backdoor then, or they fill it out for me.
Again, never have I filled them out and got a job.
And I’m sure you’ve worked enough jobs for your anecdotal experience to be statistically significant.
You aren’t. I was just hired for a great position by not filling out their form. Then they emailed me and asked if I wanted to finish. I said “I won’t fill out something that is already on my resume”. They had a couple of interviews and a substantial offer. I started last week.
It depends on the position. If it’s entry level or some retail job, yes, fill it out. But management or some other position where it’s highly specific, this is an absolute waste of my time.
“It depends on the position. If it’s entry level or some retail job, yes, fill it out. But management or some other position where it’s highly specific, this is an absolute waste of my time”
It’s an absolute waste of time, period. No need to stratify it further. McKinsey & Ilk bullshit is commodifying the lowest denominator shit in the name of HR professionals using more buzzwords and less braincells in the hiring process while pretending they’re standardizing equity, in my opinion.
That the positions you are ostensibly qualified for allow for a measure of ‘hardball posturing’ doesn’t mean pseudo-hokey HR practices on non-leadership role hiring. aren’t filtering the best of the best of people–at filling out useless forms that you’ll need to train to critically think anyways.
Only way to combat MBB bullshit is for the in-house managers to grow a spine and speak truth to power after the pre-contractually safe ‘I’m so good you want me even if I don’t toe the line’ that is allowed to every leadership role hire as their moment to feel special to see that reaction.
I got a job once that was like this, except on paper.
It was 2017.
And they can’t do that with a resume? Most things seem to be able to do that automatically these days (fill out forms with info from a resume that is); just the not damned employer.
Because filling out the data places it in identified fields that you can compile into a single table and sort. You’d have to examine each resume individually.
I mean, HR is being paid. They should be going through the resume and compiling the data themselves.
Instead they require the applicants to do it for free, despite the fact the applicants are probably having to do it dozens of times trying to apply for multiple jobs.
No reading every resume is an incredibly stupid way to spend time, even for HR workers (they are somewhat educated aka not cheap).
It would make sense for every joblisting to use the same format and you just filling it all out once in said format and connecting to any company / job listing you’ld want to apply to. That’s basically what linkedin does to some extent. That, but without the social network bullshit, would be pretty cool.
I think you underestimate how many people apply for jobs and how few people are in HR lol.
You’d make a lot of money if you were able to make a site that harvested one from the other.
I’m not even a fan of HR departments and even I recognize there’s more to their job than sorting through every resume they get every day.
Oh no… DOING YOUR JOB!
Why not make the job easier?
If your idea to make the job easier (for you) is to make it more than double the work for everyone else, then the company supporting this move deserves to go under.
Why should an applicant do everything twice just so some unknown wage slave they likely won’t even meet have an easier day?
This isn’t making your job easier, it’s just making everyone else do it for you. That’s not the same thing. Do your job and stop taking shortcuts at everyone else’s expense.
Boo freaking ho. If you’re too lazy to copy and paste some basic information into an online form, I don’t want to hire you anyway. Also discourages people from trying to apply for hundreds or thousands of jobs they are not even qualified for.
The fact is I’m an engineer, not an HR employee. I have a job other than reviewing resumes. And the absolutely will meet me if they meet the requirements. I’ll interview them. If they don’t, they are wasting both our time.
Not wanting to do double the work for no tangible benefit is not being lazy.
Being slowed down in applying for multiple positions and being upset about it is not being lazy.
If your company is small enough not to have an HR department then they’re clearly small enough to review resumes. Or just stop asking for them if everything you wanna know has to be spelled out in the exact right order for you to comprehend it.
They could absolutely attempt to parse the resumes, then ask you to verify the information instead of just having you enter it all again manually, but that would probably cost slightly more.
I don’t think HR does it by hand, they do a query for specific degree and years of experience based on what’s entered into the form. Then they take the results and send those resumes to the manager. They aren’t going to read through hundreds or thousands of resumes trying to find the key items.
They aren’t going to read through hundreds or thousands of resumes trying to find the key items.
It’s an automated process.
I don’t know what to tell you - I just know that I’ve never known an HR organization that used something like that. All the corporate websites I’ve ever seen have you fill out a form an attach your resume. Maybe that’s changing, but not where I am.
I know they never use it either… That’s the problem. 🤦♂️
There are ways to make this bullshit non-existent and the only people not using it are the actual people doing the hiring.
A lot of those systems suck, AI might have improved in the last few years since I got out of HR so maybe it’s not like that any more but they always crazy inaccurate. We use to see brick layers making it through the auto screens for finance roles when we just used the software. When the software makes that crazy of a mistake then HR can’t see people actually qualified for the roles their recruiting.
Honestly I wish there was a standard resume format. It would make it easier for the software and for the humans rather than everyone flexing their creativity on resume formatting.
Yet these companies have the audacity to complain that they can’t find any qualified applicants. It would be funny if it wasn’t so fucking sad.
I’m not sure what your problem with it is. The process seems to work reasonably well on my end. I’m not sure why you think the form is such a burden.
See this is why nothing improves and why the process remains to be a shit show.
On your end everything seems fine. To everyone on the other end it’s a complete failure.
If someone is looking for a job they are going through this process 20-30 times. Every fucking time it’s filling out some long form repeating all the same crap that’s in your resume.
Like I get it. You do this to make your life easier. But you do it at the expense of everyone else and in the end you glazed over all the good talent because you didn’t even know it was there since the people looking at this stuff don’t know the first thing about the role they are hiring.
The problem is on your end. Not the applicants. The really good applicants aren’t even applicants because they see this shit and NOPE out since there are plenty of good companies that don’t pull this crap.
Not sure why you think I have trouble getting good talent.
This doesn’t make my life easier. I still get a mess of resumes that I have to read through and rank, then go through the interview process. It’s a lot of work. But I do get good results generally.
Because all of the big corporations out there including Lockheed Martin write articles complaining about how they struggle to find qualified applicants.
Also, it’s hard for a computer to parse a resume, and most of this stuff runs through a computer before a human sees it, so filling a form makes sure the data is correct.
You also don’t have to worry about corrupted or unsupported files.
You’re telling me that computers are sophisticated enough to drive cars and create new antibiotics but resumes are just too much? Nah.
If that’s the case then don’t ask for a resume and only have the form to input job history that can be easily handed over to a manager using a printable template.
It’s lazy on HR’s part and on the HR software they use.
Have you ever seen a standard resume?
They don’t exist. Resumes are totally different for every person. Different document format, different layout.
The forms are for filtering. Ones that pass filtering, then the resumes will actually be read.
that computers are sophisticated enough to drive cars
they aren’t
Not according to every shitty car company with a “social media expert” that makes an OpenAI account
Yeah I’m pretty sure you can probably train an AI to do this quite accurately these days, and in fact, someone out there has likely already done that.
The question is whether the company you’re applying to is willing to pay for that. Unfortunately, if does, it would probably also be willing to pay for an AI to replace you as well, and if it isn’t, they’ll likely have you do similarly boring and useless tasks at your job.
You can’t. An NDA prohibits me from saying how I know this, but I know for a fact that advanced and specifically trained FMs still struggle to accurately parse resumes, even with several million dollars devoted to the project.
Really? That’s quite surprising. I understand that it’s not trivial to algorithmically parse a resume formatted for human consumption even though it’s a somewhat structured format, just because the formatting can vary quite a lot, but there’s only so many different types of information on there, and little of it has any overlap in terms of how it could be categorized, so I would think an AI should be quite effective at picking it up.
Then again, I’m not an AI expert and I certainly haven’t attempted to do anything like this.
The models can do alright for very simple resumes, but once you start getting into multiple page ones it gets messy.
While resumes follow a pattern that we’re able to easily recognize, there’s so much variation that even with AI you have to add in a ton of heuristics to control for hallucinations.
The fact that you have people that know nothing about the technical requirements of the role means you have an idiot deciding on whether or not you fit. Your chances are crippled from the get go.
These are red flags to me. This is just a tip of the iceberg and a great indicator as to how dysfunctional the company is.
If you’re THAT detached from the hiring process then you’ll never find a good candidate because you don’t know what a good candidate is.
All that means is that if you some how manage to get hired you’ll be working with idiots that can’t do their job because they were hired by an idiot.
I work for a company that makes rocket engines. It makes no sense to teach the folks in HR about all the disciplines that go into the business - mechanical design, combustion devices, materials and properties, electronics, software, etc. It makes way more sense to make sure they know how to do their own job, and for a hiring manager to be able to tell them something like, “Send me all the applicants who have a computer science degree and at least five years of experience.” Then I can evaluate which of those applicants is the best fit based on the resume. The form facilitate that.
That attitude is precisely the reason why you struggle to find good people. There is no shortage of good applicants. You just don’t know what you’re doing and can’t see the difference.
It’s a real shame. All the more reason why my hatred for corporations grows on a daily basis.
I don’t struggle to find good applicants. I have a really high success rate in a very challenging field.
just because somebody typed this stuff and took a photo doesn’t mean that’s what they submitted.
Understood, but I didn’t want anyone to think it’s a good idea.
Would actually love to do that. I just have an extreme aversion to knowingly shooting myself in the foot
Me too. The only jobs I apply to are ones I really want (obviously), so doing this just hurts my chances of getting them.
But I absolutely hate this bullshit.
Eh, sometimes I apply to jobs I don’t really care too much about, just to go through the process and see what the market is like without any stress. I can recommend. And once that even turned out to be a good thing and I stayed, who knows.
Before anyone complains, the companies put out job descriptions they’re not really serious about either, sometimes to just meet candidates they could maybe use elsewhere, sometimes just to make themselves look good towards their competitors. Play that game, get your time wasted for my “training”, I don’t feel to t bad about that.
Some companies and institutions also have policies that they have to put out a public employment ad even if they plan to promote someone internally.
Yeah its annoying as hell most times
But you would edgily shoot you in the foot!
As a hiring manager, I am absolutely floored how many people do not actually have this information on their resumes. So while most people would assume a lot of redundancies between the form and a resume, I can assure you that many people do not have this information readily available on their resumes.
K so…don’t hire them?
That’s easy to say when you aren’t bombarded with 800 resumes submitted from headhunting call centers out of India for every job.
The purpose of these forms is to figure out which resumes are worth reading. It puts all the relevant information for a first-round elimination in a standard format.
Once the 80 percent of applicants that aren’t worth any consideration are eliminated, you can start looking at the actual resumes.
I don’t have it on mine. I finished high school (college) 20 years ago. There are way more relevant things to put in my resume than that.
Why do you even need to know my high-school?
We don’t need YOUR high school, but if the applicant is 15 you do, or at least would want it for work permit reasons.
I guess it depends on the job, but I feel thar a job that wants to know my college wouldn’t care about my high school.
To pull records.
I have been out of college for 15 years. Why the fuck do they care about my honkey highschool in bum fuck nowhere.
To discriminate against your bum fuck nowhere ass.
Jokes on them, I’m a white cis male, gonna take more than that to poke a hole in my privilege!
gotta see what juicy tidbits are on the old permanent record
I remember when they convinced us that that was a thing.
Sorry to say but you hiring managers don’t know jack shit about hiring people. You have zero clue as to what qualifies an employee. Always asking the wrong questions.
The reason why corporations have a hard time finding talent isn’t because a lack of talent. It’s because the hiring process is a joke. But then you’ll complain that no one wants to work anymore.
The amount of top talent you toss into the bin because you don’t know what questions to is staggering.
Truly abysmal.
“What would you say is your biggest weakness?”
STAR. The STAR format is my biggest weakness. Please everyone stop using it.
then why ask for both things? just have a checkbox to indicate that the information is in the resumé, and if it isn’t then obviously they shouldn’t be hired since they either can’t read or don’t give a shit.
Why do you need to know where I went to school if I have years of job experience showing that I can do the job? Education seems only to matter if someone is newly graduated and without real-world experience. And high school? Wtf?!
Why do you need to build a system to capture this information from people that can’t read rather than just rejecting those applications?
Thousands of applications and only dozens of jobs.
Imagine a world where there are countless open job reqs and only one applicant per job. That might be the case if the world population was not 8 billion.
I’m saying why not just reject them if you have lots of applicants… Not sure I follow what you are saying.
Building the elaborate system to help them get last the initial pass of resumes only gives you more resumes to look at later.
I honestly think ATS are a pain in the ass simply to filter out the people who won’t deal with bullshit. They want people who will live with bullshit working for them because the org is (always) dysfunctional.
Alternatively… their HR technology team is just trash because it’s run by HR and not someone who knows technology. Seen it plenty of times where shadow IT is being run by people who don’t know what they’re doing beyond “we need this thing.”
I just joined a fantastic team and within a month I saw how dysfunctional it is. Nobody knows how to organize humans. Whoever actually figures it out could rule the world.
Then why do you need the resume if you just ask for it all again
I’m seeing some hostility towards you as a hiring manager which is rough, because hiring manager is not necessarily HR. It often means the manager of the person being hired. So the person on a specific team responsible for filling positions on that team. I’m not sure if you directly hire for your team or it’s an HR term in your case, but just adding this here in case it helps someone not be rude to a random person on the internet.
Also, as a person who hires people on my team (I don’t use the hiring manager title, but yea) it’s ridiculous how awful some resumes are. We don’t use hiring software, and I personally review all the resumes, but we are a small team so I totally understand why that would be used. The overlap of people who don’t like filling out the forms but who also want to be evaluated on who they are rather than what’s on their resume is a circle. I don’t want to dismiss anyone who doesn’t have a degree, but just because a degree isn’t on the resume doesn’t mean they don’t have one. Plenty of people leave off the years they worked at a specific job. I can assume months or years, but the form would help clarify that without wasting anyone’s time. Decisions have to be made somewhere and if people want to be judged by people in their field, then their full time job will likely not be hiring, so sometimes they use these forms for standardization purposes. I don’t like them either, but they are not this evil thing they are made out to be.
Thanks for this completely sane interpretation!
I appreciate your response. I am a cog in the machine and I work within the limitations of the system in which I work. My organization requires data entry into fields such as this example. I have no control over this. I would assume it is to have some sort of standardization, as there is no “standard” format to resumes. I have seen resumes come through that is a narration of their job experience, one that had a sentence or two, one that completely left off any relevant job experience, many that don’t have call back information. As I mentioned in my original post, I have been absolutely floored at what people believe to be acceptable. I hire for professional jobs, ones that require degrees and licenses, so these people should “know better,” especially as I have nothing to go off of except what you share with me. I want to give qualified people jobs! But if your best foot forward is a sloppy mess, what makes me believe you have the skills to do the job?
Because I know if a hiring manager talks to me, they are likely to hire me, but if I write down that I didn’t graduate college, then they aren’t going to talk to me.
Same. Didn’t even finish high school because credits wouldn’t transfer and I’d graduate after my peers. Got a GPD and started college while my friends were in their senior year. Didn’t finish, but I took some classes.
The greatest lie ever told to me was that without a college education, I’d be worthless. Thanks Dad. That really fucked me up in my twenties. I’m extremely qualified and I learned to recognize it, but boy did it create some imposter-syndrome for a while.
I’m relieved whenever candidates demonstrate that they are less likely to correctly complete important tasks.
“Pick up this can…”
seems to me like this would be the kind of information that you would clarify IN the interview. But what do i fucking know. I’m just a person.
We all, deep down, understand the exploitative of the employer/employee relationship. They are setting the tone for the rest of your life doing bullshit work that doesn’t matter at all.
There’s actually an easy technical fix for this. All we would need is a common format for resumes that is machine readable, e.g. an XML schema that defines what fields should be in there. Then you just need a simple tool with a nice UI for inputting the info. So what are the chances of this happening? That’s right, exactly zero.
The EU actually has something like that:
https://europa.eu/europass/eportfolio/screen/profile-wizard?lang=en
Interesting. Never heard of that.
This is about what I imagine would happen.
If you ever get through to a person high enough to answer your question of: “why did you ask for my resume?”
…the honest answer is:
“There are two things that look at you, the candidate. For cost cutting reasons, we put your answers you fill in all these blanks into a computer which eliminates you if you don’t match our basic criteria. We save money by never actually even knowing your name. If you pass the computer filter, your resume is needed because actual humans look at it. So thats why we ask for both.”
Unfortunately this computer filtering step tends to be highly inaccurate and game-able, but I’m not sure what to propose instead.
Unfortunately this computer filtering step tends to be highly inaccurate and game-able, but I’m not sure what to propose instead.
Game-able, as in, entering specific answers (even if they are inaccurate) gets you through the computer and put in front of a human? Working as intended.
Ever since the social contract was broken with employers where they’d give you a job for decades if you stayed there, there’s been an ongoing “arms race” of how job applicants can get noticed, and how employers can get usable candidates out of the massive tidal waves of applicants they get. The first step computer filter doesn’t have to be perfect, if it even filters out 80% of the candidate that don’t meet basic criteria, leaving only 20% for humans to review that is massively better (to employers) than requiring humans to look at all 100% of applicants.
So yes, its game-able to get through the computer filter, but if you still don’t match the basic criteria, you’ll be eliminated by the human reviewers anyway. The difference is only very small number of candidates will figure out the game-able answers to get through even if they aren’t supposed to. This is…until the next round of the arms race where nearly all candidates are getting through. That hasn’t happened yet.
I would really like to know how to game the filters because the number of interviews I get vs the number of resumes I put in is depressingly low. My job history and experience is really extensive, but I can’t seem to even get to the initial HR interview much less get an actual interview for a job.
I recently endured a job search. Applied to over 400 positions on Indeed alone. I stopped filling out the forms. Probably lost out on some job opportunities, but having to fill this shit out 30 times a day is not worth the effort.
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I’m so glad I was able to establish a career and become well known in an industry before applying for positions was so demoralising and exhausting. I worry about what things will be like in another few years when my children enter the job market.
Recruiters consistently use bad practices like this and use AI to search for keywords.
Then they get upset when candidates use AI to apply for jobs.
Rules for thee, but not for me!
There’s a technical reason they do this that has been pointed out elsewhere but it has the added benefit of filtering out people who believe they are above the process. Most jobs have processes (safety processes, legal processes, etc.). You can avoid people who aren’t ready to accept they may be exceptional, but are applying for a position that does not require them to be.
That’s a very pro-company spin on it. But on the other hand it definitely filters for people who don’t mind being downright humiliated by a job that doesn’t respect their time or puts effort into finding employees. This pattern of reentering your resume data is pretty brand new, and justifying it from the companies side is pretty post-hoc when it’s really just offloading labor the company used to do to the unpaid job applicant who has to do this 20 times in a row.
Unfortunately it’s why I just used LinkedIn only for my last search. I only applied at places where LinkedIn would auto-enter everything. Nobody gets paid to apply for jobs - I’ll be happy to do their HR stuff all day once I’m on the clock.
Excuse me, but we’d like you to do some unpaid at-home practice tasks to show us how you’ll
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Yes, they’re basically testing your ability or willingness to do meaningless tasks when they’re assigned to you because let’s face it, most jobs these days are 90% meaningless work.
I used to think that’s a bad thing because just like most people here, I wanted to be exceptional but perhaps it’s not the worst thing in the world to get paid for doing something so simple you could do it in your sleep, so you can save your mental energy for doing more important things in your free time.
This may be the case at some companies, but I think for the most part this is giving companies too much credit. Having people fill in these details in this form directly feeds into a spreadsheet, meaning the staff responsible for onboarding don’t have to go looking for the information on the resume
Which makes sense when you’re filtering through hundreds of CVs…
I have filled out these forms, and I have abandoned applications.
If I am being paid to follow process, that’s one thing. If I’m being forced to jump through hoops for free on my own time, before I’m even particularly interested in your company, that’s a completely different thing.
Same with coding applications. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t, really just depends on if I’m bored or not. But as a requirement before the application is even looked at, it’s fucking stupid.
And this is exactly why you can’t find anyone with talent that will work for you. You make the hiring process a joke and push all the smart people away. They don’t have to put up with that shit so they don’t.
Companies who utilize these tactics can be ignored. Find a better company to work for. They do exist. Life is too short to put up with moronic companies.
You can avoid people who aren’t ready to accept they may be exceptional
Cool. You know some of us are starving out here, right?
Once when I was in High School, there was a test that had a fat block of instructions at the top. But buried in those instructions it said “You don’t need to write any answers, just write your name and hand the instructor the test, and you will receive 100% credit.” It was more a test to see if people would read and follow instructions than it was for knowledge. Needless to say, many people did not get 100% credit.
I can only guess that job applications are like that test in this regard.
My version was the last question of the test. She wanted us to read an entire test and then start answering after we finished reading it.
Lady, was I supposed to read an entire section of the SAT before taking it? That sounds so nutty.
I had something like that in military school except it was group graded…and we couldn’t talk, so once myself and like 5 others saw the instructions, we watched the others 25 finish the test. We got lit up for the worst class out of 5 in the current year.
probably not read, but maybe just look at
We had this kind of test, too. I guess it’s a popular way of teaching this lesson of “read the whole f*cking instructions! That’s why someone wrote them down for you!”
While it is good to filter through people who are unwilling or uncapable of reading/following instructions, it still feels unnecessary.
It sometimes feels like the whole world refuses to stop testing you. It’s an endless gauntlet.
This is one of the rare spaces where AI could be genuinely useful if it can accurately pull this data out of mass uploaded resumes.
It’s already being used, and already screens out people with the same biases you could expect (name sounds foreign, name is female, etc.).
I wouldn’t want it to do screening, literally just OCR and key word extraction.
They do that too.
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Cheaper?
They just pass the labor and trouble on to the people applying for job. That’s only cheaper to them. To me, my time and energy is a cost.
“nO oNe WaNtS tO WoRk AnYmOrE!!”
You won’t get hired but it was funny
We’ve airgapped the employee database from middle management resume double-space-n-font-checkers. Don’t ask how, it just happened.
- HR, Marketing sub-team
