The whispering is all in her head and says she sucks
I definitely don’t take advice from someone who leads with this
I am the human embodiment of a perfectly poured shot of espresso. Smooth. Satisfying. Energizing.
This is why I am able to exceed expectations and tap into superhuman qualities that transform the lives and careers of job seekers throughout the known galaxy. How?
Actual psychopath
Most of the time, sentences in a sensible order, we reading easier can make.
Candidate hot tip - if you’re going to learn English from a fictional green puppet, choose Kermit The Frog; he is a native English speaker.
Actually this is good advice. Nowadays nobody reads your CV in the first step. Your CV first gets through an automated system (ATS i think its called). It’s designed to filter out as much as possible.
The problem with PDF is that it’s terrible to parse cuz it’s designed for humans reading it, not machines. The only reliable way to parse it is by converting it to images and then OCR, which is kinda expensive.
So before you send a PDF, you should first try to convert it to txt and see if the content make enough sense. Or just use word to make a CV then export to PDF.
When i was looking for a job, i remember there was a website that would give you tips on your CV and they had an ATS report of your CV. I was so shocked to realize that ATS totally messed up completely to parse the correct info from my latex CV. Like I have a lot of AI/ML experience and it completely missed it and thought i had quality assurance one. And i was applying for AI jobs, no wonder I couldn’t get any interviews. Then I changed it to word and an exported pdf where word wasn’t accepted. I got many more interviews after that.
Was it that the PDF produced by latex was less OCR friendly than the word one, or just that you didn’t submit the PDF at all most of the time?
I guess if you trained a program to OCR PDFs that are produced by word it might get really good at that and less good at PDFs from other sources.
I’m curious if your CV font was computer modern?
I think OCRs are really good nowadays but i think old ATS systems don’t use them or at least use old OCR. If you parse a pdf (without OCR) a word exported pdf preserve the text order much better than a latex ones.
Like i actually tried some websites and python libraries to extract the text from my latex pdf, none of them gave good results like words inside pdf would be out of order.
If i use ocr then I get good coherent text. Which is really important for ATS but I doubt people use OCRs cuz they are kinda expensive or maybe people just use old ATS systems etc
For my most recent application I submitted an Europass resume. It embeds an xml with the pdf, making it machine readable.
Whether or not the ATS can read it, I don’t know.
I have gotten some response in the past that some people see europass as somewhat being lazy which is why I moved to latex. Also my CV got a bit too long with europass (2-3 pages I think).
Well, this is obviously ridiculous. If you want to maximise your chances, make it as easy as possible. Send an exe.
You. I like you
Lms “we are incompetent”
Are you fucking kidding me?
That’s some of the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard… Hell, that would even be fucking stupid in 1998.
Definitive red flag if that is their supposed understanding of computers
Update: ffs I’m not defending hr, they’re usually incompetent buffoons. But they’re the incompetent buffoons you need to get past if you want to get hired. And I don’t know about you, but when Frito Pendejo said “I like money” I kinda agreed with him. Anyway back to my OC:
Why? They’re HR and hiring managers, not IT specialists.
Try seeing it from HR’s perspective. They post a job and get +200 applications. The success criteria is not hiring the best candidate, it’s hiring a suitable candidate. Given that premise, why would you read through all 200 applications, when there’s someone with a nice website and cool sounding software, who promise that their product can sort through the resumes and only pick the relevant ones for you?
Heck, I’m definitely going to be looking for an ATS testing site for my CV now. It really doesn’t matter what we think of it. If you want to communicate you’ll have to do it in a way that your recipient will understand, and if my recipient is a PoS software that can’t read PDFs, then writing my CV in latex is probably not the most effective way to communicate.
Try seeing it from HR’s perspective.
K, now what.
Now you get it. That was what I was trying to say. They’re just trying to look like they’re doing enough to get paid.
“we can’t afford ATS software that can read PDFs”
okay, can you afford to pay me a proper wage??
I’ve been in hiring discussions where word doc is looked down on since the candidate is not thinking about how to protect their data from manipulation.
This ladies take is dumb as hell, or as others have mentioned because her company changes applicants information.
The number of times I got a word doc with the job description in it is ridiculous as well. Yes, I am judging you if you do that.
A PDF is also editable, sure, but at least everyone can open the goddamn thing without any problems.
Realistically what’s the worst that company is gonna do? Make my resume better?
PDFs are also editable…
This lady’s* take is dumb
These people just want to remove your contact data so they can make money off your back.
Real recruiters find candidates and setup a meeting between you and the company. They also don’t care about eventually sending your contact details as their services are actually worth giving them money.
Stupid recruiters that post on LinkedIn arguing about your resume like in the OP just edit your details out and send companies a handful of resumes. They make money from simply being a glorified proxy.
“Chief Candidate Whisperer”, like what the actual fuck.
9/10 applicants who submit their resume as a PDF for our openings, we can’t view.
Can’t, or won’t?
If you can’t figure out how to open a PDF, I really don’t want to work for you.
Or don’t know how to.
If you can’t open 90% of pdfs sent from different sources then you’re the problem
I also wonder what the fuck they’re even looking at the site with. Any modern version of Windows can open PDF’s without needing to install additional software. If they’re using Mac’s I’m not sure, but given that Office similarly would need to be installed to open a Word doc I’m pretty sure they could also install a PDF reader at that point …
Mac also opens PDFs natively
I don’t want to work somewhere if they can’t even open a PDF. The fuck kind of Windows 3.1 machines are they using.
Even that wouldn’t be an excuse: https://winworldpc.com/product/acrobat-reader/3x
I work for a small/med business MSP. You have no idea
See, that’s okay though. The MSP who can’t read PDFs being filtered out is kinda okay. Been there, ain’t going back.
An MSP is an IT company that supports several other companies. They’re saying they have users who don’t know how to open PDFs all the time in multiple industries.
chief candidate whisperer
are they looking to hire a horse?
I’m going to take a stab and say she’s a recruiter for a third party staffing company.
They REQUIRE word docs so that they can copy and paste or edit your resume on their template.
Pro tip: take the requirements that they send you and Google search for it. Apply directly with the company and cut them out.
I have great experience with third party recruiters. I only ever had to send them a CV (as PDF!) and they took care of the rest. I just had to go to the interview. The company hired and payed for the recruiter so for me it’s a win.
Granted, in my last two job searches I never looked for open positions myself, I answered messages from recruiters in my inbox. So it’s more that they were applying to me. Most messages can be ignored because the recruiters have no idea what they are talking about.
The recruiters also like to remove your name and contact details so that the companies they are selling you to can’t bypass the recruiter.
I mean her profile says she works for “First Search” which sound like a middle man for sure.
And “Chief Candidate Whisperer”? Wtf. Don’t get me started.
is she the person you’re supposed to hire when your Chief Candidates are out of control?
“Is the cheif candidate with us in the room now?”
Unless you open the pdf in gimp or something (and it’s not just a photo, which would be equally bad in a word document) you should be able to copy from a PDF too.
Yeah, I don’t know how to say this nicely, but my experience so far is that HR people are not* exactly the sharpest knives in the kitchen…
Had Javascript on my resume, and the recruiter send me to an interview for a Java programming job…
The other one asked me to take an online test about cryptography algorithms in node js for a prescreening interview, which is something I never even remotely had to deal with in more than 20 years working for multiple e-commerce, health systems, CMS and other services and websites. Also, no Google or any online sources allowed to solve their questions…
I think most recruiters are legitimately stupid.
Most of them certainly have no business recruiting for people in industries they’ve never worked in and can’t really comprehend the requirements for.
“Please do our work for us for free. Thank you for applying.”
It’s not even that (and I think you mean are not).
It’s because they are dealing with literally hundreds of resumes. They want to be lazy and just slap on their logo and be done.
PDFs just make this much harder than they want to put in.
not sure this is a great tip. Only jobs I got past 1st stage with this year was through a recruiter, applying solo got me auto booted from over 120 jobs.
A recruiter is a networker that you’re paying.
They have networked with the hiring manager, developing a rapport,
Well in my case that the eventual employer pays
If your organization is such a clusterfuck that you can’t figure out how to open a PDF, then I’m going to consider that a bullet dodged.
Literally every single browser can open a PDF.
Is she admitting that their organization only uses discontinued, insecure Internet Explorer to use the internet? Is she also opening word files in Microsoft word 2005?
Nah she’s talking about the ATS systems that filter through all the applicants’ resumes looking for the ones with the highest amount of matching keywords so they can get the number of applicants down to a more reasonable number to interview.
They don’t care if their bots don’t work for your PDF resume because they get so many applicants it doesn’t matter.
I’m surprised this isn’t common knowledge for jobseekers.
It is common knowledge.
Bots can scrape PDFs.
I had about 50 applications of proof where bots scraped the information from my PDF and auto-filled it into the next forms which are again simply re-typing in all of the information from your resume again (which most medium or large companies use anyway which makes the entire point moot). They can scrape PDFs unless you hand-write your resume with bad handwriting so the OCR can’t pick it up.
Unless they got their ATS system from aliexpress, it can scrape PDFs.
I recently found an ad requiring knowledge of win2000/XP
I met a company that still has a machine in their production line, that uses 5.25" floppy discs and an amber monochrome display. “Why?” I hear you ask. Because it still works, it isn’t networked, and the floppies next to it are the only ones it’ll ever interact with.
The biggest problem with these dinosaurs is when they stop working. Sourcing parts is getting more difficult.
Depending on the job itself, this actually makes sense for legacy support. My job requires “passable experience with Windows 98SE, XP, and 2000”, but the network-facing computers are all 10 and 11.
Military and medical too.
It was for an electronics rework technician role, though. Outside of a wave/reflow oven’s interface, (which should have its own GUI) it didn’t really make sense.
Fuck them for not putting the requirement on the application and wasting everyone’s time though
Our front desk person, on the computer all day, barely understands how tabs work.
It’s scary.
gen z or boomer?
Boomer.
As a gen z will echo that I’ve also seen some tech illiteracy from people my age as well.
I don’t like dishing on generational rants, but OMG the mobile device generation is every bit as lost as Boomers are when it comes to the actual functioning of their device or using a PC as an actual work device.
My kids have had a PC since they were four, they’re teens now and they still don’t get a lot of it, but when their friends come over they are absolutely clueless. Use an Xbox or Playstation? IPad? Sure! No problem! Anything beyond that they just give up.
Technology needs to be actively taught and actively learned! If their school isn’t teaching it, maybe try subscribing to some online tech literacy courses?
That is absolutely an answer, but getting teens to take more classes after being done with school…? Good luck. The kids are issued chromebooks, that’s as much tech as they get.
I had my eldest help putting together her PC after she wanted to upgrade parts for her birthday. That’s promising, I think?
I feel like I’m about as computer savvy as most gen z. Born in 91, but we was poor, so it was the family dell (that I wasn’t allowed to do much with*) until 2008, got my first laptop in 2009**, it broke almost immediately because poor and cheap, and then got my first smart phone (T-Mobile G1) in 2010, and basically didn’t touch a laptop again until I started school 2020. I basically started over from scratch at that point, but now I run fedora full time and made myself learn some basic stuff, but I would consider myself pretty tech illiterate.
*Because my brother was caught looking at porn, so computer time was severely cut back. Then I was caught sending sexy messages to someone. And then the final nail in the coffin was when I tried to dual boot it with some Linux distro, I don’t remember, borked it, and we had to wipe the hard drive
**Technically I had a netbook before this, in like 07/08, that I used Wubi to install Ubuntu on, and I loved that. But never got more than browser level into it.
Coding-wise I’d hazard that younger generations are on-par or better than my generation. But “jack of all trades” is probably more our wheelhouse.
Nope. We shed a lot of mentor-types in the great layoffs after Y2K, and a generation of nerds ran without any oral history and then taught that to their successors.
What they don’t know they don’t know is not only What best-practice is, but Why best-practice is. And there’s little demonstrated effort to adhere.
I look over installation docs that do Very, VERY bad things, for instance. Build processes with no artifact validation, a toxic cargo chain, builds in prod, and so much more.
I can’t blame the devs, as they didn’t learn better. I blame the c-suites who canned the pricy experienced nerds who were also raising their successors properly.
Now we get to re-learn all that at great pain and hope to regain some of what we had before the next board of defectors guts another carefully-rebuilt culture of adequacy.
I’d argue the Boomers are a fair cut above Gen Z. We Gen X folk are the greatest!
Seriously though, we straddled the digital divide. We went from nothing to having to figure it all out. All when we were young and able to learn quickly. FFS, we couldn’t play a simple video game without understanding drives, IRQs, CLI, all that.
Millennials got it best born just when tech was easy to learn but before it was overly obfuscated
The iPhone really screwed Gen Z.
X and Millennials had to do everything manually that our phones now do automatically for us.
We are the generation that learned how to use wireless mesh networks to text off Nintendo DS’s.
“Portable Document Format”. If they can’t open it, fuck them, you don’t want to work for that tire fire.
Yeah, like… You can literally open it in your web browser wtf
The HR department might be shite, but the data team might be good.
Nah. A good team will desert a bad company. And if their main interface is some pencil-pusher with a DENIED stamp, they’ll be a good dev for a better company soon.
That pencil pusher might be the sole interface to billions of autogenerated CVs, wwyd?
