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Why Resumes Are Dead and How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market

paulfuhr.medium.com

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Re: Why Resumes Are Dead and How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market

#81

Post by ta46645745 »

valdiorn wrote: post #57
ben_w wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trying to cold-apply to every single job with a spray and pray approach is about as fruitful as cold calling every company you can to sell a product which may or may not apply to them. This also describes most of the recruiters who contact me; occasionally they happen to be aligned with me job hunting, but usually they were in the "java == javascript" category, and time has only changed this into the "all mobile de…

wtf? The recruiters in your area sound horrid. A lot of the recruiters in London and VERY on top of technology and know more than I do about current trends, languages and frameworks and exactly where to find people to fill every niche need their client companies have. To the point where they can follow the logic of "Client needs F# developers, F# is a functional programming language. I should look at former employees…

That's been my experience of ~20 years also, you don't always get to pick the recruiter. "Oh twenty years of Java, you'll be perfect for this Android position! Or this React one! Its more of a script role though!" Sounds unfortunately accurate.

Re: Why Resumes Are Dead and How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market

#82

Post by gcanyon »

adeon wrote: post #35

The author says they've been applying to thousands of jobs. This is the resume the author is linking in the article: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/v2sv6ev393z9fkk62v1hw/Paul-Fu... I wonder, if this person's main method of applying has been online forms where you click the "upload resume", he puts this resume in and then everything fails from the start because the ATS is unable to read it. It looks like the text in t…

When I was applying, I had a situation where sometimes the ATS system would show me as Geoff and other times as Geo, with no clue why.

Obviously, that's not a fatal issue, but it was indicative of other problems with my résumé, and I saw those in the auto-generated job histories.

Pixelmator Pro just released a feature where it can open PDFs to show you the internal structure. I opened my résumé and sure enough "Geoff" is in two text boxes, despite being a single chunk of text in the source document. :-/

Re: Why Resumes Are Dead and How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market

#83

Post by gcanyon »

giantg2 wrote: post #70
adeon wrote: post #35

The author says they've been applying to thousands of jobs. This is the resume the author is linking in the article: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/v2sv6ev393z9fkk62v1hw/Paul-Fu... I wonder, if this person's main method of applying has been online forms where you click the "upload resume", he puts this resume in and then everything fails from the start because the ATS is unable to read it. It looks like the text in t…

Any good resume submission system should be capable of OCR. But what is this guy? Sounds like he's a designer, a communications specialist, team leader, and project manager. Just all over the place. I'm not sure what I'd hire them for. Edit: why disagree?

And yet they don't. When I was applying some systems got my name wrong. They would chop off two characters. I assure you, that's not how it looked in the PDF.

Re: Why Resumes Are Dead and How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market

#84

Post by giantg2 »

valdiorn wrote: post #57
ben_w wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trying to cold-apply to every single job with a spray and pray approach is about as fruitful as cold calling every company you can to sell a product which may or may not apply to them. This also describes most of the recruiters who contact me; occasionally they happen to be aligned with me job hunting, but usually they were in the "java == javascript" category, and time has only changed this into the "all mobile de…

wtf? The recruiters in your area sound horrid. A lot of the recruiters in London and VERY on top of technology and know more than I do about current trends, languages and frameworks and exactly where to find people to fill every niche need their client companies have. To the point where they can follow the logic of "Client needs F# developers, F# is a functional programming language. I should look at former employees…

I could be wrong, but it seems like recruiters in Europe are "better" (I'm not sure, but maybe more strategic and less used-car-salesman; or the whole recruiting system is more structured). The ones in the US are mostly terrible.

Re: Why Resumes Are Dead and How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market

#85

Post by daft_pink »

Is their evidence that Indeed is posting scraped jobs from other services?

The reason this doesn't make sense is as an employer, we found that Indeed produced the highest number of candidates but cost like $400 per listing. We would first post somewhere cheaper and then post on Indeed if we couldn't find a qualified applicant.

We would have loved to post somewhere else for less money and have it be scraped and listed on Indeed for free. It's difficult to believe that their listings are being scraped from somewhere else as the actually customer is the job poster not the applicant.

Re: Why Resumes Are Dead and How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market

#86

Post by ta46645745 »

Aeolun wrote: post #58
dboreham wrote: post #10

Never used indeed.com once. But...people should know that these sites, and recruiters, are basically hiring theater. Almost all jobs (perhaps excepting FAANG meat grinder) are filled through personal connections.

> Almost all jobs (perhaps excepting FAANG meat grinder) are filled through personal connections. I’ve hired roughly 10 people and all of them came in through recruiters. I don’t think my company ever considers direct applications, even though that’s an option on LinkedIn. They just never pass HR to actually arrive at the interview stage.

Yeah its nonsense, anecdotal at best.

Re: Why Resumes Are Dead and How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market

#87

Post by giantg2 »

gcanyon wrote: post #83
giantg2 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any good resume submission system should be capable of OCR. But what is this guy? Sounds like he's a designer, a communications specialist, team leader, and project manager. Just all over the place. I'm not sure what I'd hire them for. Edit: why disagree?

And yet they don't. When I was applying some systems got my name wrong. They would chop off two characters. I assure you, that's not how it looked in the PDF.

If they're expecting text, then why even submit in PDF? Wouldn't a Word document be better? At the very least, if a system has limitations or and expected rigid input, then it should provide that information to the submitter. I'm sure there are terrible systems our there, but I'd be surprised if the average ones aren't decent at OCR.

Re: Why Resumes Are Dead and How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market

#88

Post by AnimalMuppet »

_8j50 wrote: post #69
38 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree. this thing is WAY too stylish. just put the information so that a computer can read it in. the annoyance factor is probably enough to reject him in some cases.

Oh come on. OCR is a thing. I mean this is HN, are you normalizing acceptance of crappy software?

I would not blame the software. I'm pretty sure that images are not generally used as formats for resumes.

I mean, at what point do you think it gets ridiculous? When it's a video instead of an image? When it's in Sanskrit? (Computer translation is a thing, after all.) When it's a video in Sanskrit?

Or maybe is it more reasonable to say, look, this is some text, submit it in a standard text format? And an image is not that, even though OCR is a thing.

Re: Why Resumes Are Dead and How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market

#89

Post by giantg2 »

adeon wrote: post #78
giantg2 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any good resume submission system should be capable of OCR. But what is this guy? Sounds like he's a designer, a communications specialist, team leader, and project manager. Just all over the place. I'm not sure what I'd hire them for. Edit: why disagree?

Are they actually good though? (the ATS systems) I've only recently learned how important they are in general and I'm not familiar with their capabilities. I would think that even with OCR, this resume might be confusing because the years and contact information and stuff is kinda spread around. If someone has has good insight how well/not well they work, I would appreciate if you commented about it.

There will always be some edge cases where it can't identify or interpret something, but they're pretty good. It doesn't matter where something is located in the document, it can pull stuff out like an address or phone number based on format and stuff.

Re: Why Resumes Are Dead and How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market

#90

Post by Tao3300 »

adeon wrote: post #35

The author says they've been applying to thousands of jobs. This is the resume the author is linking in the article: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/v2sv6ev393z9fkk62v1hw/Paul-Fu... I wonder, if this person's main method of applying has been online forms where you click the "upload resume", he puts this resume in and then everything fails from the start because the ATS is unable to read it. It looks like the text in t…

Yikes. PDF without any of the text embedded. Can't select, can't search, can't filter. He's basically sending everyone a JPEG!

I would expect this to totally not work. Maybe someone is going to have OCR somewhere in the chain, but... why would you bet on it??

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