Never Send Your CV via Gmail • Hacker News Board

Re: Never Send Your CV via Gmail

#11

Post by jdm2212 » Wed, May 06, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

The article says that the issue was on the recipient side, not the sender's side, so the title is wrong -- sending via Gmail is fine, receiving via Gmail is... well, supposedly an issue, but I've never had a resume land in my spam folder so I'm skeptical.

(Amusingly, my Google job offer landed in my Gmail spam folder years ago. But that was because of a weird thing where forwarding from my @university.edu account would screw with headers that Gmail uses to verify the authenticity of an email.)

Also...

> They must be using Gmail client to access their office emails, I guessed.

Is that even a thing? Does Gmail reroute stuff to spam that came into your inbox via POP/IMAP?

Re: Never Send Your CV via Gmail

#12

Post by floren » Wed, May 06, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

Good news if you're concerned about Google's Hire product: it'll be dead by September (https://killedbygoogle.com/)

Re: Never Send Your CV via Gmail

#13

Post by janwillemb » Wed, May 06, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

Summary:

> Author applied to multiple positions via email and was not hired. He suspects this has something to do with his resume ending up in the spam folder on the other side, who use Gmail.

If this was a problem in an application I was debugging, I would highly mistrust this theory and dig deeper to find a more probable cause.

Re: Never Send Your CV via Gmail

#14

Post by mrlala » Wed, May 06, 2020, 5:33 PM UTC

What a weird article.. first of all, what does sending it with gmail have to do with anything?

He says the company is USING gmail to receive.. that's where the spam-filter comes in. He could have sent this with any service and it still would have been filtered out.

Then he complains about gmail auto-complete? First, I have found it to be quite helpful.. but next, if you don't want it to autocomplete then you just keep on typing. Yeah sometimes it might try to correct a specific word.. just like everything else these days. It's not always going to be perfect.

For someone who is apparently trying to get such a tech job- not understanding the email filter was on the receiving end and he would have hit the same situation no matter what is... quite disturbing. Especially after going through the trouble to write an entire article about it.

Re: Never Send Your CV via Gmail

#15

Post by snapetom » Wed, May 06, 2020, 5:33 PM UTC

claytonjy wrote: post #8

victor9000 wrote: post #3

You can send your resume as a flat PDF to avoid this problem.

Is it really that easy? I see no mention of _how_ the author sent their materials, but a directly-generated PDF is just as easy to search as a word doc, isn't it? Does gmail explicitly only inspect the latter?

Unless the PDF is generated as one big image, making it a tad bit harder for google to scan, yes, PDFs are easily parsable. There's a ton of open source libraries out there for it.

Re: Never Send Your CV via Gmail

#16

Post by jdm2212 » Wed, May 06, 2020, 5:33 PM UTC

united893 wrote: post #7

This is patently incorrect. The author doesn't have any idea on how GMail's email filtering works.

Particularly given that the author thinks the sender is responsible for recipient-side spam filtering...

Re: Never Send Your CV via Gmail

#17

Post by bdamm » Wed, May 06, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

morisy wrote: post #4

Having been on both side of the hiring fence, many HR departments primarily pass around PDFs when evaluating candidates. If you instead, as suggested, include a link, I think you're even more likely to shoot yourself in the foot because when you're evaluating dozens or hundreds of candidates, anyone who makes you take an extra step is very easily lost in the shuffle, even inadvertently. The spam filtering tools can i…

Yeah email is a train wreck now. The right answer is to use all the mediums. Gmail, link, and follow it up with a phone call/chat/etc. The resume email is just one arrow in a small flight of arrows.

Re: Never Send Your CV via Gmail

#18

Post by unilynx » Wed, May 06, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

Spam filtering is (mostly) on the receiving side. You have little control over whether or not the recipient is on Google mail. It doesn’t really matter if you send using gmail, and it might be even better for deliverability given the reputation systems in spam filtering

Re: Never Send Your CV via Gmail

#19

Post by knorker » Wed, May 06, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

The fact that this so called developer doesn't understand the difference between a sender and a receiver of email makes me think there are other things in the CV that caused them to not be hired.

Re: Never Send Your CV via Gmail

#20

Post by slg » Wed, May 06, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

This entire article is premised on an excuse from a single HR person that an email ended up in their spam folder. It is probably worth keeping in mind that "your email ended up in spam" does occasionally happen, but it is also a widely used polite white lie that people use instead of saying "I ignored your email."