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

paulfuhr.medium.com

111–120 of 176 posts

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

#111
post #68
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…

2000 applications is quite rare. A posting is "hot" on indeed above the 50+ applicant mark from what I have seen. If you have under 150 resumes there is no reason why a human can't skip+prioritize a few times and read in detail the top 50 or so. A liberal 4 minutes per resume is 15/hr,120/8h. You can't spend or have someone spend one day reading resumés? In my earlier example of 50 resumes, that's less than half a da…

One thing that is worth keeping in mind is that if a team is hiring they're probably understaffed, which likely means that they don't have much spare time. Hiring should be a high priority in that case but it's often a struggle to even get a small amount of time to focus on it.

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

#112
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…

Yes, but the good ones generally have the candidates applying directly through them. The ones who spam people tend to be the bad ones, giving this impression.

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

#113
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s my experience also, except the ones from the UK and especially the ones from the UK hiring for clients outside said UK, like Germany. Now the experiences I had with _those_ people would make a used car salesman blush

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

#114
post #70
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?

> Edit: why disagree?

Because I don't think a resume submission system should be doing OCR. There aren't that many text formats out there: between Word, PDF, and some form of plain text (just actual plain text or something like markdown or readme), that probably covers 99% of resume formats. Why on Earth would I want to run resumes through OCR when all those other formats can easily have their text extracted?

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

#115
post #87
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Be careful, the wrong settings, and all your edit history may be available.

(This could be bad, depending...)

As well, as some others mentioned, some sleezy recruiters will change your resume without permission. Add things/skills. Remove things.

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

#116
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another middleman who is "professional" at finding middlemen, of course.

For a fee, I could get you in touch with a few people who are able to find middlemen

Buy my book: "Finding middlemen for loosers"

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

#117
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would any hiring manager care whether a CV is AI generated? As long as the CV is accurate, the tool used to write it is irrelevant.

> Why would any hiring manager care whether a CV is AI generated? As long as the CV is accurate, the tool used to write it is irrelevant. How do you know if the CV is accurate or not? Multiply these CVs by hundreds and you will introduce software to sift through fake AI generated CVs, or not bother deal with them at all as most hiring managers are extremely time constrained. By now, I'm assuming that all hiring softw…

A hiring manager can't know whether a CV is accurate, but the tool used to generate it is irrelevant to that. There is no software which can reliably detect whether a document was generated by an LLM. Most tech companies now use background check services to verify educational credentials and previous employment before onboarding new hires.

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

#118

Personal websites or linkedin profiles for non-techies would address a lot of the problems he's describing. Actually, linkedIn makes sense for everyone as the profile outline is standardized across users, so anyone interested can scrape info as needed. edit to say that there needs to be a less social version of linkedin, so just a profile without any of the cringe-inducing toxic positivity.

That’s sorta what we are building at Simplify: https://simplify.jobs/

We started by building a common app for jobs. One single profile that can be used anywhere on any job on the web. Recruiters index on so many different data points, and it makes it more straightforward for both parties if data is standardized

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

#119

The worst resume forms are those from Workday, I run from them like the plague. You will probably need a new email to create an account for each job application. And if you get the job, you'll have to deal with their unbearable UX where nothing can be reached directly, but needs you to dive in a menu to a page that requires clicking a box to a link to a page with a small grid view. What were they thinking!?

Try https://simplify.jobs/copilot

Common application for jobs and it will auto fill all your information in Workday apps

Disclaimer: I am the founder (we’re also YC backed!)

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

#120
post #87
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These were systems that were happy to take word, text, pdf, and a few others. Often they expressed a preference for pdf.
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