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

paulfuhr.medium.com

131–140 of 176 posts

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

#131
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…

> How do you know if the CV is accurate or not?

What does this have to do with AI? People have lied on their resumes long before ChatGPT existed.

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

#133
post #13

Im my more than 10 years of experience as a software engineer, I’ve never used once indeed.com. It always looked to me as a place where 90% or more of the job ads are either scam or of very little quality.

Indeed.com is useful for finding employers you didn't know about in your area and getting a sense of the jobs. Then I take that info and apply directly to the company through their webpage. So indeed.com is just useful for human screen scraping :)

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

#134

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.

Yes and No. Lots of jobs are through personal connections but plenty are through applying to the company.

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

#135

How come I keep reading these types of posts, hearing these stories, yet I've never experienced anything remotely close to this? Job hunting has always been the opposite for me; being inundated by sharks trying to aggressively recruit me. --- For reference; here's a quick summary of my job history: Mid 20s, I was working for a retail bank in Iceland (where I'm from), doing ASP.NET and C#. With about 4 years of experi…

You're desirable. Congrats. (Of course you don't recognize it.) Most people are most people/average trying to eke out a living .

Yeah but, it's not like I have some god given talent the next person can't obtain. I went to a shitty university, and it took me 4 years to finish a 3 year undergrad. From there on, it was all about building skills, and making very intentional decisions to steer my career.

There's the classic joke of how to pick up women: "Step 1: Be attractive. Step 2: don't be unattractive" - which is funny because you can't change your appearance. But if you have a skill gap on your CV it is absolutely within your remit to fix that. Don't like your current job? You can change that. Don't have what it takes to pass the interview rounds? You can fix that. Spend 2 weeks doing leetcode exercises and you'll ace any coding test.

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

#136
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…

In this case "my area" is "LinkedIn"; in addition to the previously mentioned issues, there's also a good chance they didn't notice my location and offer on-site positions in London, Vienna, or Singapore even though I'm physically in Berlin.

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

#137
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?

> 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?

Even if I'm sending it in PDF, I at least want it to be such that in case the document I've uploaded does wind up on some HR mook's plate, they can actually select, copy, and paste text from it.

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

#138
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…

Resume format is definitely a big reason here. I used to have a resume that looked like this – two-column, made in Adobe Illustrator, fancy icons/fonts. I applied to 150+ places with maybe 5 callbacks. I switched over to a super basic .docx template and got 3x the callbacks.

Resume aside, the job search process itself is also insanely outdated. Companies still force you re-enter your resume on their hiring portal and then have recruiters manually review resumes. We're building something like a "common app for tech jobs" here at Simplify (https://simplify.jobs/) to help candidates find roles that actually fit them and recruiters effectively process inbound. Praying for the day companies stop using Workday as an ATS....

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

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

#139
post #131

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. 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…

> How do you know if the CV is accurate or not? What does this have to do with AI? People have lied on their resumes long before ChatGPT existed.

Well it has everything to do with AI, as this will make the application process completely worse, fake CVs and cover letters produced at scale faster than before with little effort which does not help the sifting process for hiring managers.

You might as well (as I suggested before) not rely on CV / cover letters as a signal at all, and look at other means such as real world projects (with working links) that people use.

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

#140
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?

> 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?

That's fine if the system discloses to the users that it must be in a text format.
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