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?
It seems to be a per-school kind of thing. I am late millennial/early Gen Z, and my school had computer classes where we learned how to use Windows and Microsoft office, how to touch type, the meaning of computer terminology, and what the functionalities are of basic computer parts (eg, "CPU is the brain of the computer"). And later on we started learning how to use Photoshop and Illustrator.
I'm always surprised when I hear that other people don't have that sort of in depth tech learning in their schools, and worse so, that some people don't even have computer class. It just always felt like what we learned in computer class was an essential skill
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
If you think about it though, it is actually easier to find replacement parts for 70s-90s systems because there is now a small industry around it as well as collectors and there was a differrnt culture around it.
Replacing things from 2000s-2010s systems is the bigger issues. They were all taken over by giant corpos with all repair parts, manuals, and software restricted and hidden in the name of "profit" and "protecting corporate IP" and now it is not profitable enough for them to spend resources keeping stock of old parts or driver installers, so into the trash they go, never to be able to be seen again, and reproducing them also is note challenging with increasing system complexity.
The difference is that you can use new parts in computers from 2010s. You can also replace them easily without much difficulty, as the standards haven't really changed that much.
But computers from the 80s and 90s are not compatible with modern platforms. Standards have changed, and new hardware thar uses standards like 32-bit PCI, ISA, MCA (for expansion cards), IDE are no longer manufactured. Even the CPU architecture had big changes between early x86 CPUs.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
This would be a great opportunity to insert a bunch of crazy content hidden in the edit. Like passages of the Bible or edits of an erotic book you've been writing.
This isn’t even necessarily for nefarious reasons. I’ve actually had a case where HR was trying to help by putting in the words that they were stupidly required to find in a resume.
Still not a good sign of a properly functioning organization.
If you are an HR manager and you're unable to open a PDF then you should first try and finish first grade high school before continuing your job.
How many great employees have YOU missed out on because you're so lacking in basic life skills that one wonders how you found the tit as a baby to nourish yourself...
It's because they feed the document to a parser and pdf parsers are more involved and may even require OCR. They aren't unable, they're inept and cheap
It's more of an issue with the HR platforms not being able to read PDF's. It doesn't help opening a PDF outside of the platform you are using for hiring actions
If HR at a company doesn't have the capability of opening the most common document format, that's not a company worth working at. Doesn't really matter if the idiots are HR, IT, or management.
Now that Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge can not only open but even fill PDFs straight out of the box, there's no excuse to not be able to open a random PDF file these days. It means you're either still using Internet Explorer or something equally dogshit
You can open pdf files. PDF files were designed to be interchangeable, and readable in the same way everywhere, it's the entire point of the format. If some shit platform cannot open a PDF file, then you need a new platform, period. It's a basic ingredients, it's like leaving out potatoes in mashed potatoes. You can still open up the file outside the platform and if said platform doesn't allow that then by god are you on the wrong wrong platform.
I have reviewed many resumes, I HATE Athenones that are sent in with word, it's always a hassle to open, it always looks different on different versions, it requires me to have to deal with Microsoft shit which I don't want, use PDF.
I used to work IT at a school and reports were emailed to parents as PDFs.
We got a complaint from a few parents saying things like, why are the reports PDF? Not everyone has Acrobat Reader, you should be sending these out as Microsoft Word files.
I then had to tell them that unlike Microsoft Word, Acrobat Reader is free to download and install. Anyone can get Acrobat reader or another PDF viewer, but not everyone just has Word on their device nor are they willing to buy it.
I didn't mention the part about a Word file is easy to just edit.
I'm also going to assume that some of them are using a work laptop where they have Word installed and no admin rights to install a PDF viewer and too lazy to ask IT.
Not just this, most (?all?) browsers now support viewing standard PDF documents… So, they shouldn’t even need to installing anything as long as they aren’t using IE…
MSP== managed service provider. Aka we're the it team for multiple small businesses.
Many of our clients have stuff that was out of warranty in the 1900s.
Did you know there was a 32bit version of Windows 10? Cause I didn't until one clients win xp machine finally died and the program they use can't run on 64bit os's. Lucky for the client that the guy who wrote the program was still willing to do some contract work to get us the installer and instructions. He'd been retired for about twenty years.
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.
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 ..
I used to do layout and design for children’s books. I cannot tell you the number of times I requested an image to be edited, or a higher resolution version, only to be sent a word doc with the image inside the document.
When you email a graphic artist and ask them if they can send the file with layers and they send you an xls document with extra workbook tabs you know you are in for a fun day.
The great thing about random tech illiterate assholes posting "hot tips" like this on LinkedIn is that they very often don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
That, and also to ensure they can open the document. I don't use word processors in my daily job, yet I do interviews, so if someone gives me a Word Document or similar, I'm going to be put out to read it. PDFs, on the other hand, render just fine in my web browser.
I've experienced formatting issues on different installs of Microsoft Word that both are M365, so its not even like we're throwing Office 2007 into the mix to get weird extra pages or other formatting problems
I always think of the one green text where the first thing the person does when they get resumes is to throw the top half of the pile in the bin cause:
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.
Tbf I've done that with first joblistings. Like "ask questions that a suitable candidate for the following joblisting should answer in a job application". And then pasting my cover letters asking for relevancy and phrasing help. Maybe I should try for ATS optimization.
You can be outraged all you'd like, but if you choose to, then we're not really competing for the same jobs.
I get that they're busy, but it's their problem, not mine.
So? What are you going to do about it? They're making it your problem, and you can comply or not get hired.
IDK about you, but I've got a family to feed, car payments to make, a mortgage, and no self-esteem. It's clearly hyperbole, but if I have to go down on a clown to make it easier to meet my income requirements, then I'm not gay but I'll still be looking for some tictacs.
Not setting standards for yourself is holding you back. I see people with your attitude get underpaid, passed over for deserved promotions, and get mistreated. You are enabling shitty companies to stay shitty.
It IS sad, and shitty, that companies treat people like trash. But when you're on your third layoff in 18 months for reasons completely out of your control, clown knob starts looking mighty appetising. Not everyone gets to live the same reality you do.
Yeah, you live in the reality you create for yourself.
Why would you stay in an industry that's in a period of layoffs? Do you have no transferable skills? Did you make a series of financial decisions that mean you require a specific salary level?
Do you not invest time in continuing education? Did you spend a decade working for people that didn't invest in you? Gave you no opportunities to grow? Why would you tolerate that?
Encouraging people to take abuse doesn't fix anything.
Encourage people to do things to insulate themselves from the risk of "reasons completely out of their control".
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.
Then stop using automated software that excludes candidates if the entirety of the job description isn't embedded in the resume. You're not special. You're just another job. And 90%+ of companies use dumb filtering so people have to adapt or get used to 2k+ applications per interview.
I think you misinterpreted what I meant. It was written from the perspective of a person who gets job offers in word files, mostly on LinkedIn. Like, just write it out in your message. I'm not opening files random people send me via any platform, much less LinkedIn, get real.
I think they meant that the document can look significantly different based on the software reading it? Whereas a published PDF is going to look basically the same (embedded fonts, etc)
Maybe they should be asking themselves the same questions if they are just ignoring most of the candidates because they are too lazy to get a pdf reader. I'm sure they aren't getting the best people with that approach.
The problem is they expect everyone to jump through hoops for them as if all the candidates are the same and they just need to pick one.
You don't even need a dedicated PDF reader, many (most?) browsers have a PDF reader built-in. You need extra software to see word processor documents, you don't to see a PDF.
If a company is so incompetent that a PDF isn't sufficient (or even preferred), that's not a company I want to deal with anyway.
All 3 of them do. You have to work at it to find one that doesn't support reading PDFs, unless you happen to still be using Internet Explorer in the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty Four
The problem is they expect everyone to jump through hoops for them as if all the candidates are the same and they just need to pick one.
Had a job posting asking candidates to go on a goosehunt to find pictures of a landmark at some coordinates they provided, under the guise of "this proves you have attention to detail"... sod off.
And I don't know why some posting still require CVs... like they don't realize ChatGPT exists to write the fluff that they aren't going to read.
Seriously, job opportunities have almost always been a numbers game, there's an opportunity cost to investing time in these games that could be better spent applying to more jobs.
Actually, I do read the fluff. Not HR though, just the technical approver whether the candidate's skillset looks up to the task.
Had one candidate whose letter claimed their experience in one field would be valuable for their work with us. Indeed, they did have plenty of experience in it. If that was the field I was working in, I'd have considered them a great fit.
Unfortunately, we're a different field. Not that it would disqualify them - I'm the last person to hold a lazy copy-paste-fill template against anyone. I hate those things too. I just found that slip-up amusing.
(And I also wouldn't hold a will to switch tracks against them either. I didn't even know anything about my field four years ago, but now I love it.)
Reminds me of that greentext about an IT guy for a big business who has absolutely no idea what he's doing and just keeps telling people over the phone to install Adobe Acrobat, about 2 or 3 times a day at most, and 98% of the time it works.
looks like that company seriously suffers a huge lack of experts, maybe if you didnt get an answer, just resend your application as a word document with your salary expectation just "tripled" for ... compensation purposes.
whatever company still "depends" on microsoft still has heaps extra money it can easily divert to you without any real loss, so don't waste that chance!
Apparently it's because a lot of agencies use software that automatically scrapes résumés for keywords that match job descriptions and they don't work very well with PDFs.
This isn't a PEBCAK error for once, and that's very surprising because I've learned the hard way that your average recruiter is a professional spammer that will flood your inbox with shitty roles whilst lacking the mental capacity to understand that entry level doesn't mean 5+ years of experience.
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.
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).
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
Not necessarily, CVs have complicated formatting. Nobody (should) write blocks of text, and you don't know how many columns the candidate is using. Is the candidate using a specific section to show star based skill rating or word based? So you can still search for individual keywords but if you try copying the whole pdf and paste it in txt (which is what will be forwarded to ATS), it does not make much sense. The structure is too complicated extract where you studied, what did you studied and your grade, what other experiences you have and how long you worked there etc.
Extracting structured data is in its own right a different field of science. There is plenty of recent research on extracting structured data from academic pdfs (I was working on this in a research institute in germany around 2022), even when LLMs are used it can get really complicated to the point that there are specialized LLMs for just that.
But ATS systems are cheap/not high enough priority to even use OCR let alone LLMs so unfortunately the responsibility of making an easily parsable CV comes down to the candidate.
Try this next time you see your CV, copy its text to a txt then think about if you can write a program that can reliably extract your experience, education, interests etc. Its going to be super difficult and even then it won't generalize to thousands of other CVs.
All those "problems" apply to Word too. Maybe you use tables, maybe you use lists, maybe you use stars, maybe ... So there's no advantage in forcing people to use Word "because the machine can understand it better". Because that's a lie.
Alternative suggestion: spray paint your resume on the outside wall of the offices of whatever company you are trying to apply at. Bonus points if you manage an approximate rendition of Comic Sans throughout.
Unironically recommended a friend as referral to my job. He was the only person applying, but the company has a policy of needing at least two candidates under consideration for any position.
So they called back another guy who had already been rejected, claimed he was in another round of interviews, used those interviews as the comparison, rejected him as unqualified, and then hired my friend.
Pdf files are a prime vector for malware. One of the most reliable ways to get a virus in a system seems to be sending a gimmicked pdf and social engineer it so it's opened.
I've always kinda wondered how recruiters computers aren't swimming in malware.
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.
Our front desk person, on the computer all day, barely understands how tabs work.
It's scary.
gen z or boomer?
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?
It should be part of elementary/highschool, like it was for me and most gen Y.
I suffered through word editing, excel, ppt, email setup, etc. on 10 year old machines, and it gave the foundations for my studies and life later.
It seems to be a per-school kind of thing. I am late millennial/early Gen Z, and my school had computer classes where we learned how to use Windows and Microsoft office, how to touch type, the meaning of computer terminology, and what the functionalities are of basic computer parts (eg, "CPU is the brain of the computer"). And later on we started learning how to use Photoshop and Illustrator.
I'm always surprised when I hear that other people don't have that sort of in depth tech learning in their schools, and worse so, that some people don't even have computer class. It just always felt like what we learned in computer class was an essential skill
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.
Boomer.
As a gen z will echo that I've also seen some tech illiteracy from people my age as well.
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?
I recently found an ad requiring knowledge of win2000/XP
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.
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.
If you think about it though, it is actually easier to find replacement parts for 70s-90s systems because there is now a small industry around it as well as collectors and there was a differrnt culture around it.
Replacing things from 2000s-2010s systems is the bigger issues. They were all taken over by giant corpos with all repair parts, manuals, and software restricted and hidden in the name of "profit" and "protecting corporate IP" and now it is not profitable enough for them to spend resources keeping stock of old parts or driver installers, so into the trash they go, never to be able to be seen again, and reproducing them also is note challenging with increasing system complexity.
The difference is that you can use new parts in computers from 2010s. You can also replace them easily without much difficulty, as the standards haven't really changed that much.
But computers from the 80s and 90s are not compatible with modern platforms. Standards have changed, and new hardware thar uses standards like 32-bit PCI, ISA, MCA (for expansion cards), IDE are no longer manufactured. Even the CPU architecture had big changes between early x86 CPUs.
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.
Fuck them for not putting the requirement on the application and wasting everyone's time though
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 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?"
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.
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...
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.
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.”
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
Yes, with money they're not paying you instead
That would only be the case under a profit share agreement and the vast VAST majorities of businesses see salary as a cost center.
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.
Exactly, so she is lying. It’s not that they can’t open it, it’s that they prefer word.
Not that you can’t copy out text from a digitally created pdf. Still, I only ever send my CV in a locked format, would never send an editable doc
Well duh...PDF stands for "portable document file", not "readable document file".
You can send it, but no one can read it.
You should use readable text files (RTF) instead.
:::slaps knee::: ohhh that’s Rich
Why did you put that behind a scratch-off?
That’s my new name for spoiler tags
Aw, shucks. I'm gonna be famous? 🥹😭✨🤩
Holy shit, I like calling it that now
🙇🏽♂️🤣🖖🏽
Ahhhh! I finally understand what UTF means now!
But how do I get the readable text file to them?
“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?
They want it as a word doc so they can edit it and fuck with it before passing it along.
They also like this for the off chance you forgot to disable revision history - so they can look at how you edited the document over time.
This would be a great opportunity to insert a bunch of crazy content hidden in the edit. Like passages of the Bible or edits of an erotic book you've been writing.
This isn’t even necessarily for nefarious reasons. I’ve actually had a case where HR was trying to help by putting in the words that they were stupidly required to find in a resume.
Still not a good sign of a properly functioning organization.
Staffing agencies will do this to make you look more appealing to a client.
They should just learn to edit the pdfs if they're sent with actual text.
Or to throw it in whatever AI bullshit software they use that doesn't support PDF
If a headhunter wants to put forth my resume as if I already contract with them, then they can start paying me.
If you are an HR manager and you're unable to open a PDF then you should first try and finish first grade high school before continuing your job.
How many great employees have YOU missed out on because you're so lacking in basic life skills that one wonders how you found the tit as a baby to nourish yourself...
It's because they feed the document to a parser and pdf parsers are more involved and may even require OCR. They aren't unable, they're inept and cheap
It's more of an issue with the HR platforms not being able to read PDF's. It doesn't help opening a PDF outside of the platform you are using for hiring actions
If HR at a company doesn't have the capability of opening the most common document format, that's not a company worth working at. Doesn't really matter if the idiots are HR, IT, or management.
Now that Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge can not only open but even fill PDFs straight out of the box, there's no excuse to not be able to open a random PDF file these days. It means you're either still using Internet Explorer or something equally dogshit
Don't throw shade on IEx now! I'd rather not spend New Year's waiting for the retort.
You can open pdf files. PDF files were designed to be interchangeable, and readable in the same way everywhere, it's the entire point of the format. If some shit platform cannot open a PDF file, then you need a new platform, period. It's a basic ingredients, it's like leaving out potatoes in mashed potatoes. You can still open up the file outside the platform and if said platform doesn't allow that then by god are you on the wrong wrong platform.
I have reviewed many resumes, I HATE Athenones that are sent in with word, it's always a hassle to open, it always looks different on different versions, it requires me to have to deal with Microsoft shit which I don't want, use PDF.
But the web browser won't feed a stack of a thousand into a system that ranks them based on key words.
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
.txt file it is
.txt file
80 characters wide
With cool ASCII art, like those pirated software readme files. (Looking at you, Razor 1911)
Uh I love this idea and will be adopting it.
Right? Like, if I was a hiring manager, I would hire that person on the spot because I know they gots l33t hacking skillz.
Ah I love putting in sick ASCII art into my notes in R and other programming syntax. My advisors did not appreciate it as much as I did.
With the chiptune music.
XML all the way.
Excellent plan if you ever need to apply to 2007.
The X in .docx is for XML. MS Word files have actually just been zipped XML files for years now.
It works. What else is needed?
JSON is compacter.
A nice little trick to get rid of that annoying recruiter spam. Archive your software eng resume in xz format and only competent HMs will read it. /s
Fuck it if they can't compile my LaTeX then they don't deserve me.
I used to work IT at a school and reports were emailed to parents as PDFs.
We got a complaint from a few parents saying things like, why are the reports PDF? Not everyone has Acrobat Reader, you should be sending these out as Microsoft Word files.
I then had to tell them that unlike Microsoft Word, Acrobat Reader is free to download and install. Anyone can get Acrobat reader or another PDF viewer, but not everyone just has Word on their device nor are they willing to buy it.
I didn't mention the part about a Word file is easy to just edit.
I'm also going to assume that some of them are using a work laptop where they have Word installed and no admin rights to install a PDF viewer and too lazy to ask IT.
Not just this, most (?all?) browsers now support viewing standard PDF documents… So, they shouldn’t even need to installing anything as long as they aren’t using IE…
Edge defaulting to the default pdf viewer is the bane of my existence
I should have added this was back in 2010 or so, I don't think it was as common to be able to open PDFs in browsers without an addon.
I remember sometime after 2014 I was just able to open PDFs without any additional software.
I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've needed Acrobat Reader to view a PDF.
I wish I had 0th finger…
If you can't open 90% of pdfs sent from different sources then you're the problem
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.
MSP== managed service provider. Aka we're the it team for multiple small businesses.
Many of our clients have stuff that was out of warranty in the 1900s.
Did you know there was a 32bit version of Windows 10? Cause I didn't until one clients win xp machine finally died and the program they use can't run on 64bit os's. Lucky for the client that the guy who wrote the program was still willing to do some contract work to get us the installer and instructions. He'd been retired for about twenty years.
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.
And I wish that was the worst.
Just last week, we had a call about missing emails to an accounts payable account.
Emails weren't missing. They needed to scroll down in outlook to the shared mailbox folder.
There were 1400+ unread emails.
They hadn't noticed for a month.
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
Sorry I can't see this picture, can you upload it as a word document please?
I used to do layout and design for children’s books. I cannot tell you the number of times I requested an image to be edited, or a higher resolution version, only to be sent a word doc with the image inside the document.
lol, that's a boomer classic
I've gotten a screenshot in a word doc that was printed and then scanned to email. I couldn't see a gd thing.
I asked someone to send me an image once (I think their logo) and they wanted to know if I prefer word or excel format?
When you email a graphic artist and ask them if they can send the file with layers and they send you an xls document with extra workbook tabs you know you are in for a fun day.
Can't open a PDF? Fine, here is a JPEG of my resume.
I have been known to put high quality renders of my PDFs in word documents (image per page) to beat the file type validations.
What the hell? Every bit of resume advice I've ever gotten has said to use PDF to protect from potential formatting errors due to display differences.
The great thing about random tech illiterate assholes posting "hot tips" like this on LinkedIn is that they very often don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
That, and also to ensure they can open the document. I don't use word processors in my daily job, yet I do interviews, so if someone gives me a Word Document or similar, I'm going to be put out to read it. PDFs, on the other hand, render just fine in my web browser.
I've experienced formatting issues on different installs of Microsoft Word that both are M365, so its not even like we're throwing Office 2007 into the mix to get weird extra pages or other formatting problems
I always think of the one green text where the first thing the person does when they get resumes is to throw the top half of the pile in the bin cause:
This is SovCit level.
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.
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.
She’s lying, many recruiters want to edit your CV in word, e.g. removing contact data, so that the companies can only contact you through them.
Shitty and unprofessional practice, no self-respecting candidate would ever hand out their CV in an editable format
Send it locked 😅
Deleted
Actual psychopath
Cool, everyone who has submitted their resume in only PDF format dodged a bullet.
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.
You think they bother to read it if it doesn't fit in their system?
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.
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??
The savvy ones are probably copy pasting entire resumes into chat gpt and then asking if they're a good candidate.
Tbf I've done that with first joblistings. Like "ask questions that a suitable candidate for the following joblisting should answer in a job application". And then pasting my cover letters asking for relevancy and phrasing help. Maybe I should try for ATS optimization.
That...is an excellent idea actually. Damn.
You can be outraged all you'd like, but if you choose to, then we're not really competing for the same jobs.
So? What are you going to do about it? They're making it your problem, and you can comply or not get hired.
IDK about you, but I've got a family to feed, car payments to make, a mortgage, and no self-esteem. It's clearly hyperbole, but if I have to go down on a clown to make it easier to meet my income requirements, then I'm not gay but I'll still be looking for some tictacs.
Not setting standards for yourself is holding you back. I see people with your attitude get underpaid, passed over for deserved promotions, and get mistreated. You are enabling shitty companies to stay shitty.
It's sad.
It IS sad, and shitty, that companies treat people like trash. But when you're on your third layoff in 18 months for reasons completely out of your control, clown knob starts looking mighty appetising. Not everyone gets to live the same reality you do.
Yeah, you live in the reality you create for yourself.
Why would you stay in an industry that's in a period of layoffs? Do you have no transferable skills? Did you make a series of financial decisions that mean you require a specific salary level?
Do you not invest time in continuing education? Did you spend a decade working for people that didn't invest in you? Gave you no opportunities to grow? Why would you tolerate that?
Encouraging people to take abuse doesn't fix anything.
Encourage people to do things to insulate themselves from the risk of "reasons completely out of their control".
I actually was going along with this for 2 split seconds.
"Wait. WAIT! Is she serious?!"
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.
Then stop using automated software that excludes candidates if the entirety of the job description isn't embedded in the resume. You're not special. You're just another job. And 90%+ of companies use dumb filtering so people have to adapt or get used to 2k+ applications per interview.
I think you misinterpreted what I meant. It was written from the perspective of a person who gets job offers in word files, mostly on LinkedIn. Like, just write it out in your message. I'm not opening files random people send me via any platform, much less LinkedIn, get real.
Realistically what's the worst that company is gonna do? Make my resume better?
I think they meant that the document can look significantly different based on the software reading it? Whereas a published PDF is going to look basically the same (embedded fonts, etc)
PDFs are also editable...
Translation: i can't insert a pdf into whatever bullshit system i'm using to thoughtlessly eliminate people
Maybe they should be asking themselves the same questions if they are just ignoring most of the candidates because they are too lazy to get a pdf reader. I'm sure they aren't getting the best people with that approach.
The problem is they expect everyone to jump through hoops for them as if all the candidates are the same and they just need to pick one.
You don't even need a dedicated PDF reader, many (most?) browsers have a PDF reader built-in. You need extra software to see word processor documents, you don't to see a PDF.
If a company is so incompetent that a PDF isn't sufficient (or even preferred), that's not a company I want to deal with anyway.
All 3 of them do. You have to work at it to find one that doesn't support reading PDFs, unless you happen to still be using Internet Explorer in the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty Four
Had a job posting asking candidates to go on a goosehunt to find pictures of a landmark at some coordinates they provided, under the guise of "this proves you have attention to detail"... sod off.
And I don't know why some posting still require CVs... like they don't realize ChatGPT exists to write the fluff that they aren't going to read.
Seriously, job opportunities have almost always been a numbers game, there's an opportunity cost to investing time in these games that could be better spent applying to more jobs.
Actually, I do read the fluff. Not HR though, just the technical approver whether the candidate's skillset looks up to the task.
Had one candidate whose letter claimed their experience in one field would be valuable for their work with us. Indeed, they did have plenty of experience in it. If that was the field I was working in, I'd have considered them a great fit.
Unfortunately, we're a different field. Not that it would disqualify them - I'm the last person to hold a lazy copy-paste-fill template against anyone. I hate those things too. I just found that slip-up amusing.
(And I also wouldn't hold a will to switch tracks against them either. I didn't even know anything about my field four years ago, but now I love it.)
Reminds me of that greentext about an IT guy for a big business who has absolutely no idea what he's doing and just keeps telling people over the phone to install Adobe Acrobat, about 2 or 3 times a day at most, and 98% of the time it works.
Link for the context
Thank you stranger for understanding my deep internet references when my wife sure doesn't lol.
Wait, they freely admit that they are incapable of opening 90% of applicants documentation?
looks like that company seriously suffers a huge lack of experts, maybe if you didnt get an answer, just resend your application as a word document with your salary expectation just "tripled" for ... compensation purposes. whatever company still "depends" on microsoft still has heaps extra money it can easily divert to you without any real loss, so don't waste that chance!
Apparently it's because a lot of agencies use software that automatically scrapes résumés for keywords that match job descriptions and they don't work very well with PDFs.
This isn't a PEBCAK error for once, and that's very surprising because I've learned the hard way that your average recruiter is a professional spammer that will flood your inbox with shitty roles whilst lacking the mental capacity to understand that entry level doesn't mean 5+ years of experience.
Lms "we are incompetent"
She is trolling applicants as hard as she can
are they looking to hire a horse?
This has got to be a shit post or engagement bait...
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.
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).
I've never heard that. I want my CV to be a representation of what I can do, not how much time I spent making what I can do look good.
My resume was about 4 pages with Europass, but in the end the cover letter did the heavy lifting.
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
Not necessarily, CVs have complicated formatting. Nobody (should) write blocks of text, and you don't know how many columns the candidate is using. Is the candidate using a specific section to show star based skill rating or word based? So you can still search for individual keywords but if you try copying the whole pdf and paste it in txt (which is what will be forwarded to ATS), it does not make much sense. The structure is too complicated extract where you studied, what did you studied and your grade, what other experiences you have and how long you worked there etc.
Extracting structured data is in its own right a different field of science. There is plenty of recent research on extracting structured data from academic pdfs (I was working on this in a research institute in germany around 2022), even when LLMs are used it can get really complicated to the point that there are specialized LLMs for just that.
But ATS systems are cheap/not high enough priority to even use OCR let alone LLMs so unfortunately the responsibility of making an easily parsable CV comes down to the candidate.
Try this next time you see your CV, copy its text to a txt then think about if you can write a program that can reliably extract your experience, education, interests etc. Its going to be super difficult and even then it won't generalize to thousands of other CVs.
All those "problems" apply to Word too. Maybe you use tables, maybe you use lists, maybe you use stars, maybe ... So there's no advantage in forcing people to use Word "because the machine can understand it better". Because that's a lie.
Alternative suggestion: spray paint your resume on the outside wall of the offices of whatever company you are trying to apply at. Bonus points if you manage an approximate rendition of Comic Sans throughout.
This is legitimately feasible with a 3d printed stencil
Alternative explanation for why your resume was not read: https://lemmy.world/post/20282317
Unironically recommended a friend as referral to my job. He was the only person applying, but the company has a policy of needing at least two candidates under consideration for any position.
So they called back another guy who had already been rejected, claimed he was in another round of interviews, used those interviews as the comparison, rejected him as unqualified, and then hired my friend.
Pure nonsense.
Yeah, I've worked for companies who's policy says there must be three people interviewed when almost every hire is an internal promotion.
I've got no fucking clue what I just read. This job market is a joke
Deleted
She doesn't know that Word can open PDFs
Learn how to do your job you lollipop.
what's a pdf?
“Most of the time, we meaning” reads like the most awkward attempt at using Aftican-American Vernacular ever.
Pdf files are a prime vector for malware. One of the most reliable ways to get a virus in a system seems to be sending a gimmicked pdf and social engineer it so it's opened.
I've always kinda wondered how recruiters computers aren't swimming in malware.
That's the fun part; they are!
I wonder if it would work to upload resume.pdf.exe to an ATS, and fill out the form with enough BS exaggeration to be sure that person will see it.