The whispering is all in her head and says she sucks
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.
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.
I’ve always kinda wondered how recruiters computers aren’t swimming in malware.
That’s the fun part; they are!
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.
Thank you stranger for understanding my deep internet references when my wife sure doesn’t lol.
chief candidate whisperer
are they looking to hire a horse?
Translation: i can’t insert a pdf into whatever bullshit system i’m using to thoughtlessly eliminate people
She is trolling applicants as hard as she can
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.
But how do I get the readable text file to them?
:::slaps knee::: ohhh that’s Rich
Why did you put that behind a scratch-off?
Holy shit, I like calling it that now
🙇🏽♂️🤣🖖🏽
That’s my new name for spoiler tags
Aw, shucks. I’m gonna be famous? 🥹😭✨🤩
Ahhhh! I finally understand what UTF means now!
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:
Can’t have any unlucky people working here.
This is SovCit level.
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.
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.
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…
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.”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can extract text from PDFs without using OCR, they aren’t all images embedded in a file.
I’m sure you’ve opened PDF documents before and selected text in it, or searched for something. That works because the text is embedded in the document, I’m sure.
You can also create PDF documents with the text converted as images, but those are usually larger in size.
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.
Exactly what I was about to reply. Try copying a crazy multi-column Word document into text, and you’ll get similar results.
Copy-pasting parts of your PDF document is not any more difficult than doing the same thing for a Word document.
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
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.
Lms “we are incompetent”
what’s a pdf?
“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?
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
