Sounds like you found an effective strategy to weed out ineffective companies (or at least those w/ HR departments putting unnecessary requirements on people they want). It may not seem representative of the entire company, but like many things, first impressions are often accurate.
Or perhaps it's the companies weeding out ineffective candidates that cannot adapt and figure out how to provide a very common format such as a Word doc.
I have no idea how true it is but what I've always been told is never to give someone a word-processor format resume as they will then turn around and use it in hiring/recruitment scams.
The biggest problem is that recruitment agencies and/or HR can mangle it before it gets to the people that matter. I interviewed someone for C skill and halfway through they (very politely) interrupted to point out that they had only worked with C++. The recruitment agency had 'helpfully' amended C++ to C/C++.
I've heard that advice as well, but I have a hard time explaining how it would be all that important. PDFs are editable, after all, you'd just have to spend a few minutes looking up a tool. So that would just cut out the absolute laziest or most incurious of scammers, right? How much value could there really be in that?
harder to automate, which is the real reason why companies don't like pdf.
every company/hiring startup is making tools to just feed your word docs into the system and then highlight candidates based on whatever the company values
every company/hiring startup is making tools to just feed your word docs
Whereas pdftotext tools have been there since forever.
I've written tools to try and extract text from docx files programmatically (not CVs but citations and footnote citations) and I seriously doubt "hiring startups" wouldn't just ask you to fill a web form.
(As a matter of fact, I'm low key job hunting and what I've seen typically is that the systems try to extract the text from my non-standard formatting latex-made pdf, and then pre-fill a form. The form is usually right but needs fixes here and there. It's a good approach.)
As a counterpoint, I have heard this before but have never had someone ask for a doc file. I never used agencies or recruiters, so maybe that plays a role?
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Last time I looked for work, I made a nice CV in PDF and I put it on a custom website with a simple URL I could say over the phone.
People still asked for it to be emailed in DOC format.
Let's just say I experimented with the then current version of Word to see what would happen if I renamed that PDF to a DOC extension.
Sounds like you found an effective strategy to weed out ineffective companies (or at least those w/ HR departments putting unnecessary requirements on people they want). It may not seem representative of the entire company, but like many things, first impressions are often accurate.
Or perhaps it's the companies weeding out ineffective candidates that cannot adapt and figure out how to provide a very common format such as a Word doc.
Exactly. In an equal-leverage job market, the unnecessary requirement makers and the capitulators deserve each other.
I have no idea how true it is but what I've always been told is never to give someone a word-processor format resume as they will then turn around and use it in hiring/recruitment scams.
The biggest problem is that recruitment agencies and/or HR can mangle it before it gets to the people that matter. I interviewed someone for C skill and halfway through they (very politely) interrupted to point out that they had only worked with C++. The recruitment agency had 'helpfully' amended C++ to C/C++.
This is why I no longer talk to recruiters. The ones I get at least, like to turn my resume into keyword soup regardless of the truth.
I've heard that advice as well, but I have a hard time explaining how it would be all that important. PDFs are editable, after all, you'd just have to spend a few minutes looking up a tool. So that would just cut out the absolute laziest or most incurious of scammers, right? How much value could there really be in that?
harder to automate, which is the real reason why companies don't like pdf. every company/hiring startup is making tools to just feed your word docs into the system and then highlight candidates based on whatever the company values
Whereas pdftotext tools have been there since forever.
I've written tools to try and extract text from docx files programmatically (not CVs but citations and footnote citations) and I seriously doubt "hiring startups" wouldn't just ask you to fill a web form.
(As a matter of fact, I'm low key job hunting and what I've seen typically is that the systems try to extract the text from my non-standard formatting latex-made pdf, and then pre-fill a form. The form is usually right but needs fixes here and there. It's a good approach.)
Yeah, but it’s still more work, which has to be done by humans and not automated.
The thing they hate most in life is to be forced to do actual human work, especially when they are processing all those résumés and CVs.
I mean, they have to feed the machine somehow, and you’re making them do real work during that process?!?
As a counterpoint, I have heard this before but have never had someone ask for a doc file. I never used agencies or recruiters, so maybe that plays a role?
That's funny. It's an allegory for the hirer / hiree intelligence ratio.