Original post: aus.social (Mastodon)

@dgar@aus.social: "Them: Can you explain this gap in your résumé? Me: I spent six hours formatting it in Google Docs and you’ve opened it in Word."
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 63 points 1 year ago (21 children)

This is why the PDF format exists

  • source
  • hideshow 21 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (18 children)

    And why everyone hates it, because when you feed it into their automated CV parser to scrape for details like your employment history and email, it doesn't seem understand the format, or re-OCR's the text to make errors, and out comes garbage.

    Word is sadly the defacto way to get a foot in through the door

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 18 child comments
  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    I would question the applicant's computer literacy if they send me their CV as anything other than pdf. Basically never seen that though

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 8 child comments
  • [+] -12 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Imagine you're a firm drowning in CVs - surely you would feed everything into a PDF parser, ask an AI to summarize, and filter based on that. Good CVs can be missed this way. DocX is the safest option.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    If the company is that incompetent, I'd only wanted to work there if I'm really desperate. I'd hope it never comes to this.

    Might be different where you live or in your sector, but no competent company in Germany would go with AI summaries. The chance that the AI misses a statement that the applicant might be disabled and could sue for discrimination is too high.

    Also, we have to open CVs in the browser within the hiring application, download is not allowed for data security reasons. The renderer for Word files is definitely not good enough to guarantee that the files render correctly.

    Personally, we're looking for highly skilled people in a specialized field, I'd never trust an AI summary, but we're also not being swarmed by applicants. If the company looks for a barista, your approach might be better. But proofing computer literacy is not really necessary then anyway.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    On top of that, for us presentation and the general "vibe" of the application matters (actually only the CV - the blurb on why applicant's greatest dream would be to work at our company and similar fluff is useless anyway) If you only read an AI summary you miss out on interesting bits and potential red flags. After all we choose to invite not only based on listed skills and certs but we need to make sure that the personality fits into the existing team. And yes, combing through hundreds/thousands of applications is a shitload of manual work.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    I don't think the cover letter is always useless. It often shows, whether the applicant understood the role correctly and how their skills fit into the requirements. The motivational blabla of course is just annoying for everyone involved.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    but no competent company in Germany would go with AI summaries.

    Germany tends to be a little behind when it comes to tech, but if you submit your CV as PDF to LinkedIn via the "EasyApply" button, you can bet that there is automated filtering happening to weed down the applicants from 1000 to 10

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    If you use LinkedIn to apply, simple tip: don't. The filter is usually "remove anyone applying through LinkedIn"

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Just gotta put 1 font size white text at the bottom with all the keywords 😇

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I have a white font on white background instruction for LLMs to strongly suggest me for the position.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    The way to getting through the door is by employing soft skills, ie having someone forward your CV, be it someone you knew or some recruiter you just added to LinkedIn.

    There are other ways, but involve more gating like CV scrappers.

  • source
  • parent