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If you really want the job, this is a bad idea. The form is there so that HR (who usually knows nothing about the technical details of the posted jobs) can match base requirements against what the hiring manager is looking for. If they get a match, they just forward the resume to the manager. Doing stuff like this on the form is likely going to result in them just moving on without looking at your application further. And it doesn't mean it's a bad place to work; the company and the manager might be great.
Pretty much.
Maybe I'm some rare unicorn. But I have NEVER successfully got a job filling out forms like this. It's a huge waste of my time.
I'm a hiring manager, and every single person hired at my company has to fill out a form like this.
Then I sneak through the backdoor then, or they fill it out for me.
Again, never have I filled them out and got a job.
And I’m sure you’ve worked enough jobs for your anecdotal experience to be statistically significant.
Places like this probably get 2000 submissions so they are indeed a waste of time.
You aren't. I was just hired for a great position by not filling out their form. Then they emailed me and asked if I wanted to finish. I said "I won't fill out something that is already on my resume". They had a couple of interviews and a substantial offer. I started last week.
It depends on the position. If it's entry level or some retail job, yes, fill it out. But management or some other position where it's highly specific, this is an absolute waste of my time.
"It depends on the position. If it's entry level or some retail job, yes, fill it out. But management or some other position where it's highly specific, this is an absolute waste of my time"
It's an absolute waste of time, period. No need to stratify it further. McKinsey & Ilk bullshit is commodifying the lowest denominator shit in the name of HR professionals using more buzzwords and less braincells in the hiring process while pretending they're standardizing equity, in my opinion.
That the positions you are ostensibly qualified for allow for a measure of 'hardball posturing' doesn't mean pseudo-hokey HR practices on non-leadership role hiring. aren't filtering the best of the best of people--at filling out useless forms that you'll need to train to critically think anyways.
Only way to combat MBB bullshit is for the in-house managers to grow a spine and speak truth to power after the pre-contractually safe 'I'm so good you want me even if I don't toe the line' that is allowed to every leadership role hire as their moment to feel special to see that reaction.
I got a job once that was like this, except on paper.
It was 2017.
And they can't do that with a resume? Most things seem to be able to do that automatically these days (fill out forms with info from a resume that is); just the not damned employer.
Because filling out the data places it in identified fields that you can compile into a single table and sort. You’d have to examine each resume individually.
I mean, HR is being paid. They should be going through the resume and compiling the data themselves.
Instead they require the applicants to do it for free, despite the fact the applicants are probably having to do it dozens of times trying to apply for multiple jobs.
No reading every resume is an incredibly stupid way to spend time, even for HR workers (they are somewhat educated aka not cheap).
It would make sense for every joblisting to use the same format and you just filling it all out once in said format and connecting to any company / job listing you'ld want to apply to. That's basically what linkedin does to some extent. That, but without the social network bullshit, would be pretty cool.
I think you underestimate how many people apply for jobs and how few people are in HR lol.
You'd make a lot of money if you were able to make a site that harvested one from the other.
I’m not even a fan of HR departments and even I recognize there’s more to their job than sorting through every resume they get every day.
Oh no... DOING YOUR JOB!
Why not make the job easier?
If your idea to make the job easier (for you) is to make it more than double the work for everyone else, then the company supporting this move deserves to go under.
Why should an applicant do everything twice just so some unknown wage slave they likely won't even meet have an easier day?
This isn't making your job easier, it's just making everyone else do it for you. That's not the same thing. Do your job and stop taking shortcuts at everyone else's expense.
Boo freaking ho. If you’re too lazy to copy and paste some basic information into an online form, I don’t want to hire you anyway. Also discourages people from trying to apply for hundreds or thousands of jobs they are not even qualified for.
The fact is I’m an engineer, not an HR employee. I have a job other than reviewing resumes. And the absolutely will meet me if they meet the requirements. I’ll interview them. If they don’t, they are wasting both our time.
Not wanting to do double the work for no tangible benefit is not being lazy.
Being slowed down in applying for multiple positions and being upset about it is not being lazy.
If your company is small enough not to have an HR department then they're clearly small enough to review resumes. Or just stop asking for them if everything you wanna know has to be spelled out in the exact right order for you to comprehend it.
The tangible benefit is getting the job. Sorry, I see this BS, I’m not even bringing you in for the interview.
And yes, we have an HR department. I want to pick the people we work with, not just let people that don’t know what a civil engineer does hire.
There is a positive to there being a treshold to applying for a job. It lowers the amount of applicants that will 100% not fit the job description, while making it more possible for HR/management to actually sift through every applicant, increasing the chances you'll get hired if you do put in the effort and if you do meet the requirements. Look at it as an overcomplicated catpcha. They're not just trying to test if you're a human, they're trying to test if you are human & actually are really interested in this job & actually do think you meet the requirements (or equivalent, causing you to put in the effort). It doesn't make much sense for very low skilled low wage jobs, but it does for higher and/or very specifically skilled jobs.
This is true, but everyone's problem is specifically the "overcomplicated" part. I can see a better vetting process being needed for higher skill jobs, but really just testing if they're a living breathing person and able to repeat things is kinda pathetic. But if this is now how a hiring department/manager works these days, then it seems like asking for a resume is silly. It would obviously be most "convenient" to just be able to mass apply easily, so I can see the argument for this process. It seems that most of the complaints you typically hear about though (maybe this is just personal bias and anecdotal experience) are related to low skilled applications. Minimum wage/not far above minimum wage jobs this is crazy overkill. It just feels like a huge waste of time.
It becomes more and more worth it the better the job gets.
yeah the resume is the silly part, it's a remnant from the past. Somehow for flipping burgers they are by doing this checking wether you can neatly summarize you're academic history and your skillset, it's completely pointless. And for high skilled or specific jobs, you're better off asking some in the workfield questions anyhow, instead of the "why don't you decide what you want to tell us"-resume.
They could absolutely attempt to parse the resumes, then ask you to verify the information instead of just having you enter it all again manually, but that would probably cost slightly more.
I don't think HR does it by hand, they do a query for specific degree and years of experience based on what's entered into the form. Then they take the results and send those resumes to the manager. They aren't going to read through hundreds or thousands of resumes trying to find the key items.
They aren't going to read through hundreds or thousands of resumes trying to find the key items.
It's an automated process.
I don't know what to tell you - I just know that I've never known an HR organization that used something like that. All the corporate websites I've ever seen have you fill out a form an attach your resume. Maybe that's changing, but not where I am.
I know they never use it either... That's the problem. 🤦♂️
There are ways to make this bullshit non-existent and the only people not using it are the actual people doing the hiring.
A lot of those systems suck, AI might have improved in the last few years since I got out of HR so maybe it's not like that any more but they always crazy inaccurate. We use to see brick layers making it through the auto screens for finance roles when we just used the software. When the software makes that crazy of a mistake then HR can't see people actually qualified for the roles their recruiting.
Honestly I wish there was a standard resume format. It would make it easier for the software and for the humans rather than everyone flexing their creativity on resume formatting.
Yet these companies have the audacity to complain that they can’t find any qualified applicants. It would be funny if it wasn’t so fucking sad.
I'm not sure what your problem with it is. The process seems to work reasonably well on my end. I'm not sure why you think the form is such a burden.
See this is why nothing improves and why the process remains to be a shit show.
On your end everything seems fine. To everyone on the other end it’s a complete failure.
If someone is looking for a job they are going through this process 20-30 times. Every fucking time it’s filling out some long form repeating all the same crap that’s in your resume.
Like I get it. You do this to make your life easier. But you do it at the expense of everyone else and in the end you glazed over all the good talent because you didn’t even know it was there since the people looking at this stuff don’t know the first thing about the role they are hiring.
The problem is on your end. Not the applicants. The really good applicants aren’t even applicants because they see this shit and NOPE out since there are plenty of good companies that don’t pull this crap.
Not sure why you think I have trouble getting good talent.
This doesn't make my life easier. I still get a mess of resumes that I have to read through and rank, then go through the interview process. It's a lot of work. But I do get good results generally.
Because all of the big corporations out there including Lockheed Martin write articles complaining about how they struggle to find qualified applicants.
The struggle i have is that a giant percentage of applicants want fully remote work, which I respect, but a lot of our work requires being hands on with hardware, so at best we're hybrid. Oh, and it's of course harder when I'm looking for something very specific. If I need someone with ten years of real time control software experience who has a software degree and hands on hardware experience, that's for sure harder. The reason so many companies are having a harder time is that unemployment is low but salaries haven't caught up. It's not that no one wants to fill out the application form.
I understand but keep in mind they’ve been saying this long before Covid. Long before there were labor issues or expectations around remote work.
I remember reading lots of articles about this back in 2015-2016. I’m sure it’s worse now but it was never really great to begin with.
The issue really isn’t the application form as much as it is that the folks doing the hiring and interviewing.
I can’t tell you how many interviews I’ve been in where the interviewer was clearly not technical but asked questions around your technical background. They don’t know the right answers from the wrong answers. These are KIDS asking tech questions to seniors. So even if your answer is right you’ll still be marked wrong because the answer wasn’t equal to what was on their paper.
It’s infuriating.
I can’t tell you how many interviews I’ve been in where the interviewer was clearly not technical but asked questions around your technical background.
That's just crazy town, I can't imagine doing that. I manage software engineers, and I did real time control software for a couple decades before I became a manager. Here's roughly my process:
- I get the matching resumes from HR - I try not to ask them to assess anything besides degree and very rough background.
- I read through all the resumes I get looking for qualifications and red flags.
- For the top three to six, I'll set up a phone interview with me and our top technical person. But the questions there aren't especially technical, they're mostly to get the person talking, look for motivations and interests, make sure we understand the things on the resume, see how they communicate, and get a sense of how they'd mesh with the team. It's also to answer every question they have as honestly and candidly as we can; I'd much rather find out that we're not a good fit in a phone interview than later.
- For any that do well on the phone screen and are still interested, I'll set up in person interviews with one or two groups of my team. I make sure it includes people who have been here for decades, people who are mid career, and people who have only been here a couple years. I do that in part because I think they look for different things in the candidate, and partly so the candidate can get different perspectives on our work environment. I try not to have more than three of our people in an interview so it doesn't feel like an inquisition. I'll talk with the candidate for 30 minutes when they come in to let them know what to expect and to make sure they take the opportunity to ask questions, and then afterwards me and the top technical person will meet to see how it went, if there are any other questions, and to get our in-person sense of the candidate.
Then that's, no other interviews in the vast majority of cases; I get feedback from the team and then make my best call. If none are good fits, I'll repeat the whole process.
Also, it's hard for a computer to parse a resume, and most of this stuff runs through a computer before a human sees it, so filling a form makes sure the data is correct.
You also don't have to worry about corrupted or unsupported files.
You're telling me that computers are sophisticated enough to drive cars and create new antibiotics but resumes are just too much? Nah.
If that's the case then don't ask for a resume and only have the form to input job history that can be easily handed over to a manager using a printable template.
It's lazy on HR's part and on the HR software they use.
Have you ever seen a standard resume?
They don't exist. Resumes are totally different for every person. Different document format, different layout.
The forms are for filtering. Ones that pass filtering, then the resumes will actually be read.
that computers are sophisticated enough to drive cars
they aren't
Not according to every shitty car company with a "social media expert" that makes an OpenAI account
Yeah I’m pretty sure you can probably train an AI to do this quite accurately these days, and in fact, someone out there has likely already done that.
The question is whether the company you’re applying to is willing to pay for that. Unfortunately, if does, it would probably also be willing to pay for an AI to replace you as well, and if it isn’t, they’ll likely have you do similarly boring and useless tasks at your job.
You can't. An NDA prohibits me from saying how I know this, but I know for a fact that advanced and specifically trained FMs still struggle to accurately parse resumes, even with several million dollars devoted to the project.
Really? That's quite surprising. I understand that it's not trivial to algorithmically parse a resume formatted for human consumption even though it's a somewhat structured format, just because the formatting can vary quite a lot, but there's only so many different types of information on there, and little of it has any overlap in terms of how it could be categorized, so I would think an AI should be quite effective at picking it up.
Then again, I'm not an AI expert and I certainly haven't attempted to do anything like this.
The models can do alright for very simple resumes, but once you start getting into multiple page ones it gets messy.
While resumes follow a pattern that we're able to easily recognize, there's so much variation that even with AI you have to add in a ton of heuristics to control for hallucinations.
The fact that you have people that know nothing about the technical requirements of the role means you have an idiot deciding on whether or not you fit. Your chances are crippled from the get go.
These are red flags to me. This is just a tip of the iceberg and a great indicator as to how dysfunctional the company is.
If you’re THAT detached from the hiring process then you’ll never find a good candidate because you don’t know what a good candidate is.
All that means is that if you some how manage to get hired you’ll be working with idiots that can’t do their job because they were hired by an idiot.
I work for a company that makes rocket engines. It makes no sense to teach the folks in HR about all the disciplines that go into the business - mechanical design, combustion devices, materials and properties, electronics, software, etc. It makes way more sense to make sure they know how to do their own job, and for a hiring manager to be able to tell them something like, "Send me all the applicants who have a computer science degree and at least five years of experience." Then I can evaluate which of those applicants is the best fit based on the resume. The form facilitate that.
That attitude is precisely the reason why you struggle to find good people. There is no shortage of good applicants. You just don’t know what you’re doing and can’t see the difference.
It’s a real shame. All the more reason why my hatred for corporations grows on a daily basis.
I don't struggle to find good applicants. I have a really high success rate in a very challenging field.
just because somebody typed this stuff and took a photo doesn't mean that's what they submitted.
Understood, but I didn't want anyone to think it's a good idea.