Old school human readable and machine readable. Redundant now but the sufferring is funny to some, so it must continue.
It isn’t redundant.
You want your resume for humans to read, which means your respect their time (remember they have the power and you as unemployed have time) so they don’t throw you into the trash. That means you ensure that the things in your background that make you look good to them are easy to find.
You want the forms to be things that the machine is looking for, even if they are not interesting. The machine might verify so don’t lie, but a lot of things the machine is looking for are boring things that the box needs to be checked - since they are boring you don’t want them on a resume - but not having them someplace means the machine rejects you.
It’s redundant because machines can read human readable resumes and cover letters.
It’s even easier to present the form data in a human readable way.
The point is they are looking for different information and putting that information into the parts humans will read makes the humans more likely to reject you.
Sometimes humans and the machine care about the same thing, but when there is a difference you don’t want the humans to reject you for having information the machine needs.
Last time we were hiring my boss gave me 50 resumes to read and half an hour to get the job done. Not only is that less than a minute each, but the ones I forwarded on got 3-5 minutes (as did 1-2 rejects), if you want to be hired you need to capture my attention in a few seconds - anything that won’t capture my attention needs to not be on the resume even if the machine needs it.
they are looking for different information
I have not encountered an electronic form that would ask for information not included in my CV. What would such information be?
You can defend shitty late stage capitalism hiring practices all you want, there is still no reason to put in the information twice
Capturing your attention is completely irrelevant to the discussion of whether computers can read a normal resume when they don’t ask for any additional information not found in the resume.
Sounds like your employer doesn’t give you enough time to actually do the work, just barely enough to to do it “good enough.”
It’s probably even worse for the people you hire.
They say we are going to become worse off as population decline tightens the labor market and I am fucking here for it. Maybe when you only get 10 resumes you will be given a chance to actually read them.
The labor market isn’t going to decline that much in our lifetime.
I’m reading 100 resumes because they got past the automated scan system. I interview about 5 because an interview requires a lot of investment on our part. Interviewing 100 people means we can’t get anything else done. My job isn’t to hire people it is get engineering work done.
People are hearing this as defense of a crappy system rather than the strategic idea that it is.
Yes this sucks, and everyone hates it who has applied to a job i n the last decade. Form duplication is just part of a huge problem with how hiring is done.
Even if you hate it, you can game the system using this info. Make your resume for humans the highlight reel and the form version a deep dive. They don’t have to be the same.
The advice from the comment above that you’re missing because you don’t like the system is how to cope if you’re looking for a job right now. Be angry at the stupidity of it, but use the tools provided you if you want a better chance at getting in the door.
Except it is, if you have the machine readable fields you can export the ones you’re interested in into a human readable document. Instead you have what the candidate thinks you want to read, which is essentially all of the information you had on the other fields.
To make you jump through hoops. How else can they know for sure that you follow directions no matter how stupid they are.
Because fuck you, that’s why. You’re not a human being to them.
How it feels to be part of a union that negotiated so hard my employer backed down from all compromises and just accepted a 3% raise retroactive to last year, as well as this year, along with a massive increase in benefits.
A retroactive raise? Goddamn those are some beautiful words
What does that mean?
It means getting paid a special check equalling the amount extra you would have been paid if you had gotten the raise last year.
It means all of the hours I worked last year and this year are recalculated at my new 3% raised rate in 2025, and the 3% on top of the 2025 raise for this year.
I.e. if I made $100 000 in 2025 over 2000 hours for $50/hr, my 2025 wage would be upped to $51.50/hr, meaning I get a cheque for $3000 (minus taxes, pension, and dues)
That also means I would earn $106 090 this year, so any hours I worked this year would be at my new new rate of $53.045/hr
Plus retroactive money in the bank for certain benefits they just pay out since it costs more money to track and verify usage, so they gave up tracking and just give it out to everyone at the start of the year.
OCR is fallible. The forms are for the robot to quickly filter based on tags. The resume is for the human to quickly filter based on vibes.
Edit: I’m not saying that OCR is necessarily part of the system. I’m saying that, while OCR is the type of technology one might use to parse data from resumes of various file types, it’s unreliable enough that having the duplicate form fields as a way to gather the information you want in a clean and processable way is an effective supplement or replacement.
OP was talking about pasting the text from the resume into their forms, so OCR shouldn’t even be involved. Once pasted in, why even require the resume anymore?
The company still wants the resume. They just want the information extracted accurately. OCR may not be involved because it isn’t accurate enough to associate specific chunks on the resume with specific questions. If companies just had the form they would have three accurate info, but would have to generate a resume internally for human use (which isn’t a bad idea necessarily). If they just had the resume uploader then they would have to have a person manually extract the information.
So they ask for both–because they want accuracy and the original document and there aren’t tools around to give them both today.
The resume does put on emphasis on specific stuff. Whatever the applicant has found most relevant to tell.
I still don’t agree that the extra workload for the applicant is justified.
Or you could just filter based on the job being applied for?
I’m not sure what you are proposing or how it’s relevant to what I said.
I’m asking why the resumes need to be filtered by tag in the first place? Why not just filter them by the job that is being applied for?
The company wants a way to rapidly reject applicants to slim the pool of viable candidates to a level manageable by humans.
If a software engineer job posting is made that requires java and got 10,000 applicants having a computer automatically reject any that don’t have “java” in the application reduces the human load.
Yeah but every application like that I have has also had individual questions about meeting the requirements. So why filter by ocr tags? If I’m going to lie on the questions I’m probably fine doing so on my resume too.
My conspiracy theory is that it’s a plausibly deniable way to filter out disabled people
To make sure you will follow directions without question even if they don’t make any sense
One is for HR to use to immediately reject your application. The other is to train their AI model.
It started with basic indifference and became a feature.
In the beginning, people were manually receiving and reviewing resumes given to them in person.
This moved online and, for a time, normal humans continued to upload their resumes. Humans continued to review them.
Eventually someone decided they wanted to spam resumes, like someone swiping right on every potential Tinder match and turning people down later. This spam became problematic, so companies needed a way to automatically filter folks. Extracting info from PDFs wasn’t easy at the time.
Having a form to fill out prevented some spam and let them do keyword searches and filtering, but more importantly now it gives them two things: It prefilters people who don’t care enough to complete it and add a sight sunk cost bias to folks who are on the fence.
Free labor. Gotta know early if you’ll do redundant useless tasks without compensation.
Because fuck you, that’s why
It’s the first step in you accepting the fact that you are a useless piece of meat for them to abuse. If you can’t accept that first step, you could not possibly accept everything that comes afterward. and it will always get much worse after that.
And if you’re unwilling to accept that abuse, you’re not a suitable candidate for wage slavery at whatever company you just applied to
HR reads the forms. The hiring manager reads the resume.
It’s easy to make you do it, that’s all.
To let you know how the relationship is going to go.
Has it happened to you that there is something that you don’t know how to put in the limited set of options they give you? They don’t know what the proper fix would be either without fixing the forms. Of course they don’t want to fix anything, so you better figure out a way to make that data fit in if you want it there.
Some are saying that it’s to have both human-readable and machine-readable data. I don’t doubt that some places do that. But others don’t.
I worked at a college HR and we asked candidates for a a bunch of stuff, including both a CV and a form.
The CV was given to whoever decided whether that person was hired or not.
The forms were given to HR, so that we could independently verify information and manually add information to the college’s records.
Why didn’t HR use the CVs for that? Can they not read?
CV has a lot of fluff that HR doesn’t require.
For example, your previous employer’s name and maybe your post there is sufficient. They don’t need to know what your projects were.
So? It’s magnificently easy not reading those parts of the CV.
It may sound baffling that people ask for information that may be duplicated. But for us to understand what was really going on, it’s worth explaining what was in the forms.
The forms asked for information that often were missing in CVs. Here’s a list of things that CVs usually didn’t have:
Bureaucracy-friendly considerations:
- A clear-cut distinction between first, middle, and last names. CV’s rarely spell it out.
- Government-issued ID. Never seen this in a CV.
Medical considerations:
- Blood type in case there’s an emergency. Never seen this in a CV.
- Emergency contact information. Never seen this in a CV.
- Allergies that the college should be aware of. Never seen this in a CV.
- Medical conditions that the college can provide accomodations for. Never seen it in a CV, although it probably exists.
Specific information:
- The specific role or roles that someone is applying to. Sometimes CVs are re-written to better fit the job they’re applying to, but I’ve rarely seen the specific role being written on the CV.
- Whether the applicant personally knows people in the institution, both to check for references and also to mitigate blatant conflicts of interest. I’ve never seen this in a CV.
There’s also the following practical consideration: reducing the time it takes to hire.
Here’s a way to think about it: Colleges have seasonal hiring sprees. In a matter of weeks there can be dozens of CVs coming HR’s way. HR needs to handle this. From HR’s point of view, receiving a CV with incomplete information means HR needs to send your application to the back of the line and ask you to give HR the information it needs to hire you. These errors increase your time-to-hire, HR’s workload, and everyone behind you’s time-to-hire.
Am I saying the system is perfect? Am I saying the system is not annoying? Am I saying we cannot improve it? No.
I’m laying out the problems, the constraints of the problems, and the existing solutions. As it stands CVs solve for different problems than forms. I don’t doubt we could arrive at better solutions over time, but I think that would require a different set of constraints than the ones we currently have.
What could be cool would be a simple “included in my CV” button that you could click to bypass the field if it would be duplicating information already given. When you apply for 100 positions and each one requires you to painstakingly re-write all the content of your CV, it’s a big-time chore.
(Also, I don’t think it’s okay to ask half the stuff you are asking… Is that really legal someplace on Earth?! Blood type as reason to hire an applicant??)
I suppose your proposal can work: having standard questions with standard answers.
To make sure there’s consistency, maybe having a non-profit handling the whole thing could work. That way, there’s a standard application that people can fill in and standard responses that jobs can expect. Something like America’s Common App.
As to legality and the hiring criteria, I’m sorry if I misled you. I can assure you candidates were not being selected based on their blood. As I said earlier, the CV was given to the hiring decision-makers and the forms to HR.
