The whispering is all in her head and says she sucks
Alternative suggestion: spray paint your resume on the outside wall of the offices of whatever company you are trying to apply at. Bonus points if you manage an approximate rendition of Comic Sans throughout.
I feel like someone should link this person to this thread. Her profile is very easy to find on LinkedIn. I’m sure she’d be shocked by what people are saying, but maybe that’s what she needs.
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.
She doesn’t know that Word can open PDFs
If you are an HR manager and you’re unable to open a PDF then you should first try and finish first grade high school before continuing your job.
How many great employees have YOU missed out on because you’re so lacking in basic life skills that one wonders how you found the tit as a baby to nourish yourself…
It’s because they feed the document to a parser and pdf parsers are more involved and may even require OCR. They aren’t unable, they’re inept and cheap
It’s more of an issue with the HR platforms not being able to read PDF’s. It doesn’t help opening a PDF outside of the platform you are using for hiring actions
If HR at a company doesn’t have the capability of opening the most common document format, that’s not a company worth working at. Doesn’t really matter if the idiots are HR, IT, or management.
You can open pdf files. PDF files were designed to be interchangeable, and readable in the same way everywhere, it’s the entire point of the format. If some shit platform cannot open a PDF file, then you need a new platform, period. It’s a basic ingredients, it’s like leaving out potatoes in mashed potatoes. You can still open up the file outside the platform and if said platform doesn’t allow that then by god are you on the wrong wrong platform.
I have reviewed many resumes, I HATE Athenones that are sent in with word, it’s always a hassle to open, it always looks different on different versions, it requires me to have to deal with Microsoft shit which I don’t want, use PDF.
Elementary school*
All you do is double CLICK the fucking FILE. Your web browser will open it for you.
But the web browser won’t feed a stack of a thousand into a system that ranks them based on key words.
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.
how many opportunities have you missed
Maybe they should be asking themselves the same questions if they are just ignoring most of the candidates because they are too lazy to get a pdf reader. I’m sure they aren’t getting the best people with that approach.
The problem is they expect everyone to jump through hoops for them as if all the candidates are the same and they just need to pick one.
You don’t even need a dedicated PDF reader, many (most?) browsers have a PDF reader built-in. You need extra software to see word processor documents, you don’t to see a PDF.
If a company is so incompetent that a PDF isn’t sufficient (or even preferred), that’s not a company I want to deal with anyway.
Translation: i can’t insert a pdf into whatever bullshit system i’m using to thoughtlessly eliminate people
What the hell? Every bit of resume advice I’ve ever gotten has said to use PDF to protect from potential formatting errors due to display differences.
That, and also to ensure they can open the document. I don’t use word processors in my daily job, yet I do interviews, so if someone gives me a Word Document or similar, I’m going to be put out to read it. PDFs, on the other hand, render just fine in my web browser.
The great thing about random tech illiterate assholes posting “hot tips” like this on LinkedIn is that they very often don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.
Sorry. I don’t want to work for a company that’s this technologically illiterate. You can’t open a pdf? Are you also clicking regularly on phishing emails? What are the chances your personal data like SSN or banking information would be kept secure? What else don’t they know how to do on a computer?
They are definitely feeding the resumes into some piece of software to eliminate people and it likely doesn’t take PDF. So they have to actually do their job and read something. Can’t have that…
I basically read this as “Please make my job easier by doing X”.
You think they bother to read it if it doesn’t fit in their system?
I definitely don’t take advice from someone who leads with this
I am the human embodiment of a perfectly poured shot of espresso. Smooth. Satisfying. Energizing.
This is why I am able to exceed expectations and tap into superhuman qualities that transform the lives and careers of job seekers throughout the known galaxy. How?
Cool, everyone who has submitted their resume in only PDF format dodged a bullet.
Actual psychopath
Alternative explanation for why your resume was not read: https://lemmy.world/post/20282317
Unironically recommended a friend as referral to my job. He was the only person applying, but the company has a policy of needing at least two candidates under consideration for any position.
So they called back another guy who had already been rejected, claimed he was in another round of interviews, used those interviews as the comparison, rejected him as unqualified, and then hired my friend.
Pure nonsense.
Yeah, I’ve worked for companies who’s policy says there must be three people interviewed when almost every hire is an internal promotion.
I’ve got no fucking clue what I just read. This job market is a joke
Most of the time, sentences in a sensible order, we reading easier can make.
Candidate hot tip - if you’re going to learn English from a fictional green puppet, choose Kermit The Frog; he is a native English speaker.
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
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.
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.
