Never Send Your CV via Gmail | Hacker News Reader

Never Send Your CV via Gmail

medium.com

62 pointsjason_price46 comments

This entire article is premised on an excuse from a single HR person that an email ended up in their spam folder. It is probably worth keeping in mind that "your email ended up in spam" does occasionally happen, but it is also a widely used polite white lie that people use instead of saying "I ignored your email."

This is the real answer.

This

Weirdly enough a recruiters follow up email after a job interview ended up in my gmail spam folder. I tend to check my spam folder once a week but I probably would have never seen it otherwise, and would have assumed I was ghosted.

The article says that the issue was on the recipient side, not the sender's side, so the title is wrong -- sending via Gmail is fine, receiving via Gmail is... well, supposedly an issue, but I've never had a resume land in my spam folder so I'm skeptical.

(Amusingly, my Google job offer landed in my Gmail spam folder years ago. But that was because of a weird thing where forwarding from my @university.edu account would screw with headers that Gmail uses to verify the authenticity of an email.)

Also...

> They must be using Gmail client to access their office emails, I guessed.

Is that even a thing? Does Gmail reroute stuff to spam that came into your inbox via POP/IMAP?

I agree that it doesn't sound like it has anything to do with how he sent it.

I wasn't aware of a feature like this, but a quick search turned up documentation for an "email quarantines" feature in G Suite (https://support.google.com/a/answer/6104172).

I do get mail received over POP from another account in my spam folder, but I suspect it doesn't explain this quarantine behavior.

I'm not sure if a G Suite email user can add a private email over POP/IMAP, but I would be a little slack-jawed if they could AND their personal mail could get pulled into the organization's quarantine?

The quarantine docs you linked make it look like this is configured per-customer, so if the author's email did in fact get quarantined, its because IT configured it that way not because of a Gmail bug.

Also:

> For a quarantined inbound message, the intended recipient receives no indication of the message unless you release it for delivery.

So the recruiter wouldn't even see the email in their spam box. It just wouldn't exist as far as they can tell if it was quarantined.

I wonder the same, yes--it's just what I found for trying to figure out what they might even mean by quarantined in the first

It wasn't super clear to me (at least, on a quick read) what the recipient would/wouldn't see if they were given permission to admin quarantined mail, if the mail eventually got released from quarantine after someone realized it wasn't crap, etc.

Summary:

> Author applied to multiple positions via email and was not hired. He suspects this has something to do with his resume ending up in the spam folder on the other side, who use Gmail.

If this was a problem in an application I was debugging, I would highly mistrust this theory and dig deeper to find a more probable cause.

Having been on both side of the hiring fence, many HR departments primarily pass around PDFs when evaluating candidates. If you instead, as suggested, include a link, I think you're even more likely to shoot yourself in the foot because when you're evaluating dozens or hundreds of candidates, anyone who makes you take an extra step is very easily lost in the shuffle, even inadvertently.

The spam filtering tools can indeed be frustrating and even dangerous; the answer is to find a way to cordially confirm receipt and make that a practice. I switched away from Gmail to another dedicated email provider and found even more of emails were getting sent to spam, with no real recourse for diagnosing.

Yeah email is a train wreck now. The right answer is to use all the mediums. Gmail, link, and follow it up with a phone call/chat/etc. The resume email is just one arrow in a small flight of arrows.

The fact that this so called developer doesn't understand the difference between a sender and a receiver of email makes me think there are other things in the CV that caused them to not be hired.

Understanding Gmail's spam/quarantine policies (which was both the sender/receiver here) is not really relevant to engineering roles, unless maybe you're on the marketing team.

Seeing a system and getting somewhat of an accurate understanding of how the parts work is, though.

And it's not like "email" is some esoteric thing he's only now come into contact with.

For example, don't say "GMail". This is about email. To misquote Babbage: "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a conclusion".

This conclusion screams of not being able to understand the logical effect of a known fact. I wouldn't want this person troubleshooting anything, for example.

And I didn't see many comments about the rest of his statements. It's a mess. He seems somewhat angry at GMail's suggestions (this would be on the sender side) because sometimes he doesn't want to say what GMail suggests. Again… confusion of ideas.

Actually, now that I think about it I'm seriously suspecting this was written by a bot. More articles than you'd expect are written by bots, and this is close enough to making sense (on multiple points), but without an actual logical point, that it's a possibility.

Gmail is decreasingly an email client an increasingly a protocol. Gmail-to-gmail messages get treated quite differently, and ultimately OPs conclusion that gmail intercepted their email because it determined that CVs are suspicious is correct.

I would add that I think it's a bit fickle and unkind for internet strangers to pass judgement on a person's ability to do their job based on a post like this. This individual did not ask for our opinion on their ability to do a job, but instead gave (a useful) warning about how the gmail client handles CVs.

> This individual [...] gave (a useful) warning about how the gmail client handles CVs.

That's one way to see it. To me it was about as coherent and thought through as someone yelling and on the corner about 5G towers causing coronavirus.

Yup, that's a sensible conclusion. The article could be an expression of sour grapes bikeshedding.

I had a different gmail hiring snafu happen to me. I was applying to jobs, and my offer for an onsite interview at Microsoft was filtered to spam by gmail. I was also applying to google at the time, so I joked that google was being jealous and wanted me for themselves. Thank goodness I checked my spam that week, I now work at Microsoft.

What a weird article.. first of all, what does sending it with gmail have to do with anything?

He says the company is USING gmail to receive.. that's where the spam-filter comes in. He could have sent this with any service and it still would have been filtered out.

Then he complains about gmail auto-complete? First, I have found it to be quite helpful.. but next, if you don't want it to autocomplete then you just keep on typing. Yeah sometimes it might try to correct a specific word.. just like everything else these days. It's not always going to be perfect.

For someone who is apparently trying to get such a tech job- not understanding the email filter was on the receiving end and he would have hit the same situation no matter what is... quite disturbing. Especially after going through the trouble to write an entire article about it.

Spam filtering is (mostly) on the receiving side. You have little control over whether or not the recipient is on Google mail. It doesn’t really matter if you send using gmail, and it might be even better for deliverability given the reputation systems in spam filtering

I do not understand, why we put emails in spam folders instead of rejecting them (as some providers do, e.g. mailbox.org, posteo.de). It may seem weird at first, but at least if something important would end up in Spam, the sender is going to get a notice.

The same reason we shadowban people or give vague responses to incorrect passwords guesses. You don't want to give bad faith users information that makes their job easier. Telling spammers whether their emails were received or not would be incredibly valuable in interrating ways around the filters.

Does that really help, when the spammer can make their own email account on the target's email service (eg. Gmail), send the spam email to this email account and see if it gets through the filter?

I don't know. Although I would be mildly surprised if there was a single universal spam filter applied to all Gmail accounts. I would also think there are more inputs to the system than just the sender and the body of the email. Gmail being so big allows other variables like the rate that address is sending to all of Gmail as well as how users engage with those emails. Therefore getting a single test email through the filter probably isn't proof that you have defeated the overall filter.

I'd guess same reason we don't say "the password" or "the username" is incorrect but "one of these is incorrect" ?

- Oh, my spam was denied by gmail, what if I change this part?

Then your mailserver (if you aren't Google) will be blacklisted for spewing out hundreds of thousands of "rejection messages" an hour.

This is patently incorrect. The author doesn't have any idea on how GMail's email filtering works.

Particularly given that the author thinks the sender is responsible for recipient-side spam filtering...

Does anyone, outside of Google?

Wait I'm confused, are they not sending around a pdf file for their resume??

I am wondering what happened to paragraphs?

This one line one sentence style seems to be popular on Medium.

But there is no rhythm. There is no flow.

Each sentence must have started on separate index cards.

Why wouldn't you weave them together?

So much white space, so many long pauses.

Do people enjoy reading this kind of writing?

I would much rather a paragraph. But these days, I see spelling errors on some of the most popular news publication websites and have just come to accept that the quality of writing online is diminishing.

It doesn't matter what mail client you use, the issue was at their end

Another less known fact is that gmail blocks zip files/archives that contain executable extensions, scrips, or encrypted filenames. I few months ago I tried sending a document that contained my PII and I was unable to send it because gmail couldn't determine the content inside the archive. This feature that should have a on/off option IMO.

[0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6590?hl=en

Interesting point. Later in the article, Google Hire is mentioned. The article was written in February (Medium redacts the year) and in Sept Google Hire was sunsetted.

Write it in docs, use a template. Attach a pdf to the email.

That being said, if phone numbers are spam, I’ve been typing my phone into email signatures for like ever when I need to.

I have sent my CV containing both my phone number and email address to various companies and have never encountered this problem. I don't think the PDF containing your personal information was the problem, but potentially the individual dealing with your information.

Good news if you're concerned about Google's Hire product: it'll be dead by September (https://killedbygoogle.com/)

I recently had gmail putting my outgoing email in my own spam folder rather than sent items. When I've checked I've found that the recipient has received it but it's really odd behaviour.

TL;DR version: Sent CV by email and Gmail put it in the recipient's spam folder, which cost this person an interview (the position was filled by the time this was checked). Then the post goes on tangents about Gmail and Google.

Forget about a CV, I think it's impossible to say which of your emails to any Gmail recipient would even go to their inboxes. Gmail has a very aggressive, as well as stupid, spam filter. I've seen emails go into spam even after adding an address to my contacts list and marking mails in the spam folder from some contacts as Not Spam.

When it originally arrived, Gmail really revolutionized how web based email ought to be done. Now it's just a bloated and buggy mess that has managed to get a very large user base. I shudder to think how (paid) GSuite accounts also lose genuine emails to spam.

Perhaps there should be an interstitial when loading Gmail if there are items in your spam that you haven't seen 1-2 days after receiving them.

You can send your resume as a flat PDF to avoid this problem.

Is it really that easy? I see no mention of _how_ the author sent their materials, but a directly-generated PDF is just as easy to search as a word doc, isn't it? Does gmail explicitly only inspect the latter?

Unless the PDF is generated as one big image, making it a tad bit harder for google to scan, yes, PDFs are easily parsable. There's a ton of open source libraries out there for it.

Yes, it's that easy. Print your document as an image/flat pdf and you won't run into the issues described in the article. If your text editor doesn't support flattening then export the doc as pdf, open the pdf in chrome, go to the print menu, and select "Print as image". You'll know you've done it correctly if you can't select text in the new pdf.

Mail it to them in a legal-sized envelope on dead tree carcasses. Harder to ignore, they'd print it anyhow for candidate finalists, and virus FUD is a non-issue. Send them an email copy as a backup or in-case they need an electronic version too.

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