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Comment by vxnul | Hacker News Reader

This is often an intentional design.

A lot of HR people and bosses are evil and want to know not just where you worked and about how long, but what months you were there. Why? Because it's a way to figure out if you're disabled. A resume shows what the candidate wants them to know, but these portals are a way to ask the questions they want to know without revealing (as would occur in personal interactions) the degree to which they want to know.

Also, to a large degree these horrible job portals are a way of filtering out the "prima donnas" who balk at being treated poorly or having to do something mindless and unpleasant.

The hostile design is kinda the point, because it's capitalism after all.

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Honest question: how would the months of employment at prior jobs indicate whether a candidate has a disability?

Disabled people tend to get fired preemptively, regardless of performance, when their disability is discovered. It's illegal but it happens all over the place: bosses see everyone with a medical problem as a potentially unrealiable time bomb. So they tend to have a lot of involuntary "job hopping". And, not surprisingly, it takes them longer to find new jobs after getting fucked over.

This can be concealed to some extent if people only put the years of employment on their resume. Which is why the resume portals ask for months. It's a way of figuring out if someone has a history of getting flagged for depression, anxiety, or long COVID and then PIP'd over it.

Often it's less planned.

I spoke to someone recently who was bragging about all the contractors who had to suck up to him to land the project. I met a guy who purposely leaves out contact details from a job posting, saying that he automatically rejects anyone who wouldn't go to the effort of searching what they do and where they are (it was a 4 man startup).

One company I applied for needed a video cover letter. I met the HR at a job fair once and told her I didn't apply because the video cover letter wasn't worth my time. She told me that engineers didn't need to do that; it was more for other jobs that were easier to recruit for.

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