Why Resumes Are Dead and How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market | Hacker News Reader

Why Resumes Are Dead and How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market

paulfuhr.medium.com

89 pointsMichelangelo11165 comments

The author says they've been applying to thousands of jobs.

This is the resume the author is linking in the article: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/v2sv6ev393z9fkk62v1hw/Paul-Fu...

I wonder, if this person's main method of applying has been online forms where you click the "upload resume", he puts this resume in and then everything fails from the start because the ATS is unable to read it. It looks like the text in the resume is not text but an image.

I read some posts back this year that most publicly advertised positions get bazillion applications, most of which suck, so you have to assume a computer program is going to filter your resume first, unless you've been referred in.

I don't like his resume that much, I think it's a bit too embellished but if I needed a person with his kind of experience (based on the resume), I would talk to them. But if I also had 2000 other applications in front of me, I am not going to read them one by one without using a helper tool to filter them.

Resume format is definitely a big reason here. I used to have a resume that looked like this – two-column, made in Adobe Illustrator, fancy icons/fonts. I applied to 150+ places with maybe 5 callbacks. I switched over to a super basic .docx template and got 3x the callbacks.

Resume aside, the job search process itself is also insanely outdated. Companies still force you re-enter your resume on their hiring portal and then have recruiters manually review resumes. We're building something like a "common app for tech jobs" here at Simplify (https://simplify.jobs/) to help candidates find roles that actually fit them and recruiters effectively process inbound. Praying for the day companies stop using Workday as an ATS....

Disclaimer: I am the founder (we’re also YC backed!)

@mikeyan320. Curious, how is simplify.jobs handling the labeling/disambiguation of skills and platforms? I've been working in this domain for a few years and have identified this problem as a significant obstacle. I open-sourced struct-ure/kg, a knowledge-graph of IT skills and platforms, as a possible solution: https://github.com/struct-ure/kg. I'd welcome your thoughts on the subject.

oof, no offense but I wish you guys didn't push your browser extension so much. that comes off as incredibly suspicious behavior in my book.

Yikes. PDF without any of the text embedded. Can't select, can't search, can't filter. He's basically sending everyone a JPEG!

I would expect this to totally not work. Maybe someone is going to have OCR somewhere in the chain, but... why would you bet on it??

When I was applying, I had a situation where sometimes the ATS system would show me as Geoff and other times as Geo, with no clue why.

Obviously, that's not a fatal issue, but it was indicative of other problems with my résumé, and I saw those in the auto-generated job histories.

Pixelmator Pro just released a feature where it can open PDFs to show you the internal structure. I opened my résumé and sure enough "Geoff" is in two text boxes, despite being a single chunk of text in the source document. :-/

How did you create the PDF? Sounds a bit like the ff is a ligature (i.e. not simply two f’s, but like one special character consisting of two f’s)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)

"ff" can be a ligature,ﬀ. It is possible their system doesn't like the Unicode character. Even if isn't ligature character in PDF, the renderer could make it. Decomposition errors are common, as are not handling Unicode.

It's not a ligature, but you're definitely onto something. I checked again, and all the characters of my name are individual paths, except for the f's. I put a space between the f's, and now they're two separate characters as well. I double an n, no grouping. I put in a double f elsewhere, the grouping happens for those.

It's amazing to me that the PDF ecosystem is this broken after thirty years. I'm boggled that there isn't a commonly-used way to add structured data to a PDF to enable it as a machine-communication standard as well as a human one.

Edit to add: I found a "disable ligatures" option in Pages. Setting that didn't fix the "f" grouping. :-/

There’s a way, it’s just not commonly used. (See: PDF/A).

To be fair most ATSs are really bad at parsing information in very unexpected ways.

I used to have a pretty basic resume with two columns, basically plain text describing job experience and education in reverse chronological order and a narrow side column showing experience in languages and frameworks in a progress bar style to indicate proficiency/experience.

Some of the application software of the “fill everything in regardless of resume” variety offered to upload resume and then auto populate, which is essentially a preview of the ATS parsing capabilities.

It was perfectly capable of parsing the experience in languages etc, but would consistently fuckup the plain work history.

Even recreating the resume in a simple no frills Word document would help.

In these cases I was lucky I could manually input everything, but it did leave me very unimpressed.

Any good resume submission system should be capable of OCR.

But what is this guy? Sounds like he's a designer, a communications specialist, team leader, and project manager. Just all over the place. I'm not sure what I'd hire them for.

Edit: why disagree?

> Edit: why disagree?

Because I don't think a resume submission system should be doing OCR. There aren't that many text formats out there: between Word, PDF, and some form of plain text (just actual plain text or something like markdown or readme), that probably covers 99% of resume formats. Why on Earth would I want to run resumes through OCR when all those other formats can easily have their text extracted?

Even if I'm sending it in PDF, I at least want it to be such that in case the document I've uploaded does wind up on some HR mook's plate, they can actually select, copy, and paste text from it.

That's fine if the system discloses to the users that it must be in a text format.

When you submit a text document, the text should actually be text. This is the most basic step.

I would not want to hire a designer who sends text as an image.

PDFs are not necessarily text documents. That's why it's important for the system to specify if it's expecting text, or use OCR.

No, but text is text. It is perhaps easier for the designer of the document to just put some text from photoshop rather than tweak the document, but it’s absolutely user hostile.

Are they actually good though? (the ATS systems) I've only recently learned how important they are in general and I'm not familiar with their capabilities.

I would think that even with OCR, this resume might be confusing because the years and contact information and stuff is kinda spread around.

If someone has has good insight how well/not well they work, I would appreciate if you commented about it.

There will always be some edge cases where it can't identify or interpret something, but they're pretty good. It doesn't matter where something is located in the document, it can pull stuff out like an address or phone number based on format and stuff.

And yet they don't. When I was applying some systems got my name wrong. They would chop off two characters. I assure you, that's not how it looked in the PDF.

If they're expecting text, then why even submit in PDF? Wouldn't a Word document be better? At the very least, if a system has limitations or and expected rigid input, then it should provide that information to the submitter. I'm sure there are terrible systems our there, but I'd be surprised if the average ones aren't decent at OCR.

Be careful, the wrong settings, and all your edit history may be available.

(This could be bad, depending...)

As well, as some others mentioned, some sleezy recruiters will change your resume without permission. Add things/skills. Remove things.

A word document is also a binary format (unless it is an xml monstrosity) not too different from pdf, but more proprietary. Plus one vould embed an image on word.

With a markdown format I would agree, though.

These were systems that were happy to take word, text, pdf, and a few others. Often they expressed a preference for pdf.

100% agree. this thing is WAY too stylish. just put the information so that a computer can read it in. the annoyance factor is probably enough to reject him in some cases.

Oh come on. OCR is a thing. I mean this is HN, are you normalizing acceptance of crappy software?

I would not blame the software. I'm pretty sure that images are not generally used as formats for resumes.

I mean, at what point do you think it gets ridiculous? When it's a video instead of an image? When it's in Sanskrit? (Computer translation is a thing, after all.) When it's a video in Sanskrit?

Or maybe is it more reasonable to say, look, this is some text, submit it in a standard text format? And an image is not that, even though OCR is a thing.

I agree that what you said is more reasonable but most jobs are not for technical people. Even somewhat technical graphics designers might go over the top and craft a visually appealing resume and use a picture format.

Why blame anyone for this? Just use OCR where possible. If the application instructions specify a text resume sure. Having a picture resume in a .docx makes little sense but a PDF is both an image and text format. Not to mention a lot of people design their resume or have someone else make it and print it for them and scan it when applying for jobs as an image pdf.

Shit happens. Tech is supposed to make life easier not harder, despite of humans' failures not because humans arr cooperative enough right?

Why bother with OCR as you still find enough people without it. And if you don't get enough applicants that you need automation manual review will happen. So still you don't need OCR.

2000 applications is quite rare. A posting is "hot" on indeed above the 50+ applicant mark from what I have seen.

If you have under 150 resumes there is no reason why a human can't skip+prioritize a few times and read in detail the top 50 or so.

A liberal 4 minutes per resume is 15/hr,120/8h. You can't spend or have someone spend one day reading resumés? In my earlier example of 50 resumes, that's less than half a day, a morning reading resumes to decide who you will follow up over a call in the afternoon.

Corporate laziness is such an epidemic. Honestly, why shouldn't ML replace this part of your job then? Let ML do the interview and hiring too. This middle ground where lazy keyword oriented algorithms and heavily biased humans (goof luck if your last name is washington!) is the worst of both worlds for everyone but the managers and HR people cruising their way lazily to retirement.

One thing that is worth keeping in mind is that if a team is hiring they're probably understaffed, which likely means that they don't have much spare time. Hiring should be a high priority in that case but it's often a struggle to even get a small amount of time to focus on it.

That's what managers are for, this is what they do, not the team. They're supposed to delegate actual work to their team and spend time on this sort of a thing so that their team has the right people and resources.

"You can't spend or have someone spend one day reading resumés?"

Managers are even lazier than devs.

I would expect no less from a JP Morgan employee ;-)

I got the advice to imagify all the text in resumes, because some recruiters would 'upgrade' the text before sending it to companies. Next thing you know, you have 5 new skills for things you've never heard about that somehow happen to perfectly match whatever $random_corporation$ needs.

While my sympathy goes out to this person, I think this entire long, rambling, post could be condensed to a paragraph, or even a sentence: "It was a mistake for me to use Indeed.com."

If you want the job (of finding leads, and finding jobs) done right, hire a professional -- a recruiter who will charge a fee and is aligned towards you finding a job. Trying to cold-apply to every single job with a spray and pray approach is about as fruitful as cold calling every company you can to sell a product which may or may not apply to them. People hate middlemen until they use non-curated marketplaces with low quality or outright fake inventory. Then they begrudgingly realize why the middleman came into existence in the first place.

Make peace with the middleman. Find the competent ones and build relationships with them. If you do that, you may not always have the best job in the world, but you won't be so woefully out of touch with reality that you write a blog post like this blaming something that's clearly a consequence of your own actions on the rest of the world.

> Trying to cold-apply to every single job with a spray and pray approach is about as fruitful as cold calling every company you can to sell a product which may or may not apply to them.

This also describes most of the recruiters who contact me; occasionally they happen to be aligned with me job hunting, but usually they were in the "java == javascript" category, and time has only changed this into the "all mobile developers are interchangeable, so even though this is an android position and your last 13 years was iOS…" category.

wtf? The recruiters in your area sound horrid.

A lot of the recruiters in London and VERY on top of technology and know more than I do about current trends, languages and frameworks and exactly where to find people to fill every niche need their client companies have. To the point where they can follow the logic of "Client needs F# developers, F# is a functional programming language. I should look at former employees of companies X,Y, and Z because they use Clojure and OCaml, so those guys might have the necessary background - but I really need to sell it to them because they might be scared away by Microsoft and .NET".

I have NEVER met a recruiter that seemed technically savvy at even the most minimal level. That's kind of astounding.

Yes, but the good ones generally have the candidates applying directly through them. The ones who spam people tend to be the bad ones, giving this impression.

In this case "my area" is "LinkedIn"; in addition to the previously mentioned issues, there's also a good chance they didn't notice my location and offer on-site positions in London, Vienna, or Singapore even though I'm physically in Berlin.

That's been my experience of ~20 years also, you don't always get to pick the recruiter. "Oh twenty years of Java, you'll be perfect for this Android position! Or this React one! Its more of a script role though!" Sounds unfortunately accurate.

I could be wrong, but it seems like recruiters in Europe are "better" (I'm not sure, but maybe more strategic and less used-car-salesman; or the whole recruiting system is more structured). The ones in the US are mostly terrible.

That’s my experience also, except the ones from the UK and especially the ones from the UK hiring for clients outside said UK, like Germany. Now the experiences I had with _those_ people would make a used car salesman blush

> This also describes most of the recruiters who contact me

How often do you reach out to them?

> While my sympathy goes out to this person, I think this entire long, rambling, post could be condensed to a paragraph, or even a sentence: "It was a mistake for me to use Indeed.com."

I think there's more than one paragraph worth of value here, but I agree I had to skim through to make finding it tolerable. I specifically liked the sections talking directly about how Indeed operates, what their incentives are, and how companies and business interact with the website.

+1 for using a recruiter. I used to think that it was for scrubs. Then after trying one, so many interviews and doors opened, and then after I got a couple offers, they even negotiated a higher salary for me ( playing one offer against the other .. something that is necessary but I suck at)

Where do you even find a recruiter for hire? All those I contacted turned down offer to pay them stating they are paid by the recruiting company, which prevents our interest from being aligned.

I contacted on LinkedIn by a recruiter, who I saw there were mutual acquaintances with and she even was my dads recruiter for a while. She did her work and now gets a percentage of my salary. That was an arrangement between her and my company, so I never paid her personally. The fact that she negotiated my salary up by 10k and the opportunities she made possible makes it a win win in my eyes.

In other words, I don't think them being paid by their recruiting company makes it a conflict of interest. In fact, this gives them an incentive to negotiate the highest salary for you.

(On the hiring side)

Every year or so I cave and enlist a third-party recruiter.

And every year or so I am reminded why I don't normally do that.

The average quality of candidate recommendations is abysmal.

So I return to LinkedIn + personal networks.

This is a prescient insight and you're getting at the core achilles heel of the traditional recruitment model. Because the compensation is based on a ratio of first year salary, the recruiters incentives actually align with the candidate and against the hiring manager. The recruiter, as with the candidate, can (and often will) profit from overpricing a low quality candidate with a hiring manager they view as gullible.

But this creates a market for lemons where many of the savviest hiring managers hire through other means. That doesn't just disadvantage savvy hiring managers, it also disadvantages savvy candidates by eroding the ecosystem.

The solution is to use curated networks -- and any recruiter worth their salt should be able to speak credibly to their own with strong references from strong candidates and especially strong hiring managers. After canvassing both and running some real life experimental tests, you'll be able to sift the wheat from the chaff. Ideally, you can do this over a span of multiple years across multiple roles so you've integrated this ecosystem into your own.

Any recommendations on finding such middlemen?

For IT, Mark yourself looking on LinkedIn, follow up with the swarm that messages you. Focus one ones that use the actual company email, followed by ones that at least say what company it’s for (many won’t say). Be upfront about salary/location requirements, but double check about them in the interviews.

Another middleman who is "professional" at finding middlemen, of course.

For a fee, I could get you in touch with a few people who are able to find middlemen

Buy my book: "Finding middlemen for loosers"

Very clever. But rather than optimizing towards cleverness, you could optimize towards directness and say "try them out and develop relationships over the long term." It's not as cute and clever of a phrase. It's unfortunate that the truth isn't cute and clever.

Or maybe it's fortunate? You know, I actually think it's fortunate. I'll let the cynics who like being cute and clever keep their misfortune, and I'll keep my boring, ugly, successful reality.

I have met the owner of https://www.findmyprofession.com/ a few times and he seems like a good guy but I haven’t used their services. They claim to be such a middleman.

Im my more than 10 years of experience as a software engineer, I’ve never used once indeed.com. It always looked to me as a place where 90% or more of the job ads are either scam or of very little quality.

So of course, the vast majority of job postings are not for software engineering. Indeed is absolutely king when it comes to job postings. I work at a warehouse and they only posted through indeed.

Yeah same, I worry though that this is just a side-effect of our skills being currently under-supplied for the current demand.

We can afford to let people come to us a little bit more than someone who (even though probably has a wealth of experience) is applying for something where the supply of applicants is above or is more inline with the demand.

Yeah it feels like some kind of shibboleth to know that the way to get the good jobs is not through indeed but through direct contact or similar. On the other hand if everyone used that tactic I guess it wouldn’t be as effective or as good of a in group signal

Indeed.com is useful for finding employers you didn't know about in your area and getting a sense of the jobs. Then I take that info and apply directly to the company through their webpage. So indeed.com is just useful for human screen scraping :)

> very little quality

Even then you get nothing - just ghosted.

Want to start by saying I do really empathize with this person. But I can't help but shake my head a little when I read way too unnecessarily long missives like this (I admit, I only got a couple of paragraphs in before I bailed) and think "this person just doesn't get it."

Some points:

1. First, to start, I have a ton of empathy for this person being in an extremely challenging field. He essentially did internal communications for JP Morgan for the last 10 years of their career or so. Any sort of "content creation" role that doesn't have a direct tie to revenue is going to be under the knife at most companies these days. These roles are also the ones that are most in jeopardy due to AI/ChatGPT. There was a recent Washington Post article where it highlighted some copywriters who basically lost their jobs to ChatGPT. It's not "coming", it's already here.

2. Small not-so-secret: if you are beyond the age of 30 or so, and you are a relatively high level professional (this person listed VP on his resume), you should be worried if you don't think you'd be able to get your next job through your professional network. That is, most jobs at this level may put out a job req on Indeed (often for legal reasons), but it's likely to be filled by a referral. Even if it's not a referral, it's very likely that the applicant knows someone through their network (even if a degree or two away) that can serve as a better reference.

Whenever I see missives like this where the author is semi-baffled their "Send my resume to 1000 open positions" approach didn't work, I'm not surprised.

> way too unnecessarily long missives like this

The punchline (buried way too far down) is that he calls himself a professional writer.

Didn't really want to pile on, but this guy is looking for marketing writing jobs. Granted, I guess in one way he succeeded by getting to the front page of HN. But if I wanted to hire someone whose primary purpose was to communicate effectively and succinctly to potential customers (or employees as was the case with his most recent job), this post would be a red flag to me.

> Small not-so-secret: if you are beyond the age of 30 or so, and you are a relatively high level professional (this person listed VP on his resume), you should be worried if you don't think you'd be able to get your next job through your professional network

Shit.

I used to have a pretty wide professional network when I was doing freelance / contract gigs... these days, after a few stints of full-time in-the-office type work, the number of people I can lean on for work opportunities has shrunk dramatically. the recruiters and talent agencies I used to have a good relationship with have moved on. I'm not at the top of anyone's list anymore. It sucks, and it especially sucks that it happened in the background, while in the foreground, I've worked two of the best jobs of my career in the past 8 years.

Never used indeed.com once. But...people should know that these sites, and recruiters, are basically hiring theater. Almost all jobs (perhaps excepting FAANG meat grinder) are filled through personal connections.

This is true. Bottom-barrel* retail food service gigs don't count. (And even then... I'm certain the manager at the Gamestop I applied to at 18 binned my paper app immediately because he was hiring his friends.)

People don't like to admit it, because it calls into question the meritocratic nature of our job market. American recruitment process are fair and appropriate, not corrupt, right? Well...

*not in the skill or fortitude required, but in how the employer treates you

I don't see how personal recommendations are corrupt. If you have a known good employee, and they can attest to someone being a good fit based on previous direct experience with that person, that's a pretty strong signal. If the recommendation comes from someone not so great, or if it's more of a referral than a recommendation, you can weight it appropriately.

>I don't see how personal recommendations are corrupt.

Well, that would be the problem.

> Almost all jobs are filled through personal connections.

I see this repeated online, but is there any data to actually back this claim up? In my experience only a small number of jobs get filled through referrals etc.

And the sort of jobs that have a referred candidate they want to hire aren't putting up a free listing on Indeed to get 60 people send often quite good and sometimes massively overqualified CVs at the click of a button, they're putting their job ads where nobody looks and demanding they answer questions or write a cover letter explaining the appeal of $genericcompany...

I think this might be a difficult thing to get data on, as I don't think most companies would want to release this info. But I would say in my experience that the more senior the role and the more experience someone has (the author had VP-level experience) it is absolutely the case that you lean on referral networks. Even at the very senior level where people are hired through executive search firms, a big reason those firms exist is to ensure confidentiality throughout the process, but most of the names they come up with aren't usually unknown to the hiring company.

Also, it's important to understand that it doesn't need to be direct referrals (i.e. someone at the company saying "We should hire Bob X for this job"). Oftentimes it's things as simple as LinkedIn posts sharing job openings with your network, and then when that's passed around have someone reach out through a mutual contact.

Let's be honest, how many people on HN (or elsewhere) have a VP level job? Even if it is true that jobs are the very senior level are filled this way, that's a very small % of the total (in my company, much smaller than 1%).

So that still wouldn't make the claim that "most jobs are not posted/filled by referrals" true.

Nonsense, there is no way my company that is a simple mid size tech company could ever hope to fill most roles with personal connections. They try though, cash rewards for recommending someone that gets hired and passes probation.

Even with that incentive most hiring comes through a couple of in-house people that filter out the noise from the various recruiters they interact with.

Maybe with small shops < 50 poeple it might be possible.

I've gotten leads through hired and linkedin pretty easily. You can also use them to just find job postings and apply directly.

> Almost all jobs (perhaps excepting FAANG meat grinder) are filled through personal connections.

I’ve hired roughly 10 people and all of them came in through recruiters. I don’t think my company ever considers direct applications, even though that’s an option on LinkedIn. They just never pass HR to actually arrive at the interview stage.

Yeah its nonsense, anecdotal at best.

i don't know, where I work 100% of resumes come from a third-party recruiter, same at my previous job. I've gotten my last 3 jobs either through third-party recruiters or direct applications, not referrals.

> Almost all jobs (perhaps excepting FAANG meat grinder) are filled through personal connections.

Yes and No. Lots of jobs are through personal connections but plenty are through applying to the company.

I'm stuck in a similar loop and I understand the author's frustration.

Everything feels automated, and it feels like all I can do is look forward to the rare moments when I actually speak with a person about their role and try to showcase my experience and skills.

It's demoralizing. I've taken to doing freelance AI data annotation work, which is somewhat boring and not using my full capabilities, but while I'm in this limbo, I'm not sure what else to do.

"Everything feels automated"

That's because they are.

ATS solutions are a cancer. I used to work for a company that was trying to make the job application process easier. It didn't work, because at the end, there was an ATS behind it all.

This dude was a VP at JP. Surely he should be networking for a job, not applying to job sites?! Seems like they are going down the wrong channel. I’ve never filled a senior position in my teams via CVs, and always through word of mouth.

The problem with the job market is many-fold: 1. Volume. It’s easier to travel, move, work remotely etc. so there are just so many applicants for any given post. Also skills are more transferable than ever. 2. Opaqueness: salaries usually not posted as it’s uncouth to mention. Titles no longer industry standard. Job reqs are works of corporate poetry, not realistic descriptions. So people can’t contextualise. 3. Fake internal roles: apparently some companies have policies to advertise all jobs even if it’s 99% going to be filled by an internal candidate. Apparently it stems from non discrimination law. 4. Hubris: we live in a society where everyone (especially me) eternally feels under paid and overqualified. 5. Lies: the bar of what is a lie and what is a polished CV is personal and not agreed on.

Personal websites or linkedin profiles for non-techies would address a lot of the problems he's describing. Actually, linkedIn makes sense for everyone as the profile outline is standardized across users, so anyone interested can scrape info as needed.

edit to say that there needs to be a less social version of linkedin, so just a profile without any of the cringe-inducing toxic positivity.

I have a profile up on linkedIn which I update occasionally, and never see any of the posts or social media aspects of the site. I'm not sure if another site is needed, you can just not engage with it.

Per my experience I end up on the main page first, and on my monitor I can see at least 3-4 posts without even scrolling.

Is it really that apocalyptic? What’s the big deal. Honest question.

I dislike the pretense that bad things happening is somehow good. Or when someone does something that everyone else has done a million times before (like graduate with a higher degree or get into law school), it is somehow newsworthy. I think it makes sense to share highlights of your life with people who care about you, not your professional acquaintances. I want newsworthy and informative items, not feel-good memes or self-congratulatory posts. I also dislike the evangelists who pretend their X thing will save the world and cure all its ills. Yuck.

Fees like a browser extension could block such posts if someone’s really bothered.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-feed/nfnpeneo...

That’s sorta what we are building at Simplify: https://simplify.jobs/

We started by building a common app for jobs. One single profile that can be used anywhere on any job on the web. Recruiters index on so many different data points, and it makes it more straightforward for both parties if data is standardized

Best thing I ever did was unfollow everyone in my LI network. I don’t see any of the toxic positivity posts, or the “I’m so proud of myself” posts or the “I accepted X position with Y” posts.

Wouldn't it be better to stop checking LI? Uninstall the app from your phone, and check LI whenever you need something from your network.

Otherwise, all social networks are pretty harmful to our attention and well-being (read Stolen Focus [0] for more context).

[0] https://www.amazon.com/LOST-FOCUS/dp/1526620162

Eh, I mostly just see tech related content. It's what you make of it.

Some years ago I was moving to a different state and looking for a job. I ended up doing interviews at six different companies. Five of those came from direct personal connections (mostly via coworkers) and one came from generic search / cold application. After the interviews, I got five offers. The only place that didn't give me an offer was the one from the generic search. It also paid significantly less than the others and simply didn't seem as interesting. My takeaway is that cultivating a network of people who you've worked with and enjoy is invaluable for increasing your options when you come to new decision points in your career.

Is their evidence that Indeed is posting scraped jobs from other services?

The reason this doesn't make sense is as an employer, we found that Indeed produced the highest number of candidates but cost like $400 per listing. We would first post somewhere cheaper and then post on Indeed if we couldn't find a qualified applicant.

We would have loved to post somewhere else for less money and have it be scraped and listed on Indeed for free. It's difficult to believe that their listings are being scraped from somewhere else as the actually customer is the job poster not the applicant.

I’m not sure if Indeed scrapes other job boards, but they (we?) do show jobs scraped from employer sites. They’re called indexed jobs, whereas jobs posted directly to Indeed are called Hosted jobs.

https://support.indeed.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002786323-Ab...

I work at Indeed, but don’t have any part in scraping jobs.

I believe scraped jobs are ranked lower, because, like the article pointed out, it's harder to ensure their quality.

IMO job sites were dead the day the launched.

I posted a job ad on jobs.gc.ca in early 2000s which is a government site, with junk UX and even then I got about 200 applications.

Then about five years ago I have talked to my last employer. And they used StackOverflow jobs and got 350 applications just the first day for a super niche position (Perl related). No doubt most applications are unrelated spam.

Now, how do you expect these people to objectively review every single application and pick you?

It’s not possible.

You must do things differently to stand out.

Or network.

But that’s just another way of saying “do things differently”.

> about 200 applications.

> jobs and got 350 applications

Been on both sides of recruiting meat grinder and initially had empathy for this "we have hundreds of applicants and most are irrelevant". Once you have experienced human specialist on the other end, have some bloody respect. If you insist on finding inconsistencies, gaps, and incompetence in the CV, all you'll get will be hardcore fraudsters.

> Once you have experienced human specialist on the other end

This just never happens in smaller orgs.

And the big orgs aren’t that numerous. And even more likely to hire via within or by referral.

I bet saying reply with text x to show that you read this text in full would cut the valid applications in half.

I applied to indeed.com once, and it was the most demoralizing experience of my life.

I'm a fairly accomplished sr. software developer; my last official title was "sr software scientist".

I've worked on internationally famous software research projects, worked on the original tech for CD-ROMs at Philips, was on the OS teams of both the 3D0 and the original PlayStation (where I wrote the video subsystems), was lead or team member on several high profile EA Sports titles, was on the team that created the first Internet live video infrastructure, produced a live talk show, worked in VFX across the roles of developer, artist & financial analyst on 9 major release feature films, I've written and acquired a global patent in VFX technology, and was lead developer for one of the leading facial recognition systems now in a high percentage of the world's airports. I'm accomplished...

And what happened with my application at Indeed? The recruiter and I spoke for nearly an hour, when she asks "are you even a programmer? I've not heard you mention writing code once." Um... that was all I was talking about, and she did not understand a single bit, nor had the communication skills to ask for clarification at any point during that initial hour. WTF?!?!

Sir, this is Accenture.

> Now, it’s pretty early to be dropping an Einstein quote, but I’m doing it anyway: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

While the quote is catchy and viral, and fits many situations, Einstein has never said that. Call me biased, but when you work in tech, you need to be precise.

"Don't believe anything you read on the internet" -- Abraham Lincoln

Especially when you talk about how you are a professional writer.

More info here:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/23/same/

I think we all agree that there should be a unified and standardized way of submitting applications, something that passes all company's systems and also as an applicant you sure your resume is not botched somehow. Ironic how all these developers who build all these very complicated systems, APIs, architecture, you name it, can’t even make a proper system so it makes their life easier the next time they apply for a job, or even when their system receives many resumes.

Keep in mind, that after all this chaotic process, these resumes will pass through a mostly-lazy HR department, so the whole process is a failure built on top of failure.

This article reads like an article telling everything wrong with today's internet. not unlike https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507

I came across this question the other day while discussing AI Agents.

Would you chat with an AI agent to be the first line recruiter assuming that you can have a "real" chat with that agent? I.e., the agent ask real questions?

OR do you think its fairer we submit a CV with years of work experience condensed into three bullet points that's screened by an ATS AI?

"Thought: To determine if John is a suitable candidate for the role of a social media marketer, I need to ask him some questions and evaluate his qualifications. Action: human Action Input: What strategies did you use to grow Boeing's Twitter channel?"

My solution to this is to have a Markdown resume that is easy to decompose into any form fields an employer has. If they want a normal one, I produce a lightly-formatted PDF.

I have a LaTeX template that I edit and export to PDF. I also have one that is plain markdown and easy to customize, and it also works as an online CV via GitHub pages [0]. For jobs that I apply through lever, Firefox remembers all the fields! xD

[0]: https://ritog.github.io

You can also automate form filling with Simplify co-pilot: https://simplify.jobs/copilot

You have to re-type or cut and paste everything one more time, but it should be the last time you have to do it.

Indeed is a virus that needs to die as soon as possible.

It has contributed to a situation where a normal resume now is worthless. It has caused massive inflation of what we write.

Everybody who doesn't excel at selling themselves ends up lower on the chain. But that absolutely doesn't mean they're a bad fit for the job.

And then there are the stupid personality tests. What are they looking for if I have to click the same buttons on 2 separate screens?

I've never gotten any contacts through Indeed, unless we're talking about small staffing firms fishing lowballing and fishing for my resumes.

what would they gain by getting your resume?

They sell them to recruiters

The last time I was looking for a job was before the pandemic. I used Craigslist like I had since 1999 or so.

I glanced at it the other day and... it was just basically not there. Three programming jobs posted in the DC/NoVa area. How did that site manage to die, particularly if this is the alternative?

Thank you for the insights here (on several levels), as well as the conversation around my article. A great deal of this thread is invaluable feedback/information as I continue to navigate everything. Sincere thanks.

Personally for me all three trains parted and there are no more trains arriving: job search, dating, real estate. I guess I will seat on the chair over here waiting for the third end of the world, because the two previous world ends I have also missed.

The end of the pisces age will be in 2150 a.d. so unless you expect to live for another 125 years, you gotta get off that chair.

I meant covid and Russian invasion, awaiting the crisis which seems even lazier than me.

Not sure if all this matters - at the end of the day, resumes are just a filtering mechanism, and then most startups/companies should set up 15-minute screeners and also do work assessments before hiring.

Not sure how relevant this top of funnel problem is.

> Remember when your resume was the ticket in a company’s door?

No, I don't. For instance, one job, over a decade ago, I got the offer, which was followed by, "oh, by the way, can you give us your resume, so we have it on file".

I found my current role by posting on the open to work thread in July. Early days, but so far it's among my favorite positions ever. I don't know what the answer is here, but I'm glad for HN.

Don't think I ever used indeed.com, just got something recently, the market for the last few months in the UK has been the worst I'd seen since 2008

FYI, this is a dirty secret, but the correct way to use Indeed is not to apply for the job per se; it's to get in touch with the people doing the hiring.

Basically, submit your "application" for a job, get a call back from the recruiter, who will then promptly say "yeah forget about that job, I've got 20 other interesting jobs that might fit you better".

... I'm pretty sure in most cases the initial job doesn't even exist.

A genuine question: Is it better to send my CV in a word or pdf format? I assume that an ATS can read both formats?

Their job recommendation system is just awful. I really hope they put some money into improving it.

Their job classification needs some major work - I get way too big of a range of experience levels in postings.

Checkout Simplify: https://simplify.jobs/ been working hard to make actually relevant curated matches

How come I keep reading these types of posts, hearing these stories, yet I've never experienced anything remotely close to this? Job hunting has always been the opposite for me; being inundated by sharks trying to aggressively recruit me.

---

For reference; here's a quick summary of my job history: Mid 20s, I was working for a retail bank in Iceland (where I'm from), doing ASP.NET and C#. With about 4 years of experience, I decided I was a "big fish in a small pond" and that I needed a greater challenge. I was interested in finance and wanted to move to London and do quant trading or HFT, so one night I applied for about 5-6 different jobs posted on Indeed.co.uk. At 7AM the next morning the phone started ringing. 3 days later I was in London, doing five interviews a day for 4 days straight, and long story short, ended up doing about a 15-20 interviews and ending the week with a dozen offers.

Since then, I've done the occasional round of interviews, just to determine whether I'm "optimally employed", and they've never been an issue to set up. Basically just message a couple of reliable recruiters on LinkedIn, tell them "hey I'm interested, and I'm looking for X" and they come back with job specs on a silver platter. I've NEVER not got an interview somewhere I wanted to work. Literally never. I've been rejected a handful of times, most of which I'd chalk up to the interviewers or the hiring process being terrible. I've rejected or cut short A LOT of hiring processes, though, I have some insane stories to tell regarding that.

Now, I work almost entirely by referral. I didn't even interview for my current role or send them a CV, because I'm working for and with people who know me. And I have a feeling that's how it'll stay from now on.

---

So, now that I got that out of the way - why the F00k is my experience so askew with these horror stories? Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to put anyone down, or brag, or say they're doing it wrong or something, I'm simply asking; what causes the difference in experiences? Is it the fact that London finance runs on recruiters? Is that not a thing elsewhere? The last time I submitted an application directly to a company was in 2009. Since then, I've always had recruiters do it on my behalf.

>How come I keep reading these types of posts, hearing these stories, yet I've never experienced anything remotely close to this?

Well, because you're a software engineer and he's a writer.

You're desirable. Congrats. (Of course you don't recognize it.) Most people are most people/average trying to eke out a living .

Yeah but, it's not like I have some god given talent the next person can't obtain. I went to a shitty university, and it took me 4 years to finish a 3 year undergrad. From there on, it was all about building skills, and making very intentional decisions to steer my career.

There's the classic joke of how to pick up women: "Step 1: Be attractive. Step 2: don't be unattractive" - which is funny because you can't change your appearance. But if you have a skill gap on your CV it is absolutely within your remit to fix that. Don't like your current job? You can change that. Don't have what it takes to pass the interview rounds? You can fix that. Spend 2 weeks doing leetcode exercises and you'll ace any coding test.

Just the market/timing maybe? For comparison, I’ve worked in a similar tech stack and never had any issues whatsoever finding a job until maybe late 2022. You don’t list any dates, but I had no problem getting interviews and recruiters at tech companies of F500s till then.

Recruiters are a big part of it, but honestly the hard part is getting in. Once you’ve done it once people assume you can do it again.

Bros probably just feeling the high interest rates. Powell got another one

get last few employments through linkedin. never heard of indeed.

The worst resume forms are those from Workday, I run from them like the plague. You will probably need a new email to create an account for each job application. And if you get the job, you'll have to deal with their unbearable UX where nothing can be reached directly, but needs you to dive in a menu to a page that requires clicking a box to a link to a page with a small grid view. What were they thinking!?

I was honestly surprised I had to create a WD account to finish a job application. WD is a horribly slow piece of SW that I hope I won't have to use again. Sadly, it is getting very popular.

Workday = the absolutely terrible SaaS software that we have to use for quarterly evaluations and booking time off? That truly is an awful, awful piece of software.

Oh god I forgot about the quarterly evaluations.

Try https://simplify.jobs/copilot

Common application for jobs and it will auto fill all your information in Workday apps

Disclaimer: I am the founder (we’re also YC backed!)

In the age of AI, GPTs, LLMs, etc, CVs are completely over as they are now to be assumed to be generated.

Only real world projects (not toy demos), years of experience, and other particularly interesting (but relevant) hobbies would work although I'm not sure they count here. I've now seen companies raising their ask for Masters - PhDs for SWEs due to this demand.

What works best unfortunately is being hired/acquired by FAANG, working at hedge fund, and or a degree at a prestigious elite universities (top 0.01%) to rise above the pile.

For tech, now that there is a flood of FAANG employees from recent layoffs, the job market is only going to get tougher in tech on a herculean scale.

Why would any hiring manager care whether a CV is AI generated? As long as the CV is accurate, the tool used to write it is irrelevant.

> Why would any hiring manager care whether a CV is AI generated? As long as the CV is accurate, the tool used to write it is irrelevant.

How do you know if the CV is accurate or not?

Multiply these CVs by hundreds and you will introduce software to sift through fake AI generated CVs, or not bother deal with them at all as most hiring managers are extremely time constrained.

By now, I'm assuming that all hiring software have ATS systems by now that does this.

> How do you know if the CV is accurate or not?

What does this have to do with AI? People have lied on their resumes long before ChatGPT existed.

Well it has everything to do with AI, as this will make the application process completely worse, fake CVs and cover letters produced at scale faster than before with little effort which does not help the sifting process for hiring managers.

You might as well (as I suggested before) not rely on CV / cover letters as a signal at all, and look at other means such as real world projects (with working links) that people use.

That's just silly. Creation and submission of fake CVs was never an obstacle before. It was always super easy, and AI changes nothing significant. The reason most job applicants are fairly honest is that any major lies are likely to be discovered during the interview and background check process.

The point is this can be done at scale, and this is a real problem for companies that have lots of 'candidates'. So my argument is that CVs is no longer a reliable indicator anymore.

That is not a valid point. Candidates have always been able to submit fake CVs to many companies. Most of them don't do so, nor will they in the future.

> That is not a valid point.

Scale and ease of effort is a valid and relevant point as it is easier than before for cover letters and CVs to be generated they are as good as dead for hiring managers.

To solve this, do not even consider the CV to begin with and consider looking at candidate's real world projects, bounties and paid PRs. like for example tinycorp [1] or comma.ai [2]

[2] Is similar to a take home except the challenge is public and the deliverable is evaluated on an error score which lower is better.

Solutions will be different to other candidates and the best ones will put in the effort and have a lower error score, it is then you can decide to spend your time interviewing them.

I would even argue that this is even more effective than an ATS that random candidates are sending their fake CVs and cover letters through.

[1] https://tinygrad.org/

[2] https://github.com/commaai/calib_challenge

I still have no idea why you think this is an AI problem. What is the value in creating a fake resume via AI that doesn’t exist without AI?

A hiring manager can't know whether a CV is accurate, but the tool used to generate it is irrelevant to that. There is no software which can reliably detect whether a document was generated by an LLM. Most tech companies now use background check services to verify educational credentials and previous employment before onboarding new hires.

> “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

This is the quote from the last powerpoint slide by cute girl from consulting agency. Sweetheart I wake up every morning, eat and drink the same, and yes I expect this day will be different.

That's not what the quote says.

It'd be more like you waking up, eating the same thing every day, and expecting different outcomes from the eating, e.g. the level of satiety or the effect on your energy until lunch.

> and expecting different outcomes from the eating, e.g. the level of satiety or the effect on your energy until lunch.

But eating the same can absolutely result with different levels of satiety and energy. Ever been sick, poisoned, or depressed?

It can, but again, that's not what the quote says. Suppose you eat a candy bar and get hungry 30m later. Suppose you do it again. If you're surprised that you got hungry, that's what the quote defines as insanity.

If you eat the same thing, you expect the same results. Whether you get the same results or not is a result of the complex chemical processes in your body. That's not what the quote argues about either.

The quote is and always has been silly/wrong.

Without a time machine you can't repeat the same thing. It's different every time.

Exactly Panta Rhei doesn't mean not to do the same thing repeatedly, it means even if one does it again, the water flows and the river is completely different.

The origins of the popular quote are apparently drug addiction treatment/recovery[0].

I doubt folks parroting it realize they're essentially regurgitating a line of Narcotics Anonymous propaganda associating addiction with insanity.

[0] https://professorbuzzkill.com/einstein-insanity-qnq/

I've heard this quote repeated so many times over the years that I just assumed everyone in my AA meetings knew what they were talking about. Appreciate the info.

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