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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

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