The whispering is all in her head and says she sucks
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.
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.
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.
Translation: i can’t insert a pdf into whatever bullshit system i’m using to thoughtlessly eliminate people
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”.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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).
Lms “we are incompetent”
“Most of the time, we meaning” reads like the most awkward attempt at using Aftican-American Vernacular ever.
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
Definitive red flag if that is their supposed understanding of computers
Why? They’re HR and hiring managers, not IT specialists.
Try seeing it from HR’s perspective. They post a job and get +200 applications. The success criteria is not hiring the best candidate, it’s hiring a suitable candidate. Given that premise, why would you read through all 200 applications, when there’s someone with a nice website and cool sounding software, who promise that their product can sort through the resumes and only pick the relevant ones for you?
Heck, I’m definitely going to be looking for an ATS testing site for my CV now. It really doesn’t matter what we think of it. If you want to communicate you’ll have to do it in a way that your recipient will understand, and if my recipient is a PoS software that can’t read PDFs, then writing my CV in latex is probably not the most effective way to communicate.
We don’t care, it’s their job. I get that they’re busy, but it’s their problem, not mine. No excuses for these scumbags.
Try seeing it from HR’s perspective.
K, now what.
Now you get it. That was what I was trying to say. They’re just trying to look like they’re doing enough to get paid.
“we can’t afford ATS software that can read PDFs”
okay, can you afford to pay me a proper wage??
The savvy ones are probably copy pasting entire resumes into chat gpt and then asking if they’re a good candidate.
I’ve been in hiring discussions where word doc is looked down on since the candidate is not thinking about how to protect their data from manipulation.
This ladies take is dumb as hell, or as others have mentioned because her company changes applicants information.
The number of times I got a word doc with the job description in it is ridiculous as well. Yes, I am judging you if you do that.
A PDF is also editable, sure, but at least everyone can open the goddamn thing without any problems.
Then stop using automated software that excludes candidates if the entirety of the job description isn’t embedded in the resume. You’re not special. You’re just another job. And 90%+ of companies use dumb filtering so people have to adapt or get used to 2k+ applications per interview.
This lady’s* take is dumb
PDFs are also editable…
Realistically what’s the worst that company is gonna do? Make my resume better?
I think they meant that the document can look significantly different based on the software reading it? Whereas a published PDF is going to look basically the same (embedded fonts, etc)
