For us it was design.
The form submission and info would go to HR for background checks and systems, I usually didn’t look at that information, just the resume. My department was about animation and designed, so the first step of the process was seeing how much attention to detail you gave your resume. All that design would also throw off some of those resume scanning apps as well. It may have gotten better at doing so, but at least for me it did help.
Every once in a while people would forget to add obvious information on their resume, like their website, address, etc (usually the first red flag). That’s when that redundant info would also help.
Structured data vs. unstructured data. The form is structured data and it can be manipulated easily and reliably with code. With unstructured data it’s a lot of guesswork and chance.
Also sometimes HR can’t use the resume because the name could reveal gender or ethnicity and they need to blind that. And it’s not trivial to manipulate any part of the resume to do that masking.
For the same reason that when you research and buy a product, the computer starts telling you to buy the product you just bought. Absurdity.
Use auto fill in your browser for all.
If you’re typing that shit manually, you don’t deserve the job.
Wrong people.
Do not copy paste resume details. Tailor each submission to match the job. There’s no other waycto beat the AI right now other than to regurgitate job details back at them.
Old school human readable and machine readable. Redundant now but the sufferring is funny to some, so it must continue.
It isn’t redundant.
You want your resume for humans to read, which means your respect their time (remember they have the power and you as unemployed have time) so they don’t throw you into the trash. That means you ensure that the things in your background that make you look good to them are easy to find.
You want the forms to be things that the machine is looking for, even if they are not interesting. The machine might verify so don’t lie, but a lot of things the machine is looking for are boring things that the box needs to be checked - since they are boring you don’t want them on a resume - but not having them someplace means the machine rejects you.
It’s redundant because machines can read human readable resumes and cover letters.
It’s even easier to present the form data in a human readable way.
The point is they are looking for different information and putting that information into the parts humans will read makes the humans more likely to reject you.
Sometimes humans and the machine care about the same thing, but when there is a difference you don’t want the humans to reject you for having information the machine needs.
Last time we were hiring my boss gave me 50 resumes to read and half an hour to get the job done. Not only is that less than a minute each, but the ones I forwarded on got 3-5 minutes (as did 1-2 rejects), if you want to be hired you need to capture my attention in a few seconds - anything that won’t capture my attention needs to not be on the resume even if the machine needs it.
Sounds like your employer doesn’t give you enough time to actually do the work, just barely enough to to do it “good enough.”
It’s probably even worse for the people you hire.
They say we are going to become worse off as population decline tightens the labor market and I am fucking here for it. Maybe when you only get 10 resumes you will be given a chance to actually read them.
The labor market isn’t going to decline that much in our lifetime.
I’m reading 100 resumes because they got past the automated scan system. I interview about 5 because an interview requires a lot of investment on our part. Interviewing 100 people means we can’t get anything else done. My job isn’t to hire people it is get engineering work done.
they are looking for different information
I have not encountered an electronic form that would ask for information not included in my CV. What would such information be?
You can defend shitty late stage capitalism hiring practices all you want, there is still no reason to put in the information twice
Capturing your attention is completely irrelevant to the discussion of whether computers can read a normal resume when they don’t ask for any additional information not found in the resume.
People are hearing this as defense of a crappy system rather than the strategic idea that it is.
Yes this sucks, and everyone hates it who has applied to a job i n the last decade. Form duplication is just part of a huge problem with how hiring is done.
Even if you hate it, you can game the system using this info. Make your resume for humans the highlight reel and the form version a deep dive. They don’t have to be the same.
The advice from the comment above that you’re missing because you don’t like the system is how to cope if you’re looking for a job right now. Be angry at the stupidity of it, but use the tools provided you if you want a better chance at getting in the door.
Except it is, if you have the machine readable fields you can export the ones you’re interested in into a human readable document. Instead you have what the candidate thinks you want to read, which is essentially all of the information you had on the other fields.
Because fuck you, that’s why. You’re not a human being to them.
How it feels to be part of a union that negotiated so hard my employer backed down from all compromises and just accepted a 3% raise retroactive to last year, as well as this year, along with a massive increase in benefits.
A retroactive raise? Goddamn those are some beautiful words
What does that mean?
It means getting paid a special check equalling the amount extra you would have been paid if you had gotten the raise last year.
It means all of the hours I worked last year and this year are recalculated at my new 3% raised rate in 2025, and the 3% on top of the 2025 raise for this year.
I.e. if I made $100 000 in 2025 over 2000 hours for $50/hr, my 2025 wage would be upped to $51.50/hr, meaning I get a cheque for $3000 (minus taxes, pension, and dues)
That also means I would earn $106 090 this year, so any hours I worked this year would be at my new new rate of $53.045/hr
Plus retroactive money in the bank for certain benefits they just pay out since it costs more money to track and verify usage, so they gave up tracking and just give it out to everyone at the start of the year.
HR reads the forms. The hiring manager reads the resume.
To make you jump through hoops. How else can they know for sure that you follow directions no matter how stupid they are.
It started with basic indifference and became a feature.
In the beginning, people were manually receiving and reviewing resumes given to them in person.
This moved online and, for a time, normal humans continued to upload their resumes. Humans continued to review them.
Eventually someone decided they wanted to spam resumes, like someone swiping right on every potential Tinder match and turning people down later. This spam became problematic, so companies needed a way to automatically filter folks. Extracting info from PDFs wasn’t easy at the time.
Having a form to fill out prevented some spam and let them do keyword searches and filtering, but more importantly now it gives them two things: It prefilters people who don’t care enough to complete it and add a sight sunk cost bias to folks who are on the fence.
Free labor. Gotta know early if you’ll do redundant useless tasks without compensation.
Because your experience as a job applicant is not high on their list of priorities. Their job application portal was made by an intern 25 years ago, and has been updated in a haphazard fashion by other interns according to the whims of random middle managers who wanted X or Y information at some point through the years. How seamless and enjoyable your experience is literally doesnt matter at all to them up until the point where they start failing to attract mid-tier applicants because of it. If anyone is aware of how shitty it is at all, they don’t care, because fixing it requires time that that person could instead spend on (1) things that will look good on their resume to get a promotion or another job, (2) things they were actually told to do so they won’t get fired, or (3) going home and having a life.
Why don’t they just use AI to read the resumes and categorize applicants? Well, because AI is often wrong. And because implementing an AI solution takes someone’s time, and (again) all those someones want to spend their time elsewhere.
Job applicants that they actually want to hire don’t go through that portal. They find out about the job via networking, then their interview consists of a hearty handshake.
Because fuck you, that’s why
It’s the first step in you accepting the fact that you are a useless piece of meat for them to abuse. If you can’t accept that first step, you could not possibly accept everything that comes afterward. and it will always get much worse after that.
And if you’re unwilling to accept that abuse, you’re not a suitable candidate for wage slavery at whatever company you just applied to
OCR is fallible. The forms are for the robot to quickly filter based on tags. The resume is for the human to quickly filter based on vibes.
Edit: I’m not saying that OCR is necessarily part of the system. I’m saying that, while OCR is the type of technology one might use to parse data from resumes of various file types, it’s unreliable enough that having the duplicate form fields as a way to gather the information you want in a clean and processable way is an effective supplement or replacement.
OP was talking about pasting the text from the resume into their forms, so OCR shouldn’t even be involved. Once pasted in, why even require the resume anymore?
The company still wants the resume. They just want the information extracted accurately. OCR may not be involved because it isn’t accurate enough to associate specific chunks on the resume with specific questions. If companies just had the form they would have three accurate info, but would have to generate a resume internally for human use (which isn’t a bad idea necessarily). If they just had the resume uploader then they would have to have a person manually extract the information.
So they ask for both–because they want accuracy and the original document and there aren’t tools around to give them both today.
The resume does put on emphasis on specific stuff. Whatever the applicant has found most relevant to tell.
I still don’t agree that the extra workload for the applicant is justified.
Or you could just filter based on the job being applied for?
I’m not sure what you are proposing or how it’s relevant to what I said.
I’m asking why the resumes need to be filtered by tag in the first place? Why not just filter them by the job that is being applied for?
The company wants a way to rapidly reject applicants to slim the pool of viable candidates to a level manageable by humans.
If a software engineer job posting is made that requires java and got 10,000 applicants having a computer automatically reject any that don’t have “java” in the application reduces the human load.
Yeah but every application like that I have has also had individual questions about meeting the requirements. So why filter by ocr tags? If I’m going to lie on the questions I’m probably fine doing so on my resume too.
One is for HR to use to immediately reject your application. The other is to train their AI model.
To make sure you will follow directions without question even if they don’t make any sense
