The whispering is all in her head and says she sucks
These people just want to remove your contact data so they can make money off your back.
Real recruiters find candidates and setup a meeting between you and the company. They also don’t care about eventually sending your contact details as their services are actually worth giving them money.
Stupid recruiters that post on LinkedIn arguing about your resume like in the OP just edit your details out and send companies a handful of resumes. They make money from simply being a glorified proxy.
“Chief Candidate Whisperer”, like what the actual fuck.
9/10 applicants who submit their resume as a PDF for our openings, we can’t view.
Can’t, or won’t?
If you can’t open 90% of pdfs sent from different sources then you’re the problem
I don’t want to work somewhere if they can’t even open a PDF. The fuck kind of Windows 3.1 machines are they using.
I work for a small/med business MSP. You have no idea
chief candidate whisperer
are they looking to hire a horse?
I’m going to take a stab and say she’s a recruiter for a third party staffing company.
They REQUIRE word docs so that they can copy and paste or edit your resume on their template.
Pro tip: take the requirements that they send you and Google search for it. Apply directly with the company and cut them out.
The recruiters also like to remove your name and contact details so that the companies they are selling you to can’t bypass the recruiter.
Unless you open the pdf in gimp or something (and it’s not just a photo, which would be equally bad in a word document) you should be able to copy from a PDF too.
Yeah, I don’t know how to say this nicely, but my experience so far is that HR people are exactly the sharpest knives in the kitchen…
Had Javascript on my resume, and the recruiter send me to an interview for a Java programming job…
The other one asked me to take an online test about cryptography algorithms in node js for a prescreening interview, which is something I never even remotely had to deal with in more than 20 years working for multiple e-commerce, health systems, CMS and other services and websites. Also, no Google or any online sources allowed to solve their questions…
“Please do our work for us for free. Thank you for applying.”
It’s not even that (and I think you mean are not).
It’s because they are dealing with literally hundreds of resumes. They want to be lazy and just slap on their logo and be done.
PDFs just make this much harder than they want to put in.
I mean her profile says she works for “First Search” which sound like a middle man for sure.
And “Chief Candidate Whisperer”? Wtf. Don’t get me started.
is she the person you’re supposed to hire when your Chief Candidates are out of control?
“Is the cheif candidate with us in the room now?”
not sure this is a great tip. Only jobs I got past 1st stage with this year was through a recruiter, applying solo got me auto booted from over 120 jobs.
A recruiter is a networker that you’re paying.
They have networked with the hiring manager, developing a rapport,
Well in my case that the eventual employer pays
“Portable Document Format”. If they can’t open it, fuck them, you don’t want to work for that tire fire.
Yeah, like… You can literally open it in your web browser wtf
The HR department might be shite, but the data team might be good.
This is SovCit level.
If your organization is such a clusterfuck that you can’t figure out how to open a PDF, then I’m going to consider that a bullet dodged.
Fuck them for not putting the requirement on the application and wasting everyone’s time though
Literally every single browser can open a PDF.
Is she admitting that their organization only uses discontinued, insecure Internet Explorer to use the internet? Is she also opening word files in Microsoft word 2005?
Nah she’s talking about the ATS systems that filter through all the applicants’ resumes looking for the ones with the highest amount of matching keywords so they can get the number of applicants down to a more reasonable number to interview.
They don’t care if their bots don’t work for your PDF resume because they get so many applicants it doesn’t matter.
I’m surprised this isn’t common knowledge for jobseekers.
I recently found an ad requiring knowledge of win2000/XP
Depending on the job itself, this actually makes sense for legacy support. My job requires “passable experience with Windows 98SE, XP, and 2000”, but the network-facing computers are all 10 and 11.
Military and medical too.
It was for an electronics rework technician role, though. Outside of a wave/reflow oven’s interface, (which should have its own GUI) it didn’t really make sense.
Our front desk person, on the computer all day, barely understands how tabs work.
It’s scary.
gen z or boomer?
I don’t like dishing on generational rants, but OMG the mobile device generation is every bit as lost as Boomers are when it comes to the actual functioning of their device or using a PC as an actual work device.
My kids have had a PC since they were four, they’re teens now and they still don’t get a lot of it, but when their friends come over they are absolutely clueless. Use an Xbox or Playstation? IPad? Sure! No problem! Anything beyond that they just give up.
Technology needs to be actively taught and actively learned! If their school isn’t teaching it, maybe try subscribing to some online tech literacy courses?
That is absolutely an answer, but getting teens to take more classes after being done with school…? Good luck. The kids are issued chromebooks, that’s as much tech as they get.
I had my eldest help putting together her PC after she wanted to upgrade parts for her birthday. That’s promising, I think?
I feel like I’m about as computer savvy as most gen z. Born in 91, but we was poor, so it was the family dell (that I wasn’t allowed to do much with*) until 2008, got my first laptop in 2009**, it broke almost immediately because poor and cheap, and then got my first smart phone (T-Mobile G1) in 2010, and basically didn’t touch a laptop again until I started school 2020. I basically started over from scratch at that point, but now I run fedora full time and made myself learn some basic stuff, but I would consider myself pretty tech illiterate.
*Because my brother was caught looking at porn, so computer time was severely cut back. Then I was caught sending sexy messages to someone. And then the final nail in the coffin was when I tried to dual boot it with some Linux distro, I don’t remember, borked it, and we had to wipe the hard drive
**Technically I had a netbook before this, in like 07/08, that I used Wubi to install Ubuntu on, and I loved that. But never got more than browser level into it.
Coding-wise I’d hazard that younger generations are on-par or better than my generation. But “jack of all trades” is probably more our wheelhouse.
I’d argue the Boomers are a fair cut above Gen Z. We Gen X folk are the greatest!
Seriously though, we straddled the digital divide. We went from nothing to having to figure it all out. All when we were young and able to learn quickly. FFS, we couldn’t play a simple video game without understanding drives, IRQs, CLI, all that.
Millennials got it best born just when tech was easy to learn but before it was overly obfuscated
The iPhone really screwed Gen Z.
X and Millennials had to do everything manually that our phones now do automatically for us.
We are the generation that learned how to use wireless mesh networks to text off Nintendo DS’s.
I actually was going along with this for 2 split seconds.
“Wait. WAIT! Is she serious?!”
looks like that company seriously suffers a huge lack of experts, maybe if you didnt get an answer, just resend your application as a word document with your salary expectation just “tripled” for … compensation purposes. whatever company still “depends” on microsoft still has heaps extra money it can easily divert to you without any real loss, so don’t waste that chance!
Well duh…PDF stands for “portable document file”, not “readable document file”.
You can send it, but no one can read it.You should use readable text files (RTF) instead.
Ahhhh! I finally understand what UTF means now!
:::slaps knee::: ohhh that’s Rich
Why did you put that behind a scratch-off?
Holy shit, I like calling it that now
🙇🏽♂️🤣🖖🏽
That’s my new name for spoiler tags
Aw, shucks. I’m gonna be famous? 🥹😭✨🤩
They want it as a word doc so they can edit it and fuck with it before passing it along.
They also like this for the off chance you forgot to disable revision history - so they can look at how you edited the document over time.
This isn’t even necessarily for nefarious reasons. I’ve actually had a case where HR was trying to help by putting in the words that they were stupidly required to find in a resume.
Still not a good sign of a properly functioning organization.
They should just learn to edit the pdfs if they’re sent with actual text.
Staffing agencies will do this to make you look more appealing to a client.
Or to throw it in whatever AI bullshit software they use that doesn’t support PDF
If a headhunter wants to put forth my resume as if I already contract with them, then they can start paying me.
I used to work IT at a school and reports were emailed to parents as PDFs.
We got a complaint from a few parents saying things like, why are the reports PDF? Not everyone has Acrobat Reader, you should be sending these out as Microsoft Word files.
I then had to tell them that unlike Microsoft Word, Acrobat Reader is free to download and install. Anyone can get Acrobat reader or another PDF viewer, but not everyone just has Word on their device nor are they willing to buy it.
I didn’t mention the part about a Word file is easy to just edit.
I’m also going to assume that some of them are using a work laptop where they have Word installed and no admin rights to install a PDF viewer and too lazy to ask IT.
Not just this, most (?all?) browsers now support viewing standard PDF documents… So, they shouldn’t even need to installing anything as long as they aren’t using IE…
Edge defaulting to the default pdf viewer is the bane of my existence
I should have added this was back in 2010 or so, I don’t think it was as common to be able to open PDFs in browsers without an addon.
I remember sometime after 2014 I was just able to open PDFs without any additional software.
I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve needed Acrobat Reader to view a PDF.
I wish I had 0th finger…
Can’t open a PDF? Fine, here is a JPEG of my resume.
I have been known to put high quality renders of my PDFs in word documents (image per page) to beat the file type validations.
.txt file it is
Fuck it if they can’t compile my LaTeX then they don’t deserve me.
.txt file
80 characters wide
With cool ASCII art, like those pirated software readme files. (Looking at you, Razor 1911)
Uh I love this idea and will be adopting it.
Right? Like, if I was a hiring manager, I would hire that person on the spot because I know they gots l33t hacking skillz.
Ah I love putting in sick ASCII art into my notes in R and other programming syntax. My advisors did not appreciate it as much as I did.
XML all the way.
JSON is compacter.
A nice little trick to get rid of that annoying recruiter spam. Archive your software eng resume in xz format and only competent HMs will read it. /s
Excellent plan if you ever need to apply to 2007.
The X in .docx is for XML. MS Word files have actually just been zipped XML files for years now.
It works. What else is needed?