Heh I've been applying to some gigs recently and those job application pages! They can be infuriatinggggg.
Oh, upload the resume that you just spent 2 hours tweaking and feel great about? Simple enough you think. No, a parser tries to extract all of the relevant information from the PDF and place it in the appropriate fields with about a -50% success rate. Now it looks like you've had 5 jobs in the past 5 years.
Want to upload a cover letter? Not an option, but you can use this text box widget thing with some basic functionality. Of course, you just can't copy and paste the pre-written cover letter, because the widget completely screws up the formatting and now it's a jumbled mess with no structure between paragraphs. Easy to fix, but still.
I guess the worst part is, there is nothing to indicate that your perfectly formatted resume that you uploaded will ever been seen by someone.
My mistake, that's the second worst part. The worst part is having to create a new account for each of these career "portals".
> The worst part is having to create a new account for each of these career "portals".
Oh it gets way better than that. How about when you are applying to XXX company through a portal and YYY company also uses the same portal? And how about when it won't allow you to use the same email address, as if that is some highly suspicious activity that should be disallowed?
I really wish the standard was to just ask you to upload your resume and cover letter as a PDF. Dont have any auto extraction. Then have some forms to fill out for basic info that shouldn't take more then 5 minutes.
I loathe the processes that have you upload a resume and then take 30 minutes to fill out forms of information that asks questions that should already be on your resume. It's feels painfully redundant but also makes me worry that they will look at the form data, not my resume/cover letter that I uploaded.
But then they can't just do a quick search for the specific skills or sort by years of experience, making the recruiter's job longer and more expensive. I keep a text only copy of my resume specifically for pasting into job applications since my resume never gets parsed correctly.
I've actually gotten to the point where I just skip applying to jobs when I'm redirected to one of those portals. Fuck 'em. The only exception is when I think it's a company I really, really want to work for, and there aren't many of those any more.
If you really [think that you] want to work somewhere, and this is what I've done in the past, you can just look up their recruiters on linkedin or something and cold call them - most recruiters or HR departments are overjoyed at this kind of personal attention, and can even get you some perks and recognition along the way. Plus you just send a nice email (your cover letter essentially, but not as forced) and attach a resume formatted as you please.
Might not be anywhere near 100% overall but when it works it makes for a really lovely experience.
I did exactly this before leaving my previous position. We had a friendly 45min call the next day, just talking about my current situation at the time and he was thrilled I reached out to him directly.
And each one wants you to create an account and a password, each with different requirements for # of letters, digits, and special characters. Because, you know, people are always trying to break into these sites to post fake resumes.
Exactly my theory, especially after having worked for two companies where their process included the shitty portals.
I figured out later that they use these portals because turnover is so high their recruiters can't keep up with demand for fresh meat. One of them couldn't even retain their internal recruiters, so they outsourced the entire recruiting and vetting process.
I think most of these start out as as management having to justify sharepoint licenses. I wonder how many of the "can't find qualified people" companies are doing this? It's amazing the steps some employers will take to limit the employee pool.
I use two columns to list my duties and assignments at previous jobs to reduce page length as handing out a one sheet at job fairs works really nice. The parsers always end up collating the lines together into a jumbled mess. I just now keep a copy for humans to look at and a text file copy for me to copy text from.
The best company job site I've used would allow me to use my linkedin profile to log in then it would just pull all my resume data from my profile. The only thing I actually had to fill out was just a cover letter. I applied to a bunch of positions within a hour although I never got a call back from them.
Oh, upload the resume that you just spent 2 hours tweaking and feel great about? Simple enough you think. No, a parser tries to extract all of the relevant information from the PDF and place it in the appropriate fields with about a -50% success rate. Now it looks like you've had 5 jobs in the past 5 years.
Want to upload a cover letter? Not an option, but you can use this text box widget thing with some basic functionality. Of course, you just can't copy and paste the pre-written cover letter, because the widget completely screws up the formatting and now it's a jumbled mess with no structure between paragraphs. Easy to fix, but still.
I guess the worst part is, there is nothing to indicate that your perfectly formatted resume that you uploaded will ever been seen by someone.
My mistake, that's the second worst part. The worst part is having to create a new account for each of these career "portals".