[masfuerte]

I've been doing this for years. Unfortunately I'm looking for a job now and there's no escape from it. The job sites, the agencies, the employers' sites - they are all awful.

The best one was an employer's site that described itself as "Easy Apply"! You had to give it a resume, which it parsed, badly, and sprayed randomly into about a thousand text boxes. I thought maybe the problem was starting with a pdf, so I began again with a Word document. The results were exactly the same, suggesting they exported to pdf and used the same shitty parser.

Having to rearrange all this text into the correct boxes was annoying enough, but they weren't just vanilla text boxes. They were janky javascript abominations that responded to input really slowly.

And employers moan that they have trouble finding good staff.

[rrr_oh_man]

> And employers moan that they have trouble finding good staff.

Employers have trouble finding good staff that they can pay peanuts.

A shitty application form is a great filter for people who are desparate and will put up with low pay and toxic corporate idiosyncrasies.

[bboygravity]

Reminds me of ASML's yearly whining (they form cartels with other tech businesses in the region to keep max compensation down and are then acting surprised that they can't find local engineers who deliberately avoid the company).

[fHr]

Nice, I can't understand their growth potential could be like infinite they operate in the right space and have the right tech and fill in a nice niche. But C-suite and shareholders dividends need to be maximalized and engineeres enslaved I guess. Man I love latestage capitalism /s.

[rrr_oh_man]

I bought capitalism.boo last night. wanna do something with it?

[WalterBright]

> engineers who deliberately avoid the company .. engineeres enslaved

Not sure how you equated the two.

[michaelcampbell]

Who/what is ASML?

[sedawk]

I believe they are talking about ASML fab for semiconductors[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding

[interludead]

But on the other hand many really well skilled would avoid the application

[rrr_oh_man]

"Thank god, they would have left anyway."

[hackable_sand]

Recently I almost completed one that was equal parts data harvesting form and job application.

The original link was through a third-party job board. The job board tried to trick me into signing up in order to jump to the posting.

The job "app" itself was actually two applications. One was an automated resume parser that was just... incorrect. The second was a manual-entry form that asked for the same information. :D

Funny enough, I got to the "Why do you want to work for A Shady Company with Questionable Morals?" series of questions I was actually given a chance to stop and sober up to the idea:

A human being (allegedly) put together the most byzantine hiring process to conceal something, and if they actually do hire someone, it will be a self-selected fanatic who needs the cash more than the indulgence.

[akudha]

One recruiter asked for my high school scores, from 20 years ago. For a 3 month contract job. Another recruiter wanted to know my salary expectations first, before giving me a single detail about the job. When I refused politely, she yelled at me.

There are lots of adults who never grew up, never learned words like please or thank you, feel super entitled etc.

It is not our job to help these people (unless they happen to be friends or family, even then we can only try). Best thing to do is avoid, and look for good people to talk to, do business with. Life is too short to waste on shitty stuff - people or otherwise

[prepend]

It’s actually good that they are so stupid so soon. It’s nice to filter those people early than to spend time on the application to learn how stupid the organization is.

[xcdzvyn]

Yeah, Canonical asks you how you performed in your high school English class as if that's something you're supposed to know.

Is that really a valuable metric for a software engineer?

[jasonpeacock]

Tell them you graduated with honors from AP English and your teacher called you "the next Faulkner".

Or tell them that your high school didn't offer English class, learning was student-led and project-based.

Or you took the GED at 12yrs to skip high school and study puffin colonies in Alaska with your aunt.

How are they going to fact-check any of that?

[thaumasiotes]

One memorable part of getting paid coaching for interviews was the admonishment "There is no place for honesty in a behavioral interview. No one is going to check on your story."

[Karellen]

A coach that you paid money to advised you to lie during a behavioural interview?

Well, that could certainly give the prospective employers plenty of information about the way you behave.

I wonder how many lies the coach told you about themselves and their qualifications, on the belief that you'd never check on their story.

[deprecative]

It makes sense though. The employer will lie constantly in one of those interviews. It's best to shore up your chances. This is the system employers wanted so give it to them. It's not like you'll be working there in three years anyway.

[Thiez]

> Well, that could certainly give the prospective employers plenty of information about the way you behave.

That's the beauty; how would they know? The information is completely unverifiable so all such an interview does is find the person best at telling you what you want to hear.

[thaumasiotes]

> Well, that could certainly give the prospective employers plenty of information about the way you behave.

How? Do you think he was wrong about them checking?

> I wonder how many lies the coach told you about themselves and their qualifications, on the belief that you'd never check on their story.

None; he was randomly assigned to me by the platform.

[akudha]

My guess is that they are trying to vacuum as much information as possible. It is easy to do ("I can do nothing, the client is asking for the high school scores, not me!"). Who knows what they are doing with that data

[pydry]

No, the CEO is just fucking weird and doesn't seem to mind that he puts people off with his low wages and idiosyncratic, drawn out hiring practices.

[quaddo]

Is it possible they’re trying to separate out candidates who studied English literature as a matter of typical high school education vs those who studied ESL back in their home countries?

[kmoser]

Knowing your ability to communicate in English is a useful metric, but asking for your high school English grade is definitely not the right way to go about it.

[trentnix]

For sure, job application submission is an awful mess. As a rule, I won’t apply anywhere that uses Workday, considering they require you to create an account to submit your application.

Truth is, any company that makes getting a job an awful experience (despite every incentive to the contrary) won’t be any better once you’re an employee.

[Terr_]

> As a rule, I won’t apply anywhere that uses Workday, considering they require you to create an account to submit your application.

At work, we've made chat interface product that takes data from (account-less) visiting applicants and makes Workday job-applications on their behalf.

So maybe that makes the world just a slightly better place... Or it's maybe it's the opposite because it enables Workday? Hard to say.

[otteromkram]

On the flipside, there's Oracle HCM which doesn't let you create an account and makes you verify your email address with each subsequent job app. They rely on cookies for all of this.

No thanks. I'll take workday over that. I like using passwords and don't like tracking cookies, so I guess I'm weird.

[interludead]

I remember how difficult it is to find a job nowadays. It sends shivers down your spine. Good luck to everyone who is searching!

[Voultapher]

Culture permeates

[wuj]

Greenhouse and Lever have the most convenient job application interface IMO. The application area is one page, which means you can navigate using tab. There's also no need to create an account and verify email address (Though I understand why some portals do that to prevent spams).

[baby_souffle]

> The best one was an employer's site that described itself as "Easy Apply"! You had to give it a resume, which it parsed, badly, and sprayed randomly into about a thousand text boxes. I thought maybe the problem was starting with a pdf, so I began again with a Word document. The results were exactly the same, suggesting they exported to pdf and used the same shitty parser.

Ohh, let me guess. Workday? There are a few application systems that offer this functionality but workday is _consistently_ the worst at parsing whatever I give it (text, markdown, html, pdf...).

[ykonstant]

More than one university in the UK had exactly this procedure. I eventually gave up on applying, but even before that I was 90% sure no meaningful information would reach the hiring committee.

[david38]

A few things for when applying for jobs-

* use a dedicated gmail * use a dedicated google voice number * have your PDF resume up to date, maybe a few versions of it for different types of jobs * keep a formatted text version of it as well for those horrible text boxes

[desro]

i have found the recent crop of SotA LLMs to be extremely useful for the latter few tasks you mentioned. Give it my full, comprehensive CV, as well as a prospective job description, then ask "tailor a condensed resume from the info in my CV to match this job description."

Of course you'll want to review and edit, but it's taken a huge amount of drudgery out of the process, for which I am grateful.

[tomjen3]

I hate writing job applications, so even if LLMs aren't good enough yet, at least they are a start.

[interludead]

This gives you some structure to start with.

[CM30]

Oh god job application forms are a travesty. Every single company seems to do it differently, about half of them seem to like making the form ten times longer than necessary and good luck figuring out whether your submission will actually get checked by anyone or thrown straight into the trash by an automated system.

And I definitely emphasise with the 'easy apply' auto fill crap. Those are incredibly unreliable at the best of times, and a waste of time all around.

But the worst ones to me have to be the incredibly lengthy 'ask everything' forms that way too many large companies and government agencies like too much. The ones which feel less like a job application, and more like filing your taxes. Way too often you'll go for something on LinkedIn, see a form, then notice it says something like 'part 1 of 20' at the top of the page because someone at Microsoft thought letting companies add a ton of unique questions was a 'great' feature.

[justinclift]

Nah. If you see that kind of thing, just nope out from that place and move on to the next one.

There's no shortage of places looking for people. :)

[fHr]

fr easy aply is so dogshit, most of these parsers for your cv can't handle the most basic shit, with my limited knowledge dealing with headless browsing with phantomjs I could come up with a better solution in an afternoon easily. Sorry but using a parser that can't even read experiences or education section to easy in a >10k+ tech company that does software is just not bearable.

[WalterBright]

> I could come up with a better solution in an afternoon easily

I once did some contract work to write a parser for that. It wasn't long before I realized the variety of resumes made it completely impractical, and had to abandon the project. (I didn't charge for my time on it.)

If you could do a better one in an afternoon, you can make good money doing that.

[throwaway598]

Not a core competence so vendor solution is used.

That's financialisation. That's maximising value. Right?

[WalterBright]

I do my own mechanical work, but am a disaster at painting. So I hire that out.

It's not "financialization". It's the economic Law of Comparative Advantage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

It only makes sense to do in business what one has an aptitude for, and pay others to do the other stuff. I bet you don't grow your own food, or make your own soap, either.

[eddd-ddde]

Hopefully one of the areas that LLMs can actually improve. I expect an LLM to fairly accurate parse content from resumes. Maybe we even start using plain text resumes.

[nox101]

I'd expect LLM parsers to enforce a monoculture in that small variations from the norm will mess it up and it will downrate/discard lots of edge cases

[dotnet00]

That's already the case with existing resume parsers and evaluators. LLMs might at least broaden the monoculture somewhat.

[mistrial9]

I expect that LLMs will be used aggressively by a subset of employers for exactly all the lazy and asymmetric power reasons that an employee can think of.. being automation, the footprint of that employer subset will be much larger on the whole, and often be the first or only resort for the desperate, uninformed etc applicants