The whispering is all in her head and says she sucks
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.
Our front desk person, on the computer all day, barely understands how tabs work.
It’s scary.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I met a company that still has a machine in their production line, that uses 5.25" floppy discs and an amber monochrome display. “Why?” I hear you ask. Because it still works, it isn’t networked, and the floppies next to it are the only ones it’ll ever interact with.
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.
It is common knowledge.
Bots can scrape PDFs.
I had about 50 applications of proof where bots scraped the information from my PDF and auto-filled it into the next forms which are again simply re-typing in all of the information from your resume again (which most medium or large companies use anyway which makes the entire point moot). They can scrape PDFs unless you hand-write your resume with bad handwriting so the OCR can’t pick it up.
Unless they got their ATS system from aliexpress, it can scrape PDFs.
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.
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?
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…
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,
I have great experience with third party recruiters. I only ever had to send them a CV (as PDF!) and they took care of the rest. I just had to go to the interview. The company hired and payed for the recruiter so for me it’s a win.
Granted, in my last two job searches I never looked for open positions myself, I answered messages from recruiters in my inbox. So it’s more that they were applying to me. Most messages can be ignored because the recruiters have no idea what they are talking about.
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.
“Portable Document Format”. If they can’t open it, fuck them, you don’t want to work for that tire fire.
Nah. A good team will desert a bad company. And if their main interface is some pencil-pusher with a DENIED stamp, they’ll be a good dev for a better company soon.
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.
