Original post: aus.social (Mastodon)
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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This is why the PDF format exists
But then recruitment companies can't get you in to trouble by editing and embellishing your CV before sending it to the potential employer. /S (and yes this came up before)
And why everyone hates it, because when you feed it into their automated CV parser to scrape for details like your employment history and email, it doesn't seem understand the format, or re-OCR's the text to make errors, and out comes garbage.
Word is sadly the defacto way to get a foot in through the door
I would question the applicant's computer literacy if they send me their CV as anything other than pdf. Basically never seen that though
Imagine you're a firm drowning in CVs - surely you would feed everything into a PDF parser, ask an AI to summarize, and filter based on that. Good CVs can be missed this way. DocX is the safest option.
If the company is that incompetent, I'd only wanted to work there if I'm really desperate. I'd hope it never comes to this.
Might be different where you live or in your sector, but no competent company in Germany would go with AI summaries. The chance that the AI misses a statement that the applicant might be disabled and could sue for discrimination is too high.
Also, we have to open CVs in the browser within the hiring application, download is not allowed for data security reasons. The renderer for Word files is definitely not good enough to guarantee that the files render correctly.
Personally, we're looking for highly skilled people in a specialized field, I'd never trust an AI summary, but we're also not being swarmed by applicants. If the company looks for a barista, your approach might be better. But proofing computer literacy is not really necessary then anyway.
On top of that, for us presentation and the general "vibe" of the application matters (actually only the CV - the blurb on why applicant's greatest dream would be to work at our company and similar fluff is useless anyway) If you only read an AI summary you miss out on interesting bits and potential red flags. After all we choose to invite not only based on listed skills and certs but we need to make sure that the personality fits into the existing team. And yes, combing through hundreds/thousands of applications is a shitload of manual work.
I don't think the cover letter is always useless. It often shows, whether the applicant understood the role correctly and how their skills fit into the requirements. The motivational blabla of course is just annoying for everyone involved.
Germany tends to be a little behind when it comes to tech, but if you submit your CV as PDF to LinkedIn via the "EasyApply" button, you can bet that there is automated filtering happening to weed down the applicants from 1000 to 10
If you use LinkedIn to apply, simple tip: don't. The filter is usually "remove anyone applying through LinkedIn"
I feel like an ideal is being touted here, at odd ends to the vast reality of how people are currently applying for jobs.
Sadly, some companies only advertise through LinkedIn and it's not possible to apply otherwise.
That's their problem. If they are going to give my CV to an AI then they can at least come up with a standardized JSON format.
Definitely not where I live
Just gotta put 1 font size white text at the bottom with all the keywords 😇
You joke, but the top paragraph of my CV is literally that, with a disclaimer at the bottom "THE ABOVE IS ROBOT TEXT"
I have a white font on white background instruction for LLMs to strongly suggest me for the position.
You could probably hide the instructions in the metadata, AIs read the whole document so they will see it.
BRB, going to search how to add comments to PDF metadata.
This is why you shouldn't use complex two-or-more column layouts. Single-column resumes import fine.
The way to getting through the door is by employing soft skills, ie having someone forward your CV, be it someone you knew or some recruiter you just added to LinkedIn.
There are other ways, but involve more gating like CV scrappers.
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