No Stupid Questions

Old school human readable and machine readable. Redundant now but the sufferring is funny to some, so it must continue.

Because fuck you, that’s why. You’re not a human being to them.

To make you jump through hoops. How else can they know for sure that you follow directions no matter how stupid they are.

Free labor. Gotta know early if you'll do redundant useless tasks without compensation.

Because your experience as a job applicant is not high on their list of priorities. Their job application portal was made by an intern 25 years ago, and has been updated in a haphazard fashion by other interns according to the whims of random middle managers who wanted X or Y information at some point through the years. How seamless and enjoyable your experience is literally doesnt matter at all to them up until the point where they start failing to attract mid-tier applicants because of it. If anyone is aware of how shitty it is at all, they don't care, because fixing it requires time that that person could instead spend on (1) things that will look good on their resume to get a promotion or another job, (2) things they were actually told to do so they won't get fired, or (3) going home and having a life.

Why don't they just use AI to read the resumes and categorize applicants? Well, because AI is often wrong. And because implementing an AI solution takes someone's time, and (again) all those someones want to spend their time elsewhere.

Job applicants that they actually want to hire don't go through that portal. They find out about the job via networking, then their interview consists of a hearty handshake.

Because fuck you, that’s why

It’s the first step in you accepting the fact that you are a useless piece of meat for them to abuse. If you can’t accept that first step, you could not possibly accept everything that comes afterward. and it will always get much worse after that.

And if you’re unwilling to accept that abuse, you’re not a suitable candidate for wage slavery at whatever company you just applied to

One is for HR to use to immediately reject your application. The other is to train their AI model.

To make sure you will follow directions without question even if they don't make any sense

My conspiracy theory is that it's a plausibly deniable way to filter out disabled people

HR reads the forms. The hiring manager reads the resume.

For us it was design.

The form submission and info would go to HR for background checks and systems, I usually didn’t look at that information, just the resume. My department was about animation and designed, so the first step of the process was seeing how much attention to detail you gave your resume. All that design would also throw off some of those resume scanning apps as well. It may have gotten better at doing so, but at least for me it did help.

Every once in a while people would forget to add obvious information on their resume, like their website, address, etc (usually the first red flag). That’s when that redundant info would also help.

To let you know how the relationship is going to go.

It's easy to make you do it, that's all.

Structured data vs. unstructured data. The form is structured data and it can be manipulated easily and reliably with code. With unstructured data it's a lot of guesswork and chance.

Also sometimes HR can't use the resume because the name could reveal gender or ethnicity and they need to blind that. And it's not trivial to manipulate any part of the resume to do that masking.

It's for the Dept. of Redundancy Dept.

Has it happened to you that there is something that you don't know how to put in the limited set of options they give you? They don't know what the proper fix would be either without fixing the forms. Of course they don't want to fix anything, so you better figure out a way to make that data fit in if you want it there.

Or further will auto parse your resume and then do it wrong and then appear to allow you to make changes only for those changes to revert once you you confirm the application.

Laziness because it is literally their job. I've done it a hundred times and I have no other explanation.

For the same reason that when you research and buy a product, the computer starts telling you to buy the product you just bought. Absurdity.

Whatever HR systems they’re using are designed one way, and they aren’t designed to interface with whatever file type your resume is. And they likely never will be.

So they don’t have to.

To make life even more of a hassle. Ugh

My HR did/does that. It's super annoying. They basically keep records to be able to use them against you one day for good or bad.

Like if you hurt yourself...hmmm ok let's put some safety in place. But if you do it several times, obviously you are a liability so GTFO! Or if you complain about something, they tell you to wait some time before firing you. Otherwise it might look like retaliation...then if you say ..oh retaliation....hmmm judge, this idiot kept clumsily getting hurt at work. So we did something to keep him safe. But in reality if because you are just not effective and complained about it. HR is a bunch of sneaky bastards. They're not there to help you. They're just there to help themselves and the company. The company, not you.

Poorly designed process. Would you really want to work for that company?

On another note you see this across the board with technology now. Its optimized to work well for the business and not give a trump about the customer. Especially if the customer will not just give up all power and allow the system to automically charge them and such.

My guess is so that their system can present red flags like long periods of unemployment or short job retention.

HR is a parasite that's infected every aspect of corporatica

There shouldn't be the same data except for intentional or trivial duplication. Your resume is for humans to read. The form is for machines to verify you can do the job and that you really have experience for the job level. These are different purposes and need to be treated differently.

Write your resume for humans to read, so figure out what they are looking for and give them that. sometimes 5 years in a job is just one line "I wasn't letting my experience rot but otherwise you don't care so I won't waste you time", while a single year of interesting to them work can be 15 lines.

Write the machine forms to be honest - they might check that you really worked those dates and had the job title so don't lie. They will flag a gap in dates but the 2 years fast food is just as good as anything else. They know what java is so if that is a checkbox item you better have it, but they don't know the difference between 10 years extensive experience and I saw java for 15 minutes every year for the last 10. (don't lie about your abilities, but if you know the job won't be writing java you just need to convince the machine you have enough java to check the box and move onto the humans who make decisions).

Note that I assume above you have done some research. You can't always figure out if a job that wants 10 years java really is writing java, or if java is a buzzword - but often you can. Don't submit any resume until you have 15 minutes research into the job/company, but time limit your research to no more than a couple hours (set a timer at 1 hour and decide if either the research is interesting anyway; or you know you have a good chance and are learning things that give you a better chance).

Use auto fill in your browser for all.

If you're typing that shit manually, you don't deserve the job.