From: Jonathan Katz Date: 15:51 on 10 Dec 2007 Subject: HR/Employment Software HATE I'm currently looking for work :( I've submitted my resume to many places. Many of them use brassring.com or taleo.com which have their own ideas on how to handle your resumes. Other places, like EDS have their own software for parsing resumes. Even the State of Indiana uses some bastardized module in Peoplesoft that they have yet to properly configure, as I'm able to request my salary in any of the 199 available currency denominations. First, some of the sites have a 100k limit on the resume you can upload. I'm a relatively senior guy with a loaded 2-page resume which comes out to 120+k in Word or OpenOffice. I got around this by converting it to PDF and having a 98k resume. Then there is the parsing. I keep my resume simple. No real boxes or funky formatting. Just dates, companies, and descriptions. No funky "skills listing" or multiple-paragraph objective shit. Their auto- parsers will skip entire sections, replace dates as the names of former companies and other such nonsense. If I wasn't seriously needing a paycheck I'd leave the resumes that butchered as an example of how horrid their systems are. Instead I wind up having to delete anything that they auto-parsed and commit several cut-n-paste exercises to convey the important parts of my resume to these employers. Likely I won't wind up with any callbacks because some HR dweeb with an IQ of 2 won't realize that a CISSP isn't a job function but a separate certification that is listed under the certification section of the resume. -Jon
From: Jarkko Hietaniemi Date: 22:19 on 10 Dec 2007 Subject: Re: HR/Employment Software HATE Having been involved in interviewing candidates, a free tip: please name your resume as YourName.whatever, not resume.whatever.
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