Almost every single time I've submitted a resume through whatever process a company has to do so (which almost always includes one of these systems) I RARELY hear back in any decent amount of time (if at all; the amount of technology companies that have never sent any type of response to me at all is absolutely staggering).
However, if you can find the recruiter's email address, the email address for the head of a group you want to work for or even a hiring post (like HN's Who's Hiring) where they give you a direct email address to send to, those are almost ALWAYS the best.
I'll never forget applying to one company a while back where I submitted through their online process then, later that day, saw their email address in the Who's Hiring on HN and directly emailed them. I went through two interviews as a result of my direct email then almost a month later got a call from whoever received my first application. The crazy thing is that one was FAST and actually responded to me; most are super slow or never respond to me.
Even if you formatted well, you'll need to have enough keywords, etc. to win against the crowd.
Your time is better spent working on networking. My current job came from a friend's referral and honestly, I'm sure many companies will take a referred candidate over a candidate whose resume got the green-light from a machine.
I usually layout my resume in something like InDesign and render it as a PDF. Anecdotally, those parsers perform terribly on them.
For instance, a couple years ago Jobvite had a problem parsing tables in PDFs rendered with Adobe Quartz PDF print driver. They wouldn't allow you continue until the parser succeeded.
Their recommendation was that I rewrite my resume in Word.
Parsers are based on millions of CV-s as inputs and they are looking for patterns. I'd guess that layout is much more important than format.
If your resume is treated this way, how will you be?
There is a concern that drudgery weeds out the wrong people. However, "we want to hire people who have a strong desire to work here in particular" is a pretty common belief in SV and if you subscribe to it, then some putting the lowest-success-rate applicant pool (online resume drops) through some clerical annoyance makes perfect sense.
A better hoop to force applicants through would be one that demonstrates some aptitude for the job which, upon successful completion, gives them access to the job submission portal/email address.
For example in a customer service role have the applicant play a game that follows through a sample phone call where they have to choose the response they would give to a customers problem.
That said,
> word formats are pretty unamenable to parsing
Compared to what? Almost all resumes show up in .doc or .pdf format. Maybe the occasional snowflake will submit an HTML file, a WordPerfect document, or a .swf file.
Candidates submitting raw text (or something like JSON) are going to be few and far between. (Although RTF is actually straight text under the hood, and I'm surprised I don't see it mentioned more often.)
Some ATS keep first name, last name, email as the only mandatory fields and in that case a basic resume where you keep the name as the first thing on top would work. But most of the others ask for your visa status, ethnicity and various other things, so that has to be manual work again.
As far as i know most of the resumes made in simple LaTeX have had more chances of getting parsed.
PS : ATS refers to Applicant tracking systems which many companies use to post jobs and track applicants and manage the hiring process.
One example: Stripe asks if you're Hispanic/Latino: https://stripe.com/jobs/positions/engineer/apply .
Untrue.
> Employers who do that lose large lawsuits.
Employers who ask it during the application process usually do it in a manner which allows the data to be tracked in aggregate but separated from the application through the hiring decision process, and retain clear documentation of this process and its execution so as to be able to defend themselves against any charges of inappropriate use of the information in hiring decisions.
Many employers are required to report this information in aggregate, but I'm not sure that they are the only ones who track it for their own information.
That's a big lie there.
A while back I wrote a Python script automating Job applying procedure for Glassdoor. It worked for a guy who got the job. If one finds it interesting, contact me at kadnan at gmail.com. Both trial and paid version available
`print('Paypal me 20 bucks please!')`
Speaking of decompiling, offcourse one can do it but not everyone is a techie. My script is used by non-techies and good people :)
