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.
gen z or boomer?
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.
Technology needs to be actively taught and actively learned! If their school isn’t teaching it, maybe try subscribing to some online tech literacy courses?
That is absolutely an answer, but getting teens to take more classes after being done with school…? Good luck. The kids are issued chromebooks, that’s as much tech as they get.
I had my eldest help putting together her PC after she wanted to upgrade parts for her birthday. That’s promising, I think?
It should be part of elementary/highschool, like it was for me and most gen Y.
I suffered through word editing, excel, ppt, email setup, etc. on 10 year old machines, and it gave the foundations for my studies and life later.
It seems to be a per-school kind of thing. I am late millennial/early Gen Z, and my school had computer classes where we learned how to use Windows and Microsoft office, how to touch type, the meaning of computer terminology, and what the functionalities are of basic computer parts (eg, “CPU is the brain of the computer”). And later on we started learning how to use Photoshop and Illustrator.
I’m always surprised when I hear that other people don’t have that sort of in depth tech learning in their schools, and worse so, that some people don’t even have computer class. It just always felt like what we learned in computer class was an essential skill
I feel like I’m about as computer savvy as most gen z. Born in 91, but we was poor, so it was the family dell (that I wasn’t allowed to do much with*) until 2008, got my first laptop in 2009**, it broke almost immediately because poor and cheap, and then got my first smart phone (T-Mobile G1) in 2010, and basically didn’t touch a laptop again until I started school 2020. I basically started over from scratch at that point, but now I run fedora full time and made myself learn some basic stuff, but I would consider myself pretty tech illiterate.
*Because my brother was caught looking at porn, so computer time was severely cut back. Then I was caught sending sexy messages to someone. And then the final nail in the coffin was when I tried to dual boot it with some Linux distro, I don’t remember, borked it, and we had to wipe the hard drive
**Technically I had a netbook before this, in like 07/08, that I used Wubi to install Ubuntu on, and I loved that. But never got more than browser level into it.
Coding-wise I’d hazard that younger generations are on-par or better than my generation. But “jack of all trades” is probably more our wheelhouse.
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.
Millennials got it best born just when tech was easy to learn but before it was overly obfuscated
The iPhone really screwed Gen Z.
X and Millennials had to do everything manually that our phones now do automatically for us.
We are the generation that learned how to use wireless mesh networks to text off Nintendo DS’s.
Boomer.
As a gen z will echo that I’ve also seen some tech illiteracy from people my age as well.
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?
I recently found an ad requiring knowledge of win2000/XP
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.
Military and medical too.
It was for an electronics rework technician role, though. Outside of a wave/reflow oven’s interface, (which should have its own GUI) it didn’t really make sense.
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.
The biggest problem with these dinosaurs is when they stop working. Sourcing parts is getting more difficult.
If you think about it though, it is actually easier to find replacement parts for 70s-90s systems because there is now a small industry around it as well as collectors and there was a differrnt culture around it.
Replacing things from 2000s-2010s systems is the bigger issues. They were all taken over by giant corpos with all repair parts, manuals, and software restricted and hidden in the name of “profit” and “protecting corporate IP” and now it is not profitable enough for them to spend resources keeping stock of old parts or driver installers, so into the trash they go, never to be able to be seen again, and reproducing them also is note challenging with increasing system complexity.
The difference is that you can use new parts in computers from 2010s. You can also replace them easily without much difficulty, as the standards haven’t really changed that much.
But computers from the 80s and 90s are not compatible with modern platforms. Standards have changed, and new hardware thar uses standards like 32-bit PCI, ISA, MCA (for expansion cards), IDE are no longer manufactured. Even the CPU architecture had big changes between early x86 CPUs.
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.
Fuck them for not putting the requirement on the application and wasting everyone’s time though
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?
“Is the cheif candidate with us in the room now?”
The recruiters also like to remove your name and contact details so that the companies they are selling you to can’t bypass the recruiter.
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 not* exactly the sharpest knives in the kitchen…
It’s not even that (and I think you mean are not).
It’s because they are dealing with literally hundreds of resumes. They want to be lazy and just slap on their logo and be done.
PDFs just make this much harder than they want to put in.
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…
I think most recruiters are legitimately stupid.
Most of them certainly have no business recruiting for people in industries they’ve never worked in and can’t really comprehend the requirements for.
“Please do our work for us for free. Thank you for applying.”
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,
Well in my case that the eventual employer pays
Yes, with money they’re not paying you instead
That would only be the case under a profit share agreement and the vast VAST majorities of businesses see salary as a cost center.
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.
Exactly, so she is lying. It’s not that they can’t open it, it’s that they prefer word.
Not that you can’t copy out text from a digitally created pdf. Still, I only ever send my CV in a locked format, would never send an editable doc
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.
:::slaps knee::: ohhh that’s Rich
Why did you put that behind a scratch-off?
That’s my new name for spoiler tags
Aw, shucks. I’m gonna be famous? 🥹😭✨🤩
Holy shit, I like calling it that now
🙇🏽♂️🤣🖖🏽
Ahhhh! I finally understand what UTF means now!
“Portable Document Format”. If they can’t open it, fuck them, you don’t want to work for that tire fire.
Yeah, like… You can literally open it in your web browser wtf
The HR department might be shite, but the data team might be good.
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 would be a great opportunity to insert a bunch of crazy content hidden in the edit. Like passages of the Bible or edits of an erotic book you’ve been writing.
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.
Staffing agencies will do this to make you look more appealing to a client.
They should just learn to edit the pdfs if they’re sent with actual text.
Or to throw it in whatever AI bullshit software they use that doesn’t support PDF
If a headhunter wants to put forth my resume as if I already contract with them, then they can start paying me.
If you are an HR manager and you’re unable to open a PDF then you should first try and finish first grade high school before continuing your job.
How many great employees have YOU missed out on because you’re so lacking in basic life skills that one wonders how you found the tit as a baby to nourish yourself…
It’s because they feed the document to a parser and pdf parsers are more involved and may even require OCR. They aren’t unable, they’re inept and cheap
It’s more of an issue with the HR platforms not being able to read PDF’s. It doesn’t help opening a PDF outside of the platform you are using for hiring actions
If HR at a company doesn’t have the capability of opening the most common document format, that’s not a company worth working at. Doesn’t really matter if the idiots are HR, IT, or management.
Now that Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge can not only open but even fill PDFs straight out of the box, there’s no excuse to not be able to open a random PDF file these days. It means you’re either still using Internet Explorer or something equally dogshit
Don’t throw shade on IEx now! I’d rather not spend New Year’s waiting for the retort.
You can open pdf files. PDF files were designed to be interchangeable, and readable in the same way everywhere, it’s the entire point of the format. If some shit platform cannot open a PDF file, then you need a new platform, period. It’s a basic ingredients, it’s like leaving out potatoes in mashed potatoes. You can still open up the file outside the platform and if said platform doesn’t allow that then by god are you on the wrong wrong platform.
I have reviewed many resumes, I HATE Athenones that are sent in with word, it’s always a hassle to open, it always looks different on different versions, it requires me to have to deal with Microsoft shit which I don’t want, use PDF.
Elementary school*
All you do is double CLICK the fucking FILE. Your web browser will open it for you.
But the web browser won’t feed a stack of a thousand into a system that ranks them based on key words.
Well, this is obviously ridiculous. If you want to maximise your chances, make it as easy as possible. Send an exe.
You. I like you
.txt file it is
.txt file
80 characters wide
With cool ASCII art, like those pirated software readme files. (Looking at you, Razor 1911)
Uh I love this idea and will be adopting it.
Right? Like, if I was a hiring manager, I would hire that person on the spot because I know they gots l33t hacking skillz.
Ah I love putting in sick ASCII art into my notes in R and other programming syntax. My advisors did not appreciate it as much as I did.
With the chiptune music.
XML all the way.
Excellent plan if you ever need to apply to 2007.
The X in .docx is for XML. MS Word files have actually just been zipped XML files for years now.
It works. What else is needed?
JSON is compacter.
A nice little trick to get rid of that annoying recruiter spam. Archive your software eng resume in xz format and only competent HMs will read it. /s
Fuck it if they can’t compile my LaTeX then they don’t deserve me.
I used to work IT at a school and reports were emailed to parents as PDFs.
We got a complaint from a few parents saying things like, why are the reports PDF? Not everyone has Acrobat Reader, you should be sending these out as Microsoft Word files.
I then had to tell them that unlike Microsoft Word, Acrobat Reader is free to download and install. Anyone can get Acrobat reader or another PDF viewer, but not everyone just has Word on their device nor are they willing to buy it.
I didn’t mention the part about a Word file is easy to just edit.
I’m also going to assume that some of them are using a work laptop where they have Word installed and no admin rights to install a PDF viewer and too lazy to ask IT.
Not just this, most (?all?) browsers now support viewing standard PDF documents… So, they shouldn’t even need to installing anything as long as they aren’t using IE…
Edge defaulting to the default pdf viewer is the bane of my existence
I should have added this was back in 2010 or so, I don’t think it was as common to be able to open PDFs in browsers without an addon.
I remember sometime after 2014 I was just able to open PDFs without any additional software.
I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve needed Acrobat Reader to view a PDF.
I wish I had 0th finger…
If you can’t open 90% of pdfs sent from different sources then you’re the problem
I don’t want to work somewhere if they can’t even open a PDF. The fuck kind of Windows 3.1 machines are they using.
Even that wouldn’t be an excuse: https://winworldpc.com/product/acrobat-reader/3x
I work for a small/med business MSP. You have no idea
I also wonder what the fuck they’re even looking at the site with. Any modern version of Windows can open PDF’s without needing to install additional software. If they’re using Mac’s I’m not sure, but given that Office similarly would need to be installed to open a Word doc I’m pretty sure they could also install a PDF reader at that point …
Mac also opens PDFs natively
Sorry I can’t see this picture, can you upload it as a word document please?
I used to do layout and design for children’s books. I cannot tell you the number of times I requested an image to be edited, or a higher resolution version, only to be sent a word doc with the image inside the document.
lol, that’s a boomer classic
I asked someone to send me an image once (I think their logo) and they wanted to know if I prefer word or excel format?
When you email a graphic artist and ask them if they can send the file with layers and they send you an xls document with extra workbook tabs you know you are in for a fun day.
I’ve gotten a screenshot in a word doc that was printed and then scanned to email. I couldn’t see a gd thing.
Can’t open a PDF? Fine, here is a JPEG of my resume.
I have been known to put high quality renders of my PDFs in word documents (image per page) to beat the file type validations.
What the hell? Every bit of resume advice I’ve ever gotten has said to use PDF to protect from potential formatting errors due to display differences.
The great thing about random tech illiterate assholes posting “hot tips” like this on LinkedIn is that they very often don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.
That, and also to ensure they can open the document. I don’t use word processors in my daily job, yet I do interviews, so if someone gives me a Word Document or similar, I’m going to be put out to read it. PDFs, on the other hand, render just fine in my web browser.
I’ve experienced formatting issues on different installs of Microsoft Word that both are M365, so its not even like we’re throwing Office 2007 into the mix to get weird extra pages or other formatting problems
Removed by mod
I always think of the one green text where the first thing the person does when they get resumes is to throw the top half of the pile in the bin cause:
Can’t have any unlucky people working here.
