Why Resumes Are Dead and How Indeed.com Keeps Killing the Job Market

The author says they&#x27;ve been applying to thousands of jobs.<p>This is the resume the author is linking in the article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dropbox.com&#x2F;scl&#x2F;fi&#x2F;v2sv6ev393z9fkk62v1hw&#x2F;Paul-Fuhr-2023-CV.pdf?rlkey=sb71duxptnyg1oqnollohd8t8&amp;dl=0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dropbox.com&#x2F;scl&#x2F;fi&#x2F;v2sv6ev393z9fkk62v1hw&#x2F;Paul-Fu...</a><p>I wonder, if this person&#x27;s main method of applying has been online forms where you click the &quot;upload resume&quot;, he puts this resume in and then everything fails from the start because the ATS is unable to read it. It looks like the text in the resume is not text but an image.<p>I read some posts back this year that most publicly advertised positions get bazillion applications, most of which suck, so you have to assume a computer program is going to filter your resume first, unless you&#x27;ve been referred in.<p>I don&#x27;t like his resume that much, I think it&#x27;s a bit too embellished but if I needed a person with his kind of experience (based on the resume), I would talk to them. But if I also had 2000 other applications in front of me, I am not going to read them one by one without using a helper tool to filter them.

While my sympathy goes out to this person, I think this entire long, rambling, post could be condensed to a paragraph, or even a sentence: &quot;It was a mistake for me to use Indeed.com.&quot;<p>If you want the job (of finding leads, and finding jobs) done right, hire a professional -- a recruiter who will charge a fee and is aligned towards you finding a job. Trying to cold-apply to every single job with a spray and pray approach is about as fruitful as cold calling every company you can to sell a product which may or may not apply to them. People hate middlemen until they use non-curated marketplaces with low quality or outright fake inventory. Then they begrudgingly realize why the middleman came into existence in the first place.<p>Make peace with the middleman. Find the competent ones and build relationships with them. If you do that, you may not always have the best job in the world, but you won&#x27;t be so woefully out of touch with reality that you write a blog post like this blaming something that&#x27;s clearly a consequence of your own actions on the rest of the world.

Im my more than 10 years of experience as a software engineer, I’ve never used once indeed.com. It always looked to me as a place where 90% or more of the job ads are either scam or of very little quality.

Want to start by saying I <i>do</i> really empathize with this person. But I can&#x27;t help but shake my head a little when I read <i>way</i> too unnecessarily long missives like this (I admit, I only got a couple of paragraphs in before I bailed) and think &quot;this person just doesn&#x27;t get it.&quot;<p>Some points:<p>1. First, to start, I have a ton of empathy for this person being in an <i>extremely</i> challenging field. He essentially did internal communications for JP Morgan for the last 10 years of their career or so. Any sort of &quot;content creation&quot; role that doesn&#x27;t have a direct tie to revenue is going to be under the knife at most companies these days. These roles are also the ones that are most in jeopardy due to AI&#x2F;ChatGPT. There was a recent Washington Post article where it highlighted some copywriters who basically lost their jobs to ChatGPT. It&#x27;s not &quot;coming&quot;, it&#x27;s already here.<p>2. Small not-so-secret: if you are beyond the age of 30 or so, and you are a relatively high level professional (this person listed VP on his resume), you should be worried if you don&#x27;t think you&#x27;d be able to get your next job through your professional network. That is, most jobs at this level may put out a job req on Indeed (often for legal reasons), but it&#x27;s likely to be filled by a referral. Even if it&#x27;s not a referral, it&#x27;s very likely that the applicant knows <i>someone</i> through their network (even if a degree or two away) that can serve as a better reference.<p>Whenever I see missives like this where the author is semi-baffled their &quot;Send my resume to 1000 open positions&quot; approach didn&#x27;t work, I&#x27;m not surprised.

Never used indeed.com once. But...people should know that these sites, and recruiters, are basically hiring theater. Almost all jobs (perhaps excepting FAANG meat grinder) are filled through personal connections.

I&#x27;m stuck in a similar loop and I understand the author&#x27;s frustration.<p>Everything feels automated, and it feels like all I can do is look forward to the rare moments when I actually speak with a person about their role and try to showcase my experience and skills.<p>It&#x27;s demoralizing. I&#x27;ve taken to doing freelance AI data annotation work, which is somewhat boring and not using my full capabilities, but while I&#x27;m in this limbo, I&#x27;m not sure what else to do.

This dude was a VP at JP. Surely he should be networking for a job, not applying to job sites?! Seems like they are going down the wrong channel. I’ve never filled a senior position in my teams via CVs, and always through word of mouth.<p>The problem with the job market is many-fold: 1. Volume. It’s easier to travel, move, work remotely etc. so there are just so many applicants for any given post. Also skills are more transferable than ever. 2. Opaqueness: salaries usually not posted as it’s uncouth to mention. Titles no longer industry standard. Job reqs are works of corporate poetry, not realistic descriptions. So people can’t contextualise. 3. Fake internal roles: apparently some companies have policies to advertise all jobs even if it’s 99% going to be filled by an internal candidate. Apparently it stems from non discrimination law. 4. Hubris: we live in a society where everyone (especially me) eternally feels under paid and overqualified. 5. Lies: the bar of what is a lie and what is a polished CV is personal and not agreed on.

Personal websites or linkedin profiles for non-techies would address a lot of the problems he&#x27;s describing. Actually, linkedIn makes sense for everyone as the profile outline is standardized across users, so anyone interested can scrape info as needed.<p>edit to say that there needs to be a less social version of linkedin, so just a profile without any of the cringe-inducing toxic positivity.

Some years ago I was moving to a different state and looking for a job. I ended up doing interviews at six different companies. Five of those came from direct personal connections (mostly via coworkers) and one came from generic search &#x2F; cold application. After the interviews, I got five offers. The only place that didn&#x27;t give me an offer was the one from the generic search. It also paid significantly less than the others and simply didn&#x27;t seem as interesting. My takeaway is that cultivating a network of people who you&#x27;ve worked with and enjoy is invaluable for increasing your options when you come to new decision points in your career.

Is their evidence that Indeed is posting scraped jobs from other services?<p>The reason this doesn&#x27;t make sense is as an employer, we found that Indeed produced the highest number of candidates but cost like $400 per listing. We would first post somewhere cheaper and then post on Indeed if we couldn&#x27;t find a qualified applicant.<p>We would have loved to post somewhere else for less money and have it be scraped and listed on Indeed for free. It&#x27;s difficult to believe that their listings are being scraped from somewhere else as the actually customer is the job poster not the applicant.

IMO job sites were dead the day the launched.<p>I posted a job ad on jobs.gc.ca in early 2000s which is a government site, with junk UX and even then I got about 200 applications.<p>Then about five years ago I have talked to my last employer. And they used StackOverflow jobs and got 350 applications just the first day for a super niche position (Perl related). No doubt most applications are unrelated spam.<p>Now, how do you expect these people to objectively review every single application and pick you?<p>It’s not possible.<p>You must do things differently to stand out.<p>Or network.<p>But that’s just another way of saying “do things differently”.

I applied to indeed.com once, and it was the most demoralizing experience of my life.<p>I&#x27;m a fairly accomplished sr. software developer; my last official title was &quot;sr software scientist&quot;.<p>I&#x27;ve worked on internationally famous software research projects, worked on the original tech for CD-ROMs at Philips, was on the OS teams of both the 3D0 and the original PlayStation (where I wrote the video subsystems), was lead or team member on several high profile EA Sports titles, was on the team that created the first Internet live video infrastructure, produced a live talk show, worked in VFX across the roles of developer, artist &amp; financial analyst on 9 major release feature films, I&#x27;ve written and acquired a global patent in VFX technology, and was lead developer for one of the leading facial recognition systems now in a high percentage of the world&#x27;s airports. I&#x27;m accomplished...<p>And what happened with my application at Indeed? The recruiter and I spoke for nearly an hour, when she asks &quot;are you even a programmer? I&#x27;ve not heard you mention writing code once.&quot; Um... that was all I was talking about, and she did not understand a single bit, nor had the communication skills to ask for clarification at any point during that initial hour. WTF?!?!

&gt; Now, it’s pretty early to be dropping an Einstein quote, but I’m doing it anyway: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”<p>While the quote is catchy and viral, and fits many situations, Einstein has never said that. Call me biased, but when you work in tech, you need to be precise.

I think we all agree that there should be a unified and standardized way of submitting applications, something that passes all company&#x27;s systems and also as an applicant you sure your resume is not botched somehow. Ironic how all these developers who build all these very complicated systems, APIs, architecture, you name it, can’t even make a proper system so it makes their life easier the next time they apply for a job, or even when their system receives many resumes.<p>Keep in mind, that after all this chaotic process, these resumes will pass through a mostly-lazy HR department, so the whole process is a failure built on top of failure.

This article reads like an article telling everything wrong with today&#x27;s internet. not unlike <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37509507">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37509507</a>

I came across this question the other day while discussing AI Agents.<p>Would you chat with an AI agent to be the first line recruiter assuming that you can have a &quot;real&quot; chat with that agent? I.e., the agent ask real questions?<p>OR do you think its fairer we submit a CV with years of work experience condensed into three bullet points that&#x27;s screened by an ATS AI?<p>&quot;Thought: To determine if John is a suitable candidate for the role of a social media marketer, I need to ask him some questions and evaluate his qualifications. Action: human Action Input: What strategies did you use to grow Boeing&#x27;s Twitter channel?&quot;

My solution to this is to have a Markdown resume that is easy to decompose into any form fields an employer has. If they want a normal one, I produce a lightly-formatted PDF.

Indeed is a virus that needs to die as soon as possible.<p>It has contributed to a situation where a normal resume now is worthless. It has caused massive inflation of what we write.<p>Everybody who doesn&#x27;t excel at selling themselves ends up lower on the chain. But that absolutely doesn&#x27;t mean they&#x27;re a bad fit for the job.<p>And then there are the stupid personality tests. What are they looking for if I have to click the same buttons on 2 separate screens?

I&#x27;ve never gotten any contacts through Indeed, unless we&#x27;re talking about small staffing firms fishing lowballing and fishing for my resumes.

The last time I was looking for a job was before the pandemic. I used Craigslist like I had since 1999 or so.<p>I glanced at it the other day and... it was just basically not there. Three programming jobs posted in the DC&#x2F;NoVa area. How did that site manage to die, particularly if this is the alternative?

Thank you for the insights here (on several levels), as well as the conversation around my article. A great deal of this thread is invaluable feedback&#x2F;information as I continue to navigate everything. Sincere thanks.

Personally for me all three trains parted and there are no more trains arriving: job search, dating, real estate. I guess I will seat on the chair over here waiting for the third end of the world, because the two previous world ends I have also missed.

Not sure if all this matters - at the end of the day, resumes are just a filtering mechanism, and then most startups&#x2F;companies should set up 15-minute screeners and also do work assessments before hiring.<p>Not sure how relevant this top of funnel problem is.

&gt; <i>Remember when your resume was the ticket in a company’s door?</i><p>No, I don&#x27;t. For instance, one job, over a decade ago, I got the offer, which was followed by, &quot;oh, by the way, can you give us your resume, so we have it on file&quot;.

I found my current role by posting on the open to work thread in July. Early days, but so far it&#x27;s among my favorite positions ever. I don&#x27;t know what the answer is here, but I&#x27;m glad for HN.

Don&#x27;t think I ever used indeed.com, just got something recently, the market for the last few months in the UK has been the worst I&#x27;d seen since 2008

A genuine question: Is it better to send my CV in a word or pdf format? I assume that an ATS can read both formats?

Their job recommendation system is just awful. I really hope they put some money into improving it.

How come I keep reading these types of posts, hearing these stories, yet I&#x27;ve never experienced anything remotely close to this? Job hunting has always been the opposite for me; being inundated by sharks trying to aggressively recruit me.<p>---<p>For reference; here&#x27;s a quick summary of my job history: Mid 20s, I was working for a retail bank in Iceland (where I&#x27;m from), doing ASP.NET and C#. With about 4 years of experience, I decided I was a &quot;big fish in a small pond&quot; and that I needed a greater challenge. I was interested in finance and wanted to move to London and do quant trading or HFT, so one night I applied for about 5-6 different jobs posted on Indeed.co.uk. At 7AM the next morning the phone started ringing. 3 days later I was in London, doing five interviews a day for 4 days straight, and long story short, ended up doing about a 15-20 interviews and ending the week with a dozen offers.<p>Since then, I&#x27;ve done the occasional round of interviews, just to determine whether I&#x27;m &quot;optimally employed&quot;, and they&#x27;ve never been an issue to set up. Basically just message a couple of reliable recruiters on LinkedIn, tell them &quot;hey I&#x27;m interested, and I&#x27;m looking for X&quot; and they come back with job specs on a silver platter. I&#x27;ve NEVER not got an interview somewhere I wanted to work. Literally never. I&#x27;ve been rejected a handful of times, most of which I&#x27;d chalk up to the interviewers or the hiring process being terrible. I&#x27;ve rejected or cut short A LOT of hiring processes, though, I have some insane stories to tell regarding that.<p>Now, I work almost entirely by referral. I didn&#x27;t even interview for my current role or send them a CV, because I&#x27;m working for and with people who know me. And I have a feeling that&#x27;s how it&#x27;ll stay from now on.<p>---<p>So, now that I got that out of the way - why the F00k is my experience so askew with these horror stories? Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I&#x27;m not trying to put anyone down, or brag, or say they&#x27;re doing it wrong or something, I&#x27;m simply asking; what causes the difference in experiences? Is it the fact that London finance runs on recruiters? Is that not a thing elsewhere? The last time I submitted an application directly to a company was in 2009. Since then, I&#x27;ve always had recruiters do it on my behalf.

Bros probably just feeling the high interest rates. Powell got another one

get last few employments through linkedin. never heard of indeed.

The worst resume forms are those from Workday, I run from them like the plague. You will probably need a new email to create an account for each job application. And if you get the job, you&#x27;ll have to deal with their unbearable UX where nothing can be reached directly, but needs you to dive in a menu to a page that requires clicking a box to a link to a page with a small grid view. What were they thinking!?

In the age of AI, GPTs, LLMs, etc, CVs are completely over as they are now to be assumed to be generated.<p>Only real world projects (not toy demos), years of experience, and other particularly interesting (but relevant) hobbies would work although I&#x27;m not sure they count here. I&#x27;ve now seen companies raising their ask for Masters - PhDs for SWEs due to this demand.<p>What works best unfortunately is being hired&#x2F;acquired by FAANG, working at hedge fund, and or a degree at a prestigious elite universities (top 0.01%) to rise above the pile.<p>For tech, now that there is a flood of FAANG employees from recent layoffs, the job market is only going to get tougher in tech on a herculean scale.

&gt; “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”<p>This is the quote from the last powerpoint slide by cute girl from consulting agency. Sweetheart I wake up every morning, eat and drink the same, and yes I expect this day will be different.