No Stupid Questions

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.

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.

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.

Use auto fill in your browser for all.

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

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

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

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

It started with basic indifference and became a feature.

In the beginning, people were manually receiving and reviewing resumes given to them in person.

This moved online and, for a time, normal humans continued to upload their resumes. Humans continued to review them.

Eventually someone decided they wanted to spam resumes, like someone swiping right on every potential Tinder match and turning people down later. This spam became problematic, so companies needed a way to automatically filter folks. Extracting info from PDFs wasn't easy at the time.

Having a form to fill out prevented some spam and let them do keyword searches and filtering, but more importantly now it gives them two things: It prefilters people who don't care enough to complete it and add a sight sunk cost bias to folks who are on the fence.

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

OCR is fallible. The forms are for the robot to quickly filter based on tags. The resume is for the human to quickly filter based on vibes.

Edit: I'm not saying that OCR is necessarily part of the system. I'm saying that, while OCR is the type of technology one might use to parse data from resumes of various file types, it's unreliable enough that having the duplicate form fields as a way to gather the information you want in a clean and processable way is an effective supplement or replacement.

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

To make life even more of a hassle. Ugh

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

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

Some are saying that it’s to have both human-readable and machine-readable data. I don’t doubt that some places do that. But others don’t.

I worked at a college HR and we asked candidates for a a bunch of stuff, including both a CV and a form.

The CV was given to whoever decided whether that person was hired or not.

The forms were given to HR, so that we could independently verify information and manually add information to the college’s records.

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.

It's for the Dept. of Redundancy Dept.

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.

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.

Pretty sure it's because we live in hell and are being tortured by malevolent entities. I'm unclear on whether we are being punished for long-forgotten sins in our past lives, or whether it's more of a feeding off our suffering for sustinance situation. Could be both.

The only thing I know for sure is that whatever beings set things up that way are not recognizable to me as human.

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.

So they don’t have to.

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