Originally posted on LinkedIn

You know… in this day and age, you can do AMAZING things with your website forms. There are quite a few runtime libraries out there that can really make tedious tasks easy.

FOR EXAMPLE…

… let’s say… oh, I don’t know… maybe you are one of a million professional looking for the right position and are constantly providing information about yourself to countless companies and/or persons-of-(un)interest.

Name/location/phone number? Easy. Tax information about how you pee (sit or stand) and what color of skin you have? Sure, those just drop-downs and boolean flags. Upload Resume? Oh, perfect! I worked really hard on this to make sure the information is consumable and accurate! PDF uploaded. DONE.

Wait… what is this?! Work history? I just uploaded my CV, I don’t unders… can’t you just pull the info from my resume?

And this is the point of this mini-rant. If a company can’t write a few lines of code that scrapes through a resume and (at the VERY least) pulls historical information into their dumb forms under “work history”… why do we still have resumes? Why do countless companies lie to us, telling us how important our resume is? All a hiring company will do is sift through their own database built off of the “work history” portion of their application form? Years ago, I paid a company good, hard-earned money to format and make my resume sound way prettier than my walking words I use to say stuff. I PAID someone to fix my resume, but here we are destroying the resume with the “work history” portion of the application form.

We’re not even hired yet, and we’re already doing data entry for them. Wuuuuut?

I think it’s a good test for job-seekers. If a company can’t instantiate information from your resume into the “work history” portion of an application form, STAY AWAY. Can you imagine what other paradoxes lie in wait for you if you are hired?

If ya can’t auto-fill, I’m not auto-feeling ya.