memes

I'm a hiring manager, and every single person hired at my company has to fill out a form like this.

Places like this probably get 2000 submissions so they are indeed a waste of time.

You aren't. I was just hired for a great position by not filling out their form. Then they emailed me and asked if I wanted to finish. I said "I won't fill out something that is already on my resume". They had a couple of interviews and a substantial offer. I started last week.

It depends on the position. If it's entry level or some retail job, yes, fill it out. But management or some other position where it's highly specific, this is an absolute waste of my time.

Because filling out the data places it in identified fields that you can compile into a single table and sort. You’d have to examine each resume individually.

I work for a company that makes rocket engines. It makes no sense to teach the folks in HR about all the disciplines that go into the business - mechanical design, combustion devices, materials and properties, electronics, software, etc. It makes way more sense to make sure they know how to do their own job, and for a hiring manager to be able to tell them something like, "Send me all the applicants who have a computer science degree and at least five years of experience." Then I can evaluate which of those applicants is the best fit based on the resume. The form facilitate that.

Eh, sometimes I apply to jobs I don't really care too much about, just to go through the process and see what the market is like without any stress. I can recommend. And once that even turned out to be a good thing and I stayed, who knows.

Before anyone complains, the companies put out job descriptions they're not really serious about either, sometimes to just meet candidates they could maybe use elsewhere, sometimes just to make themselves look good towards their competitors. Play that game, get your time wasted for my "training", I don't feel to t bad about that.

Unfortunately this computer filtering step tends to be highly inaccurate and game-able, but I’m not sure what to propose instead.

Game-able, as in, entering specific answers (even if they are inaccurate) gets you through the computer and put in front of a human? Working as intended.

Ever since the social contract was broken with employers where they'd give you a job for decades if you stayed there, there's been an ongoing "arms race" of how job applicants can get noticed, and how employers can get usable candidates out of the massive tidal waves of applicants they get. The first step computer filter doesn't have to be perfect, if it even filters out 80% of the candidate that don't meet basic criteria, leaving only 20% for humans to review that is massively better (to employers) than requiring humans to look at all 100% of applicants.

So yes, its game-able to get through the computer filter, but if you still don't match the basic criteria, you'll be eliminated by the human reviewers anyway. The difference is only very small number of candidates will figure out the game-able answers to get through even if they aren't supposed to. This is...until the next round of the arms race where nearly all candidates are getting through. That hasn't happened yet.

I had something like that in military school except it was group graded...and we couldn't talk, so once myself and like 5 others saw the instructions, we watched the others 25 finish the test. We got lit up for the worst class out of 5 in the current year.