I feel like many HR folks do understand that the tools aren’t great, but a lot of times the overwhelming amount of resumes (at a large company, for instance) can be mindboggling to deal with, so it ends up being the only real strategy to handle them. At least, that’s what I’ve heard from every HR person I’ve asked about it.
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Yeah but then employers found out Megan didn’t work nearly as well as Leah, often times not sticking together with other employees as well.
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On a more serious note, I know lego makes a superior brick, i’m a lifelong fan.
But damn…as an adult most of the kits I have my eyes on are in the $200.00 - $400.00 range. that is per kit!!! I’m sad when I buy a $20.00 - $40.00 kit for my daughter and open the box and see how few bricks you get for that price, at cost it can’t be more then a few dollars worth of plastic bricks.
We just saw the lego movie, and the first thing I thought when you see the basement was “damn, that must be like $400,000 worth of lego”. the fact that was my first thought really brought home to me how sad i am that lego pricing makes it out of reach of so many children, and how you have to invest a small fortune to get the trunk full of lego that I had growing up.
(and don’t even get me started about the “kits” that only consist of blocks so specialized that you could never build anything else with them. lol.)
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Necessarily necessary but not necessarily sufficient, unhappily, unnecessary to add.
I have heard from someone putting positive keywords in white text at the top of the resume. Optimizes for the search engine, invisible on the screen.
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Oooo, cunning.
I can see some HR people (especially in big corporate situations) possibly being turned off by the figure making it obvious that the applicant is white. I’ve heard of places where making it so that your race was immediately noticeable through something like a picture would get your resume immediately added to the trash pile to help reduce any footing that any claims of racial discrimination in hiring might have.
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Which pile? The toss or call? ; )
Probably would depend on how they felt about lego 
This is one of the reasons I say these programs are terrible. This is an OLD OLD trick that was used to fool search engines when I was working on them 15 years ago - before Google became popular. I worked on an evolution of Webcrawler (cool fact, worked directly for the guy who invented Webcrawler) and this was a thing people did back then. They would have pages where they dumped an entire dictionary onto the page, white text on a white background- mostly really trashy sites. We put in algorithms to eliminate any search results that came back from sites like this. So, that you can fool a hr search tool with this old bad hack tells me that they are not terribly sophisticated technology.
Not sure that is so true anymore because it seems that it has become so common for people to look you up on social media that its inevitable they know your race. When I was job hunting, I had pictures on LinkedIn and I did a Google image search to see what other sites were returning my photo. I replaced all of those images with professional shots - some were more casual shots but none were snapshots. Pretty much everyone has a photo on their personal website or LinkedIn. I actually found that a very weird part of the current day job hunt because a few years ago the standard wisdom was not to submit a photo with a resume, but now although you don’t submit it with your resume, you can assume they have seen a photo of you.
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I work in TV production (and post production, more recently), usually freelancing from show to show. It’s always been a who-you-know kind of industry, especially in that period between getting your foot in the door and the point when your resume and/or IMDB listing begins to speak for itself.
But getting one’s foot in the door was always the hard part. Most of the entry-level production assistants I’ve known took advantage of some form of mild nepotism (nephew of an executive, daughter of a retired-but-still-respected comedy writer, brother of an old friend of the producer, that kind of thing) or school connections (graduates of NYU, USC, Emerson, and a few other institutions have pretty sturdy networks out here), but there are still plenty of resumes out there submitted by hungry up-and-comers with no connections to give them a leg up. On one show I worked on, a producer friend and I would go through our stack of recent resumes at the beginning of every season to find a likely hire. The job requirements were pretty simple; it was definitely an entry-level position that any dope off the street could learn in a couple hours. You had to be able to answer the phones competently, take accurate messages, file things accurately, and basically act somewhat professionally. Any high school graduate with the right attitude can do an office PA job, if they want to. So the resumes weren’t really useful to us as far as the actual text on the page was intended to communicate. So we employed our own standards to help us decide. Resumes with lengthy cover letters were ditched. Resumes with an “Objective” were on the bubble; one more error, however minor, got them tossed. Resumes longer than a single page were discarded. Resumes that seemed to be from underrepresented groups got afforded a wee bit of informal affirmative action. Overrepresented groups (like alumni of the aforementioned institutions) were generally passed over, since they were assumed to have plenty of opportunities elsewhere. Resumes that utilized ten-dollar words somewhat awkwardly or unnecessarily in a vainglorious attempt to showcase the applicant’s possession of a thesaurus (rather than just using simple language to get the point across efficiently) were mocked mercilessly before being thrown out.
I’ll never know if our weeding process brought us better PAs than we might have hired otherwise, but we never did have to fire or otherwise discipline anyone. And the shows always got on the air.
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