I’m guessing not since I guess HR departments use various different software, but I figured i’d ask anyway.
I put in for a new position a few weeks ago and after I chose the option to upload my resume as a word doc, it filled some areas in on their website. Some areas still were blank, and some job duties from from employer 1. ended up merged in with the duties of employer 2. etc. OK. Fine. I went in and corrected everything, was contacted last week and did 2 interviews.
Yesterday I was contacted and formally offered the position. Yay.
So now my various onboarding docs are starting to arrive and I have to consent to a background check. I log into that company’s website and once again it partially has my employment history but things like addresses and contacts are missing.
So, i’ve updated my resume once before submitting it. Fixed it after uploading it. Now i’m fixing stuff again after being hired and uploading to the background check people. . Is this just a normal headache these days with incompatible software or could I possibly be making an easily fixable mistake?
Almost certainly this. Or a related reason, hypothetically compatible software your new employer never bothered to integrate.
Therefore, the only points of commonality in the process are your Word document, and you. So you have to manually close the gaps.
Yeah, the last time I worked with a system that “automatically imported data from my resume”, the import was worse than useless. It kept doing things like using the address of my first previous employer as the next previous employer, and going through all of the fields and fixing everything was just as much work, or more, than it would have been to just enter it all in from scratch. Well, not completely from scratch; most of it I’d copy-and-paste from my resume… except that I’d know to C&P from the right spots. My guess is that they tested it on a few different resumes (probably all generated from the same template by the same person and software package), and when it worked on that, decided that it worked, without knowing or caring that every resume will have slightly different formatting and a slightly different set of information on it.
And there ought to be some standard HR software package that auto-populates all of the onboarding paperwork. It wouldn’t necessarily have to scrape data from the resume, but you should be able to just type in things like your name and address once, and automatically fill it in on all of the 15 different forms that need it.
It’s frustrating. If they would ever digitize our permanent records, then everyone could just link to that.
To make it worse, the HR software they used had a ridiculously low character limit in the job responsibilities fields. So even with copy/paste I was having to edit things way down.
It’s like, tell us all of your responsibilities for the last 15 years but in the form of a fortune cookie.
Supervised large team
Kept members working on task
Good thing I’m a pro
This is one of the many things that kept me from applying to nearly as many places as I did when I was looking for a job. I recall when I was applying to college that there was a common application form that a great number of places accepted, though not all of them, and that seemed like a good start. The reason that no one has developed a standardized application form that can be used everywhere for most things that would be expected on a resume is likely because there’s no authority that’s interested in pushing such things down on people. It’s possible now that job seekers are becoming harder to find that someone makes a move that will be able to “promise” companies that job seekers will favor applying to them because of their more streamlined form that allows them to only have to type data once and send it to all employers who sign on to the system, but I doubt it.
What little standardization has been done in things which I’m involved in that are similar to this is downloading brokerage statements and having the data automatically imported into the most popular software packages. This was pretty easy for TurboTax to spearhead because they have a lot of market share among self-preparers, and there aren’t all that many brokerages that you really have to get in line to make it large enough that all the other brokerages will want to join. One would expect that the same sort of thing should be possible, and perhaps even easier, with W-2s, but there isn’t a small group of employers that have enough critical mass, plus W-2s are always going to be fairly simple, whereas brokerage statements might have pages and pages of transactions. I imagine a world where all your tax documents would have a standard format and you’d be able to upload them to your software after downloading from the website of the bank or whoever. It would certainly save a lot of work in my line of business, and because of the people we do the taxes for, it’s not like this would cause people to suddenly think it’s simple enough to do themselves - the vast majority have rentals or businesses that will never be able to go fully this direction.
Sorry for the tangent, but that’s what your topic made me think about.
Actually, now that I think about it, for W-2s it would only require payroll processors like ADP to sign on, and I have a vague recollection that they might have come up with something. I’m not sure on that front though.