ISSUE 18.11.F • 2021-03-22

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PUBLIC DEFENDER

By Brian Livingston

LinkedIn — the foremost social network for working professionals, with 760 million members in more than 200 countries — constantly changes the format of its PDF résumés to make it hard for companies to search for possible job applicants, according to human-resource consultants.

“LinkedIn has, for several years now, been on a campaign to make their PDF profiles not accurately readable by parsing software,” Robert Ruff, CEO of HR firm Sovren, told Marc Cenedella, CEO of TheLadders job site, in a recent interview. “I think we saw at one point they had made 40-something changes in 100 days to make the résumés hard to parse out of those profiles.”

Ruff continued: “I think the victims of it are their customers, who don’t understand that those PDFs are intended to be very inaccurate when they’re parsed now.”

The garbling of users’ PDFs, which are similar to résumés, reportedly began after LinkedIn was hit with a preliminary injunction by the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in September 2019. The injunction barred LinkedIn from blocking a data-analytics firm named hiQ from copying or “scraping” the public profiles of LinkedIn users. As the court noted, “LinkedIn blocks approximately 95 million automated attempts to scrape data every day.” LinkedIn has appealed to the US Supreme Court, but at this writing the case has not been docketed.

How can the same LinkedIn profile produce different PDF files on different days?

LinkedIn makes it easy for users to save a profile as a PDF. The site’s main menu offers the convenient command View Profile > More > Save to PDF. Whether you do this or not, any other user can also download a copy of your profile as a PDF at any time (unless you configure your profile as “private”).

Why are these PDFs important, and what can you do about LinkedIn’s handling of them?

In the olden days — before LinkedIn launched in 2003 — jobseekers submitted résumés on fine linen paper. The time required to print and mail these documents kept the number of applicants for most jobs down to a few hundred at most.

Today, the Internet makes it possible for a posted job opening to generate thousands of applications. To cope with this tsunami, HR departments now use keywords to search databases that are amassed by résumé-parsing companies. In the US, the largest firms in this field include DaXtra, HireAbility, Hiretual, Sovren, and Textkernel.

Figure 1. From left to right, a résumé parser converts a person’s work experience, name, former companies, titles, education, degrees, schools, and majors into a database record. Source: Hellpanderrr/GitHub

Companies such as these vacuum up LinkedIn profiles and résumés from as many sources as possible. Computers parse the words on each document into a database, as shown in Figure 1. All the flowery language in each résumé is stripped down to the most basic terms — any words that seem to indicate a person’s name, previous employers, work experience, college degrees, and other easy-to-quantify data points.

Regarding LinkedIn, “They do change the format from time to time,” Ninh Tran, the founding member of Hiretual, told me in a telephone interview. “We make an update to our parsing engine every two weeks” in response to LinkedIn and other format changes, he said.

“The formatting is a little bit weird. It’s not a standard résumé that people would use to apply for a job,” Tran said of LinkedIn’s PDFs. “I recommend that people make their own PDF résumé and attach it to their profile.”

LinkedIn did not respond to a request for comment. “You’re hitting upon a sensitive area of the industry,” explained Maurice Fuller, the president of StaffingTec, a firm that sponsors conferences and webinars for HR professionals. Exactly how companies scrape information from sites such as LinkedIn is a trade secret among practitioners.

Whether or not you’re currently looking for a job, there are good reasons to keep your professional résumé online and up to date. If you’re going to make your own PDF and attach it to a LinkedIn profile — so you can ensure it’s easily readable by anyone or anything — what’s the best way to go about it?

Figure 2. According to Marc Cenedella, CEO of TheLadders, a résumé parses best if it uses a plain-vanilla format, with name, job sought, professional summary, and previous work experiences in well-defined sections. Source: TheLadders

Having the most perfect résumé in the world, of course, doesn’t ensure that you’ll be offered the job of your dreams. A database will never hire you, but a garbled database entry can eliminate you from even being considered. To get a coveted interview, you want parsers to include relevant facts that will make an HR department want to put you in front of a decision-maker.

Cheap tricks, such as pasting hundreds of keywords into a résumé or using tiny white type on a white background, are more likely to get you banned than to get you that interview. Keep it simple, keep it honest, and you’ll have as good a chance as other jobseekers. And attach your own home-made PDF résumé to your LinkedIn profile, rather than forcing parsers to digest a document that may be nonstandard.

Ruff’s interview, and commentary by other parsing executives, is available at TheLadders’ CEO advice page. StaffingTec’s latest events are listed on its website.

The PUBLIC DEFENDER column is Brian Livingston’s campaign to give you consumer protection from tech. If it’s irritating you, and it has an “on” switch, he’ll take the case! Brian is a successful dot-com entrepreneur, author or co-author of 11 Windows Secrets books, and author of the new book Muscular Portfolios. Get his free monthly newsletter.

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