Why Hassle exists

People sometimes email us to ask if Hassle is real. Is there a real person on the other end, or just a computer with a friendly name?

We are a team of real humans, based here in South Africa.

After 6 months looking for work - sending application after application. I decided to do the research and beat the machines at their own game.

Six months of silence

I applied for months. Most of my applications got no reply at all. The replies that did come were strange. “Not enough experience” — for work I had done for years. I would read the rejection, then read my own CV, and they did not match. It seemed like there was no way they read my CV.

Maybe something was wrong with the way I was explaining my roles. When the only answer you ever get is a standard rejection letter, where do you start?

Then I read something online: at many companies, no person reads your application at all. A computer reads it. Was it possible that AI or automated systems were rejecting me because they did not understand my CV?

Weeks of research

So I started digging. I read everything I could find about how these systems read a CV — what they pick up, what confuses them. The hardest part was working out which advice online was based on real research.

I learnt that its better to send a MS Word document because these systems trip on PDF more often - that was a shock because I had been sending PDFs for over 10 years.

Some of the strange things I learned:

  • A table with the borders hidden is still a table. Deleting the lines does not delete the table. The computer still hits the hidden table and gets confused. Many “clean and simple” CV templates are full of them.
  • Those little skill bars and star ratings are pictures. The computer cannot read pictures. The four stars you gave yourself for Excel never reach the other side. You rated yourself, and nobody will ever see it.
  • The computer does not care how many pages your CV is. So making your writing tiny to fit onto two pages helps nothing. It only makes life hard for the human who opens it later.
  • There is a two-minute test anyone can do. Copy your whole CV and paste it into a plain notes app — one with no colours or layouts, like Notepad. What you see is close to what the computer sees. If it comes out jumbled and out of order, that may be why you are getting rejected.

I decided to write my CV again from scratch. Same experience. Same person but using everything I had discovered about formatting and structure.

After six months of searching with no luck, I could not believe when my new CV got me a job in one week.

I cannot prove it was the CV and not luck. Nobody can prove that from one person’s story. But nothing else changed. Not my skills, not my experience, not the jobs out there. Only the document.

Searching for work is a Hassle

I kept thinking about how many South Africans are stuck where I was. You can do the work, but nobody replies, and you start to think something is wrong with you — when the real problem may be sitting inside a Word file. Companies can receive thousands of applicants these days and they need machines to help them narrow down the applicants. Thats the way the world is now - might as well accept it.

The research I did for myself became HassleBot.co.za

You can read some tips like - ten things that matter most on a South African CV.

Sounds familiar?

Are you applying and hearing nothing back? You know you can do the job, but no one answers? Or are you trying to get your first job, and nobody replies at all?

Email your CV to cv@hassle.bot and we will email you a review right back. It costs nothing, and it will show you what the computers may be seeing.

— Brent

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