Diabolical way to get your resume to the top of the pile!
Have you ever heard of “white-fonting?” The practice of considering every possible keyword an employer’s parsing system might seek during it’s resume screening process, and putting them in the margins of your resume in small type, then setting the font color to white.
If you have encountered the frustration of forwarding your resume to a large company that posts job openings, and then utilizes a computer screening program to select the most qualified candidates by scanning for certain keywords that match the job’s required qualifications, read on…
After you “white-font”, no human looking at the document can see the words, but if all goes as planned, the computer will read them, and send your resume straight to the top of the pile!
In an enlightening article in the New York Post, this practice is revealed. Click here to read the entire article.
I am in the trenches, so to speak, reviewing resumes and speaking with employers every day. I had never heard of this practice. Although the article quotes career strategists and executive recruiters who claim to be familiar with white-fonting, it’s the first I’m hearing of it.
Have you heard of white-fonting? As an employer, have you felt deceived by it? As a job seeker, have you been successful by utilizing it?
This story captured my imagination, and I would love to hear from you about whether this practice actually exists, or whether it is “an urban myth.”
Interesting topic. Most major search engines eliminated the effectiveness of this technique for web pages long ago. Only a matter of time for recruitment tools to do likewise. One of the algorithm pieces for search reads the level of contrast between background and foreground colors before determining relevance of keywords.
I have not tried this, but am now considering it. But more importantly, I think it speaks to the issues that we, the unemployed, face daily. One’s experience and qualifications are no longer enough. To get noticed, one has to resort to ‘diabolical’ tactics. As a recruiter does this give you pause? Does it make you reconsider your practices?
Building on Lee’s post, this is considered a “black hat” practice when used on websites, landing pages, etc. And Google will ban you for life if you try it (and they discover it).
So is it unethical to practice it for job searching? No. As long as crude algorithms make decisions for people, I think it’s acceptable to try to fool the machine to reach a human.
I also agree with Lee that developers will eventually ban the practice; hopefully by then the filtering software will be more intelligent as well.
I have heard of this but only recently. I’m not sure why should this be “diabolical” or banned? As long as your’re not lying about your knowledge — and you’re getting across legitimate information in a way that does not clutter a resume, I don’t think it should be a “black hat” practice. Different companies frequently use different buzz-words that mean the same thing so why should I be ruled out because a computer can’t understand this. If a computer is making the decision vs. a human, I’d like to be able to appeal to the computer so I have a chance to be seen by the human.