is it bad to write “see resume” in an online application system’s endless fields?

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager .
A reader writes:
I may have flubbed a job application by doing this and am gently kicking myself, but wanted to get your opinion.
I am an accomplished mid-career professional with 20+ years of experience in my fairly niche field. I’m not aggressively looking to change jobs but a role popped up on LinkedIn that looked interesting and that I am highly qualified for, so I went ahead and applied through their website.
I have never had the experience of having to upload my resume and then basically recreate it via an online application form, and it was extremely annoying (I have mostly worked for smallish nonprofits/government for most of my career). The organization I applied with is quite large and has a million different types of roles. Perhaps the online application system does make sense for some of their positions, but the one I applied for is a senior director position. The online system pre-populated some of the information from my uploaded resume but it required a lot of additional data entry. I originally copied and pasted the bullets from my resume in the “job description” section for each role I’ve had, but before submitting I did a final review and decided to tweak a couple of minor things and reuploaded my resume, which then wiped all the content I had copied/pasted/reformatted into the correct fields so I had to redo it all. When I redid it, I opted to just add the companies/roles/dates and then under “job description” I just put “see resume,” as the formatting of that part of the application was especially wonky and it would have been quite time-consuming to redo.
I was frustrated by the fact that I had to do this in the first place, and was thinking that for a role of this caliber they surely would look at my actual uploaded resume and cover letter.
I will admit I was feeling a bit cavalier as there are some aspects about the job that I’m really not sure I want. But after sleeping on it, I realized due to some latent frustrations with my current job and some additional research on the company, I’m actually more interested. The pay/title/remote work flexibility would far trump my current role, and it would be pretty nice to keep doing basically what I’m doing but for a lot more compensation.
I dug through the AAM archives and found this advice where you stated just adding “see resume” was no bueno, but that was 2017. I’m curious to see if you think that still holds in 2023 and/or if it holds for senior-level positions such as the one I applied for, or if I just biffed it.
Yeah, it’s not ideal. If they’re asking for that info, they want you to enter it there, annoying as it is and repetitive as it feels.
How much it matters in this specific case is hard to say. Sometimes entering your info there is the only way to ensure that the employer’s system parses your application correctly, and if you don’t do it their software won’t work correctly. Other times it doesn’t really matter because (as you hoped) the hiring manager is looking at the resume you uploaded and doesn’t pay attention to what you entered in the boxes on their form. Other times that’s true once you pass an initial screening, but you won’t pass the initial screening to get to that point if there’s no substantive content in those boxes. And some hiring managers find it off-putting when candidates write “see resume” — like you’re saying “your instructions don’t apply to me.”
It can be different when you’re being actively recruited, especially for more senior positions — if you’ve already talked with the hiring manager and they’ve made it clear they’re strongly interested and the application is just a formality to get you into their system, “see resume” can sometimes make sense (although not always even then, depending on the specifics of the situation). But when you’re the one approaching them, you do need to use the system they’ve set up, unless you’re so strongly in demand that you can confidently decline to jump through these sorts of hoops.
Going forward, the easiest thing to do is to keep a plain text version of your resume that you can easily copy and paste from without having to deal with heavy formatting.
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