IMO, the root cause of this is companies pre-filter leaving high quality individuals to search longer. If you look at a random sample of all people to look for a job in a given year then say a long absence may be a bad sign.

However, you get a biased sample with obvious rock-stars quickly finding a job. Thus, negative signs on a resume are positively correlated with candidate quality. On the other hand resumes that look great are likely linked to people who regularly fail interviews.

PS: This is less common with collage job fairs where you get closer to a random candidate selection.

How do you determine that? I wrote mine in LaTeX but submit a PDF. Usually that default LaTeX font is a dead giveaway, but I find it to be pretty ugly so I switched it out.

It’s part of the metadata. Look for content creator and PDF producer fields.

Or even more simply, just use your eyes. The superior line breaking algorithm is extremely obvious, with or without microtype. Then less obviously, look at ligatures, kerning etc.

The internal HR tools at some BigCo's may convert your PDF to plain text, so it's possible that a hiring manager will never even see your superior formatting. The interview tracking system at Amazon was doing this at couple of years back.

Doesn't mean much since tooling like Sphinx will generate Latex as an intermediary for PDF generation.

I don't care for the rigidity of Latex and don't want to hand craft my own TeX documents. I once had a resume generation system that would convert ReST to Docbook and from there used XSLT to produce plain text, docx, and PDF output using XSL-FO. Sadly the code was on a failed Seagate drive and is lost. And yes I had a backup, also on a Seagate drive that also failed due to a firmware bug around the same time.

Honestly I've never understood people's problem with LaTeX, where everyone says it si "hand crafted". Honestly just grab a template. Maybe modify it a little and tweak it, but then save that skeleton. Have one for a resume, research papers, other docs, etc and you're golden. You have to do the same thing in Word too, the difference is in LaTeX it looks like code. But IMO LaTeX looks nicer than Word every time. I can usually spot a paper written in LaTeX vs Word and there definitely is a correlation to quality.

You CAN get fancy with LaTeX, but I doubt most people will be doing those things. For every day research papers or resumes, just pick up an online template and make whatever minor tweaks you want. Then fill with text.

also you can always use lyx if you don't want to write a whole bunch of raw LaTeX

I just use the moderncv package[1] included with most LaTeX distributions. It produces beautiful output while needing only minimal LaTeX customization from your end.

[1]: https://github.com/xdanaux/moderncv

I remember those, I had one of those fail too. Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 c. 2008. Found all the stuff on the Internet about the bad firmware after it failed.

At the time, the default font, that there were a few common LaTeX résumé templates, and the superior formatting compared to alternatives. If I wasn't sure, I'd just ask.

Besides metadata, the word spacing algorithm in LaTeX tends to give a certain feel that you learn to recognize once you have seen it enough times.

> But time and again the better candidates had the worse résumés

Perhaps this is selection bias?

Their resume being bad caused them to not be able to get a job at other companies, even though they are good. The only reason the resume ended up on your desk was because nobody else wanted to spend 30 minutes of their time interviewing them, therefore they were passed up.