Every application starts the same way. You find the posting, you click Apply, and the first thing the form wants is your resume. You upload it. It parses. There's a little green tick. Then you scroll down.
First name. Last name. Email. Phone. Street. City. Postal code. Country.
Then work experience. Company, title, start date, end date, description. Add another. Company, title, start date, end date, description. Add another.
You just handed them a document with every one of those fields in it. The form read it. It said so. And now it wants you to type the whole thing in again by hand.
Why the form does this
Resume parsers are unreliable and the vendors know it. A two-column layout, a table, a date written as "Jan '23" instead of "January 2023", and the parser drops a role or shifts a job title into the company field. Rather than ship a product that quietly loses your last employer, the ATS vendors made a design decision: parse it, prefill what we can, and make the human confirm every field.
That decision is defensible. It's also why the same twenty minutes of typing happens on every single application you send.
The part that makes it worse
The forms are not the same form. Workday wants an account before it will show you anything, and its work-history widget is its own little application. Greenhouse is one long page. Lever is short but hides required questions below the fold. Ashby is a single-page app that loses your place if you refresh. iCIMS wants you to re-upload the resume you already uploaded.
So it isn't one form you get fast at. It's a dozen forms you get slow at, over and over, in random order, at eleven at night.
What I'd actually do about it
Three things that cost nothing:
Keep a plain text version of your resume open in another tab. Not the PDF, the text. Copy-paste beats typing, and it stops the small drift where the dates on your application don't match the dates on the document you attached.
Fill in the work history from the bottom up. Most forms put the newest role first but validate the oldest one last. Doing it in the order the form validates means fewer surprise errors after you've already spent fifteen minutes.
Screenshot the confirmation screen before you close the tab. Not because it proves anything, but because the reference number on it is the only thing you can quote later if you need to ask what happened.
And the honest pitch
I work on AI Applyd. This exact problem is the reason it exists. An agent opens the posting, fills the employer's own form field by field the way you would, answers the screening questions from your profile, and submits. You keep the tab closed and the evening back.
The promise is simple: you should never have to type your own work history into a box again. You already wrote it down. Once should be enough.
