Searching for the right job online can be like driving down a highway littered with speed bumps. You can forget about putting the pedal to the metal. Instead, it’s a journey fraught with abrupt, gear-grinding deceleration, whether that entails customizing a cover letter, answering improbable interview questions, or correctly calculating a salary range that won’t get you laughed at. One unfortunately common part of this process, however, is less a speed bump than a gigantic wall.

After prompting applicants to upload their résumés, a confounding abundance of companies also ask them to manually enter the information as well. Names of previous employers and institutes of education can be cut-and-pasted, which is tedious but simple enough; descriptions of tasks performed and other achievements, however, require careful summarization into even-more-concise bullet points to fit into the space allotted in the designated field. It’s more than just a hitch in the process, it’s a long and unnecessary detour. According to experts in recruiting and human resources, it’s also the kind of thing some applicants might consider a dealbreaker.

“Job searching is exhausting enough these days, and the last thing job seekers want to do is manually type their résumé over and over,” says Ashley Samson, chief of staff at National Business Capital. “It probably took them hours to perfect their résumé as it is, in this ultra-competitive job market.”

During a year in which massive layoffs have hit a wide array of industries, any additional friction in the application process is especially unwelcome. Current job seekers are already doing the three-dimensional chess work of trying to fit in keywords to outsmart the AI résumé filters while also avoiding being flagged by those same filters for being too spammy. Too often, the reward for all this data entry and thoughtful consideration ends up being radio silence–79% of job seekers report having applied to a job and not heard anything back whatsoever. Given what the rest of the job-hunting process is like, it’s no wonder frustrated candidates find the extra step of keying in data they’ve already uploaded not just an annoyance but an insulting disregard for their time and energy. Especially the ones who are most qualified.

“Within the HR community, there is a growing recognition that this practice can be a barrier to attracting quality candidates,” says Stephanie Alston, president at staffing agency BGG Enterprises. “The extra effort required can lead to negative perceptions of the employer’s recruitment process, potentially deterring top talent.”

Justin Marcus, cofounder and CEO at Big 4 Talent, has interviewed countless job seekers about their experiences applying for jobs. According to him, the number-one complaint among those he’s surveyed is how time-consuming the process can be. Between having to create accounts at various companies just to apply, and meeting each company’s specific demands, just the application part of hunting for jobs can be a part-time job in and of itself.

Making that process even more time-consuming is a massive mistake.

Here’s why it happens. Many companies, especially the larger ones, use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) such as Workday to streamline the recruitment process by automatically parsing and sorting candidate information. In theory, these systems make the application process more efficient and consistent. Considering the variety of résumé formats that candidates tend to use, however, these systems struggle to sort data into the intended fields. Ideally, the ATS would just file only the most relevant data that helps ensure the candidate is qualified to move along to the next step, at which point a human being would parse the résumé for nuance. Instead, in far too many instances, employers either ask candidates to spend time fixing the missorted data and trying to fit it all into the allotted fields—or ask them to manually enter all of it.

According to Heather Doshay—partner, people + talent, at investment firm SignalFire—some companies see the manual upload request as more than a byproduct of poorly scraped data.

At a time when a crafty applicant can potentially mass-apply to hundreds of jobs with a click, this extra step is a signal of intent. It’s a hoop to jump through to prove that this is more than just another job listing coughed up by Indeed.

“An additional benefit to recruiting teams is that it serves as an extra verification layer,” Doshay adds, “if there are inconsistencies across résumé, cover letter, and LinkedIn profiles.”

The average applicant, however, will have no idea why they are being made to devote more time to data entry while applying for a job, and little to no empathy for the company’s motivations. In fact, some applicants try to circumvent the request, keying in phrases like “see résumé” into the field they’re supposed to manually enter their résumé. It’s a risky move.

“I have seen that strategy work only when the candidate was already moving through the steps with a hiring manager or a recruiter in the process,” says Marcus.

Some HR professionals are exploring more candidate-friendly solutions to the problem of data-standardization, including beefing up ATS tech to better sift through résumé data and reducing the amount of information that requires manual entry. Of course, the companies closer to the top of the Fortune 500 list will neither have any difficulty recruiting top talent nor any incentive for changing their application processes for random applicants.

The companies further down on the list, however, might do well to consider whether they can afford to make the task of applying for a job into an endurance test.