Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?
toot.cat
toot.cat
Documents like these shouldn't be automatically processed, they should be reviewed by humans. Reducing someone's life history to a list of educational institutions and employers feels robotic even for a software developer's mindset.
I understand that there are real life problems because companies do use automated processing on applications, but that kind of behaviour shouldn't be encouraged.
I’d wager in many cases they aren’t even aware of an failure to process a resume occurring.
But I think an official format for CVs might not work so well because CVs in different fields aren't formatted in the same way. A programmer isn't going to put forward the same kinds of things as a musician or a professor in psychology.
If resumes could be standardized and easily searchable for information it would help find candidates much more accurately and quickly without having to read.
Even better would be if there was a verification standard where you could get a blue checkmark on your resume meaning all the information is accurate and not made up bullshit, then you could limit searches only to verified resumes and do less investigation or third party background checking.
It pushes industries forward.
I see how that can be useful from the recruiting side of the table, but fail to see how the candidate benefits.
The key point here, I guess, is that a lot of people have told me my resume is in the wrong format, but I still got the job. What's the right format for one employer is the wrong format for another employer. So there is no way to win. I now have no clue how to write a resume, but it also doesn't seem to matter.
(Still bitter about how few people ever look at my Github, though. People put that as a custom field in their automated system, and then the interviewers have nothing to say about my projects!)
We have a "verification standard" in the form of diplomas and certificates and neither of those have fixed the hiring issue so far.
If you want to skip background checking, just make people bring their proof of certification with them to the job interview. Of course, those certifications barely mean anything in most fields of work, but it's an exact equivalent of the blue checkmark system you propose.
I get that hiring is hard, but that's why hiring managers exist in the first place. If we used a nicely standardised, automatically validated system, all recruiters and hiring managers would be out of a job. Why pay someone to do that stuff when you could pay a cheap machine learned AI to fill a list of requirements for you?
Effective way to select for only young employees, I suppose.
Way, way more than a matter of parsing a bunch of standardized resume documents.
That's very nice to think about but in the real world if people don't match some exact keywords they get thrown away. HR is looking for "node.js" but you wrote it like "nodejs"? Though luck pal, bye. HR wants a "computer scientist" but you have a degree in "computer science"? Same, automatically discarded.
If anything, a standard format would at least allow people to classify themselves/others correctly and without ambiguity.
It's random, and not based on any job-relevant differences, for sure. But hiring is always going to be pretty random so long as we're pretty bad at predicting who'll be good at any given job. So long as there's no systemic bias, it's fine, and selection by idiosyncratic spelling is at least much less biased than a lot of other irrelevant criteria that get used in hiring.
I'm sure this happened somewhere at some point in time, but IMO it's becoming a myth blown out of proportion.
I've never actually worked at a tech company that had any sort of automatic resume filtering software. As a hiring manager, we didn't even have HR pre-screening resumes for us. If we did have recruiters, they were competent and incentivized to find good candidates (e.g. wouldn't be unnecessarily rejecting good candidates because they were missing exact spellings of keywords)
It would seem ludicrous in 2022 and this hiring crunch for a tech company (one that you'd actually want to work for) to arbitrarily filter out resumes based on incomplete keyword searching.
That said, I have heard this often enough that some people must do it. I can't imagine why though, as it takes only a few seconds for a human to scan a resume. Even at 10 seconds per resume (a conservative estimate), that means the human could screen 360 resumes per hour.
Based on experience at firms with on the order of 1:1 applicants to hires up to 10,000:1 applicants to hires, I’d agree most such tools are not present at most companies, as they tend to be used from ratios of 100:1 and up.
On the other hand, while most companies might not have or use such tools, the more jobs a company has, the more likely they are to have some form of selection or filtering in the pipeline.
But none of the ATSs really collect great data on how many of their customers use them in their core processes. From observing actual, heavy duty recruiter and HR usage at Ladders, I suspect it is not very many.
These are people people after all, and they are not great at writing REGEX style queries to find only the precisely correct resumes they are looking for. You also need to remember that they are frequently working on novel searches each week, and wouldn’t have the confidence or the capability to craft such searches.
Tech companies doing recruiting of any meaningful volume are indeed generally using searches or matches of some kind at the start of the funnel.
A standard format wouldn't solve the problems you described. There's no comprehensive list of frameworks and programming languages, let alone for types of experience outside computer science. The data would be structured, but HR would still throw out the bits of data that need to be filled in manually.
Minor anecdote incoming. I applied to a company A. It was a fit. I think I used the right keywords. Zero response. I talked with my buddy there. She talked with hiring manager. I got hired by company A. I later found out HR was unhappy, because it undermined their 'process' - such as it is.
There just has to be a better way to do this when compared to things as they are now.
Fundamentally it does kind of suck to have to put up people in your environment who are "unhappy" with you, or the fact that you snuck in there -- not because you don't belong there, but because of their own basic ignorance as to how things actually work.
Not that you can't grit your teeth and live with it - it's a job after all, and that's what you get paid for. But still, it does kind of suck.
Any standardized process will lack fidelity and excellence in specific cases. Or maybe even in all cases, when the company has made the trade off for cost or speed over quality.
But that’s what big company life is like, and that’s why they have standardized processes. Because even with the errors, in aggregate, it works out better for the business.
Wouldn't those issues be more likely to occur as a result of automated processing? I imagine that most humans who deal with technical hiring would guess that "node.js" and "nodejs" are probably the same thing.
http://web.archive.org/web/20171002221201/http://www.jerkcit...
Originally published in October 2002 (almost 20 years ago from when this comment was made, for you future readers and time travellers).
“Do not send in a job application before you have an actual human being who has expressed enthusiasm for reading or forwarding it.”[0]
I believe this is sound advice, and the pitfalls you mentioned was probably the reasons that he gave this advice.
Networking and reaching out to people at interesting companies is another way.
You will probably still have to write a cover letter and send in your résumé. But if you have someone on the inside who will mention to the hiring manager that, ”hey, you should check out Jane’s application” it will probably make a great deal of difference compared to just applying and hoping for the best.
And please folks, remember that FAANG is not the only game in town. There are lots and lots and lots of other companies out there, and many of them also pay well since they need to compete with FAANG to at least some extent.
I definitely think it’s likely that most people on hn don’t work for companies that do this, but maybe hn just skews toward certain kinds of tech jobs.
I think the fact it’s low cost to avoid and high cost if it occurs keeps most people just doing it regardless of whether it’s true or not
For external candidates, we see less than 30% of all resumes. As with all things, 80% of the rest are junk and another 20% are potentially viable candidates.
It would seem most of the over-confident “it’s a myth” comments in this thread are from folks not familiar with typical processes for hiring in the 100s to 1000s.
We consider ourselves lucky to get 50 résumés, and if even one isn't obviously disqualified that is a miracle
This isn't the "real world" you're referring to here -- it's the fin-de-big-tech bubble world where everyone and their dog is not only sold, smack-down drunk on the idea that Algorithms and Data are the Solution to Your Problems. They aren't of course -- it's just a giant hornswoggle. This "world" needs to end, and it needs to end soon.
My belief is that it will. But until it does, companies that run crappy ATSs (like there's any other kind) deserve the buzzword-gurgling, keyword-dropping candidate pool get. And developers who get "rejected" by these companies should be grateful for the sublime gift of this rejection -- and for the opportunity to laser focus on companies and teams that use their heads to hire, rather than a fleet of bots.
Snark aside - hiring managers that actually read resumes (and yes, actually at least skim each and every one -- really it ain't that hard) are golden to work for (other factors being equal). Really, you don't want to waste your time with companies that have drunken the ATS kool-aid. Really you don't.
That said, however:
HR is looking for "node.js" but you wrote it like "nodejs"? Though luck pal, bye.
It's "Node.js" with a dot. If you spell it "nodejs", that's a serious red flag and you shouldn't be surprised if it gets you automatically discarded -- even by a human reviewer.
That's what resumes used to be, after all -- a kind of a take-home test where you really do have enough time (and perfect knowledge) to get everything 100 percent right. And also a test of your awareness of the fact that, yes, in critical business communications at least -- this level of correctness does matter, and it matters a lot.
So if Node.js has that many more hits than nodejs, it's not surprising that some people see it as canonical.
Hearing the context of this conversation, though, I can see that "nodejs" in your resume is a signal to senior peers within that community--others who are "in the know". That may be a useful filter.
The only thing this filters for is people who have been looking for a job for a long time and/or are people focused on presentation instead of content, good luck with that.
We’ve hired incredible engineers across that have had typos and major resume mistakes many times and they had no communications problems on the job.
A resume is a background/interests check for the hiring manager. Giving them a spell check is about as useful as measuring the ratio of times the letter ‘a’ appears relative to ‘e’.
> critical business communications at least -- this level of correctness does matter, and it matters a lot.
This sounds like someone who is unable to contextualize when that would be relevant. Unless you’re writing user documentation there are zero times in an engineer’s day-to-day communications where writing nodejs instead of “Node.js” would have any impact at all.
I know I've rejected resumes for tech writing positions that contained spelling errors. I would hope a tech writer would at least use a spell chekker.
I'll leave the matter of whether one should be expect resumes to be at least reasonably correct (in terms of spelling and grammar) or not - or what the threshold for "reasonably" should be on this front - to the side for now. It's obviously a question of taste, to a certain degree.
But sorry - what you're saying about the ratio of 'a' to 'e' makes no sense at all.
And on this front:
Unless you’re writing user documentation
I don't know what planet you live on -- but on my planet, good engineers write "user documentation" (in the sense of READMEs, docstrings, etc) and participate in mailing lists, do conference presentations, etc, all the time. And yes, while nobody is 100 percent perfect, consistently making a large number of gaffes (or more to the point: conveying an attitude that these things just don't matter; or that you're so hot that they shouldn't matter for you) in these contexts -- particularly when there there is plenty of time available to edit and review -- is definitely seen as a red flag, both in and outside the company.
For any company you'd want to work for, that is.
These days I think I work at the best team I ever worked on and it seems I'm in the top two in spelling, it is almost as if the rest if the team is mildly dyslexic or doesn't care.
But they are nice to work with, smart and they make good code.
I'll take them 49 times out of 50 over some perfect in code and writing but nasty in person ex colleagues.
Even if I really really really need a specialist on hight performance <whatever it was, I can't add a dead giveaway here> I'd still try to look elsewhere first.
Edit:
... and those two ex colleagues? Their code was good but it wasn't perfect either.
Sorry I confused you. Let me be clear, it’s not relevant at all to job performance. I would take someone with terrible spelling and punctuation who actually writes documentation over someone who writes half as much because they are obsessing over details like that.
> in the sense of READMEs, docstrings, et
These are generally for other developers. Developers do not get confused when they see “NodeJs” instead of “Node.js”. Do you know what point you were trying to make?
> is definitely seen as a red flag, both in and outside the company.
> For any company you'd want to work for, that is.
Not sure what kind of company you’re talking about, but it’s definitely not a tech company. Maybe Wall Street or something a little slower paced?
I've seen my fair share of resumes and hired my fair share of people, and I've come to the conclusion that sloppy, error-ridden, CVs are a sign of a lack of attention to detail.
Here's a candidate with all the time in the world, and huge motivation, and they still can't complete this task correctly. It's not a good look.
I'm not saying a single error I'd a deal-breaker, but it puts the applicant on the back foot. No doubt many of my rejects are quality engineers, but engineering, and software development are all about details.
You are woefully out of touch with the job market. And I’m saying this as someone who worked as a hiring manager at one of the most applied to tech companies in the world.
Edit: oh, and also US state governments. there's a reason they're known for being incompetent, people job hop within months and get keywords on their resumes and nothing ever gets done
Oh, really!? I'll be very glad NOT to work at a company that throws aways candidates because of such triviliaties.
In some software, say, nuclear warhead tracking software, you want those people.
I write it as nodejs because that's how I got used to it on the mailing lists and several places that I frequent.
If a "team" decides not to hire me because of the latter, then ... thanks, I guess?
But at this point we're getting into the territory of what's seen as a positive in some niche communities may not be seen as a positive signal outside that community. And in business communications, what masters most is knowing who your audience is, and how your message is received.
It’s ego.
What is the résumé’s job? To convey experience and work in a positive light. A small typo that may incidentally be the correct spelling shouldn’t derail that if the goal is to hire the most talented people.
To my defense, I was going by my Bayesian prior for certain language names for which one could be 100 percent sure there was no alternate accepted spelling or capitalization.
So if one put JAVA or PERL on their resume, that would generate a definite "pass" signal.
Or even if it's just 1 or 2. It's infinitely better to hire someone who is in fact really solid at what they say they know, than someone who tries to spam you with every random keyword they've been exposed to in the hope that you won't drill down and ask them any hard questions about most of them.
That, and skill listings that don't pass the "apples and orange" test. For example:
Programming languages: Java, Perl, PHP, XML, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap
Know yourself, and know your audience.
It is never advice toward hiring manager. It was always criticized as not smart and leading to many false rejects.
Yikes. “It’s not JavaScript it’s Ecmascript! What a RED FLAG.”
Not comparable.
It really does require an eye for detail (in places where it matters) to a degree that comes epsilon close to being "pedantic" in the annoying sense -- without quite going over that line.
Making such „mistakes“ actually shows quite a bit about the counterpart starting with correctness and precise communication.
Back then it drove me nuts when someone wrote „advanced in AngularJS 2“ - and it kept coming!
Mine certainly isn't, it's like me. Worked out so far.
But then again, I wouldn't want to work for most companies.
Pecunia olet!
But my CV also shows part of my character, mainly the fun part. If that is deemed unprofessional by a company, I immediately know they are no good fit for me.
The thing is: As with every relationship, they are two way streets. I am not a beggar as a potential employee, neither am I king. We see eye to eye or not at all.
At least fixing stupid mistakes in your resume is well within your control, and (unlike cramming for their tests) doesn't take hours and hours of your time.
But to reject a candidate just because they're not the same kind of pedant that I am would be quite unreasonable IMHO. As long as the whole thing isn't littered with typos or formatting issues, that's just something I wouldn't pay too much attention to. Not everyone needs to be the person to dot every i and cross every t.
Also, I really want to see the HR department that can confidently reject or even mark down a candidate when most of the writing I've seen from most people in any company I've ever been (including from HR departments, PMs or executives) has been "meh" at best, and full of errors or at least awkward language more often than not. For better or worse, writing skills are not necessarily something we tend to select for in the industry.
But whatever. It's your life. You do you, and I'll do me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/8d0bg2/oracle_o...
From my experience, however, it's the native English speakers who spel the worse.
Besides, I've noticed that ESL speakers make different kinds of mistakes than sloppy native speakers do.
All of the lines below have red squiggly lines under them in my browser's text area:
- Qt Quick
- Datalog
- Datomic
- TensorFlow
> I've noticed that ESL speakers make different kinds of mistakes than sloppy native speakers do.
I've never seen a non-native speaker writing "would of" or using "they're" instead of "their". On the other hand I can't count how many times I've skipped an article or used a wrong one somewhere (since my native language doesn't use them at all).
She has internal word concepts. When the English words fit cleanly into her existing concepts it's easy. When two English words map into one word concept it's considerably harder, it took her a long time to correctly separate turn on from open (and turn off from close), but at least any given thing always goes the same way. In situations where that doesn't even work she will make frequent errors even to this day--do not trust her use of gender words.
It’s a document sent to tons of people. Revised by tons of hiring managers. Can’t you spend 5 minute looking at a dictionary? If you cant be bothered to spend 5 minutes researching this for an important document, what makes me think that you will spend 5 minutes trying to be good at your job. Lack of care on your resume is lack of care on lots of other things.
There was even one time they forgot to give me the resume... that was probably the funniest interview ever. They got the job too.
Bullshit. There are many things person may care about and many things they may not. If this position is unrelated to professional writing, it's just irrelevant. Are you questioning their abstract ability to "care" and trying to translate spelling care to job care? Bad news, it doesn't translate (aside from the fact that ideal perfectionists can't get shit done ever; your best candidate still figures out the ideal form of his resume and is too anxious to click "publish").
Perfectly, no. But in formal communications, they need to show that they're at least making an effort to get things reasonably correct. And if it matters enough, you can always find a native-speaking friend to review your resume or cover letter for you.
(Source: been there, done that, applying for jobs in other countries).
Of course, it is also reasonable to be forgiving on resume errors. It depends on the culture and team you're trying to build.
Literally every time I have submitted an (academic) paper at least one US reviewer had to point out I made several spelling mistakes when I actually used the British spelling (consistently) instead of the US spelling.
Sorry my man but it is called "English", I think I am allowed to spell things like they do in England.
Agree. And yet, they are still the ones that mix up "your" and "you're", "then" and "them" and "than"
And for people who want to work in startup land, it’s an ideal.
Once a company gets past 40 or so people, though, ATS adoption increases. And 150+ employees without an ATS are rare. It’s just that the volume of candidates and interview processes that need to be managed require there be some software to manage the workflow.
on edit: before people come in with not wanting to work for a company that would make such a stupid mistake, first off I believe mistakes sometimes happen, and second Henry Thompson leader of the XML Schema working group, had the subtitle of his LinkedIn page saying something like he was an expert in XLM for at least a year (I should really have taken a screen shot) so I mean I think it would just as silly to not work someplace because they made a mistake as it would for them to screen you out for making a mistake.
- resume keyword scan (automated or otherwise)
- leetcode interviews
The former I think you’re spot-on. If you’re serious about hiring, some qualified to do so needs to be reading resumes.
The latter is complicated. I tend to agree that the industry has over-pivoted to “dynamic programming whiteboard puzzle” as the LSAT of high-paying software work. But while most seem to agree that leetcode interviews suck in tons of ways, something that is unambiguously superior seems to be an open problem.
And some algorithms and data structure testing is important for hard software work. Even choosing the right library requires some basics. Is every SWE at Amazon implementing CS papers every month? No, clearly not. But unless machine resources are free in your domain, brute-force doesn’t always work.
FANG people do in fact get elitist about their CMU educations. But there’s another crowd that throws the baby out with the bath water: “I solve business problems, not reverse linked lists.” Well, what kind of business problems don’t involve some computation?
It’s a balance that our industry seems to still be trying to find.
Here is your pink slip. Don't call us
Best example of someone I wouldn't want to work for ever
perfect filter, both ways
Two ways of three. Some innocent person may accidentally put Node.js in their resume and get hired.
Haha and then they scream about labour shortage )
I get hundreds posting into some of the roles I’ve hired for and I’ve got to look at every single one in order to find a possible match. It generally takes me about 30 seconds to a minute to assess a resume. A kernel of interest stands out quickly or a smoke screen of buzz words tells me it’s the wrong candidate.
Algorithms aren’t a substitute for an active hiring manager being really interested in finding the right candidate to join their team.
He said he looked at about 1000 resumes a week. After a while, you can tell in 2 seconds if it is worth pursuing or not.
Except it doesn't, because a lot of things in life doesn't fit in that boxes that well.
You might not have experience in node.js, but in JS and some of the node.js-alike server side VMs.
Even just a "degree in computer science" can mean many things. Furthermore you might have something which for the position is "equivalent", like a "master of science in cognitive systems with a specialization on AI" which contained a lot of CS courses, and maybe also some pr-axis experience. Or you just started working as a programming free lancer with 16. Or ...
Furthermore a resume is quite individualistic, beyond just the raw content it contains. How that content is represented can sometimes give you hints, about what kind of questions you want to ask during an interview.
I have seen a bunch of standardized forms for resumes some companies opted into, they _always_ caused endless problems.
Fixing that would require not only a universal data format but also a universal taxonomy of terms to describe skills. That would need everyone to agree on how to describe what they do. Easy enough when you're describing programming languages, but effectively impossible for any softer skills. This is precisely why you need the human aspect.
The way to fix the issue you describe is to educate HR people, not to try to apply technology to a non-tech problem.
Resumes aren't just a list of skills and work history (education isn't even on my resume anymore), it's also a chance to let a small amount of your personality show through so you stand out against the pile.
Of course, if you're submitting to a big corp, you'll be fighting against AI reading your resume first, so, write for that if that's how you roll. I usually only apply to smaller companies that apparently end up as bigger companies by the time I move on.
I like that so much that I dare not copycat it.
in the house == domesticated
house approxEqual box
"Keeps things running. Puts out fires."
Served me well on the resume, probably for quite similar reasons.
I wish it was easier to do. At my first job after university (not my first job altogether) we initially had great rapport between "DCOps" and HR. To be honest, our group was rather... irreverent, which made it even more interesting that we had such great rapport (we had all the stereotypes going for us, including female-only HR team and basement-dwelling male-only sysadmins).
But thanks to great cooperation, HR would do basic filtering on things they actually checked with us about, then forwarded us the CVs unmodified to give our own opinion before deciding whether to go with it or not.
Unfortunately some time later head of HR ended up let go due to some conflict with C-level I believe, and things slowly reverted to the mean :(
A regular HR can only do CTRL-F CTRL-V efficiently in their PDF viewer, when automated system would likely test for /\bnode(?:\.?js)?\b/i, because it's a result of a development cycle, which usually includes some field analysis. HRs would LOVE to select something like "where has($node) and years($redux) >= 2 order by years($php) desc". They are not idiots, they just have piles of data and nonsensical tools. Of course they optimize for nonsense.
A human could search for different variations too, but they are average in average and have no the expertise to install a regex-able viewer. It's stupid little things like this that prevent them from doing their job better, not some systemic issue of their own.
Disagree.
Recruiters, hiring managers, and specialized software is all I see.
The examples are a stretch though. I've never heard of anyone losing an interview due to their spelling of nodejs or computer science. I don't buy that's something that happens often enough to spread FUD over.
But to be honest, I’ve never seen so stupid HR people. Like a lot of people, they have goals to reach and they’ll happily accept an interview from any CV as long as there are computer-related keywords and roughly the required experience.
HRs are one of the most important department when it comes to a company potential shitiness. So I’m glad they have the power to kick you from the hiring process for stupid reasons.
Come to think of it, the latter is probably why many of us will always have a job.
If a company is choosing which candidates to interview using grep, it's very likely the rest of their hiring process is similarly broken, and quite possibly other aspects of their corporate culture as well. They're actually doing candidates a favour by giving a clear indicator of how shit they are, much like a candidate who turns up to an interview drunk.
This is not true for the largest corporations of course. But that is a solvable problem, just provide a standardized form. You can even adapt it to the needs of the industry in question. This is actually a great boon because you can specifically ask for qualifications. There should be enough budget for that at least.
If you company easily discards applications your HR is either incompetent or it just isn't looking for candidates. But even then you try to build a connection to people applying to you. You may meet them later because they tend to work in your industry.
Again, there are special rules for the largest of corporations although I think HR should be manned enough to have a sensible recruitment process.
The problem we have currently is that some CVs fail that review because they’re in a format that the tools cannot parse. If you’re CV is strong but you’re seeing fewer responses despite having a prettier CV compared to your peers, then that might be the reason. So from your stance standardisation might actually help the industry rather than harm it.
My company (we have software for responding to applicants in real time... think apply... instant conversation with a human recruiter) did a study of about 1,200 resumes and found that 14% of resumes had inaccuracies that would cause them to be screened out... and about 9% of resumes were in a unparsable format. A lot of the screening we see out there is really bad - mostly text search looking for key phrases like specific colleges, specific employers or specific skills. If you are imagining indexing resumes with elastic search and making queries, that may actually be better than state of the art which is usually something that turns into a SQL query.
14% with incomplete information also sounds right.
And I also concur with you on the screening being pretty basic, not ES level of sophistication at all.
Human review is fraught with bias. A lot of attention and column inches are devoted to algorithmic bias these days, but let's not confuse that for evidence that human review is perfect or even better. It's just harder to audit.
When submitting my resume and interviewing for jobs, I'd certainly prefer to be subject to: 1) multiple people with different biases, 2) humans that can change their mind and/or recognize their biases, 3) humans that can explain their rationale, and 4) humans that can grasp and weight eccentric and non-conforming experience. I'm not interested in being ranked in a standardized way, because I'm not interested in being a pure cog in wheel.
I also think people who want standardized resumes and automated processing are vastly underestimating the SEO effect it will have on hiring. If resumes are automated, then many people more aggressive than you will game the system to the Nth degree. The same thing that happens to Google and the internet will happen to jobs: the loudest and spammiest will win, and the good content will go mostly unnoticed and unrewarded.
Edit: Humans are weird. I guess current ecosystem is not as bad as it could be ( even though it does suck ).
Reviewing CVs is boring. They should be made easy for the human who is reading. Imagine being a person in a human resources department going through 100s of these... If there was a good portable format, that process becomes far more efficient and interesting.
A good interview after the resume has been accepted would go into precisely what you are advocating for -- the life history and interpersonal context.
I suspect the answer as to why it hasn't happened is simply because most laypeople applicants would find it too difficult to do something like LaTeX or whatever other thing would be necessary to make this a reality, and also, firms in general suck at adopting new technology.
Those people where a CV and certificates matter, they already construct a CV in the closed system of LinkedIn or Monster's websites. Nobody needs to use LaTeX, there will be websites where anyone can do it, if anything that's an additional business opportunity.
No, I suspect the actual reason is: Nobody will do it unless the big players (LinkedIn etc.) will adopt it. And the big players don't do it because interoperability, and a CV that can be migrated anywhere, isn't in their interests.
Reduced latency by 350 ms Increased engagement by 18% Reduced AWS spending by 23% Scaled from 13 to over 300 virtual machines
That sort of specificity and numerical quantification is what makes a great resume stand out.
that's a flawed view imo.
there could be plenty of catch-all sections to maintain "descriptions"
resume content expectations are largely driven by industry.
i've not heard of someone reading resume more than 10s.
the whole job posting industry dug themselves into a meaningless, needless task: parsing resume pdfs. heck, some even use "AI" for it.
Ignoring the web, we already do some formatting with the common Education/Work experience trope. We could arrange resumes arbitrarily just to mess with employers, perhaps? They are already pretty easy to parse.
Having been reading resumes a lot lately, I always breathe a sigh of relief when people hand in the standard latex template, with maybe only the colors changed. The structure is immediately familiar and easy to navigate. I could use a client app that presents a hypothetical standard data format in such a way. My colleagues in sales or customer success on the other hand seem to prefer other formatting styles; they could look at their candidates in that way.
Note that I'm not arguing that this it the best presentation possible for a CV. I'm just arguing that having a uniform presentation between CVs reduces the mental burden of filtering through them. (And if you want to get into that, might reduce bias, especially if you don't include the image in the presentation)
One person that is developing such a tool recommended collage students not to add too much links to their CVs because otherwise, their CV will be flagged as a malicious document.
I'll always remember but never find the post, where someone just hid tons of keywords in a joke resume and got interviews with an alarmingly high success rate.
It might be this one?
Reality is, however and in my experience, that more and more HR departments fall for promises of AI snake oil. Virtually every employer I apply with has it's own portal, often times asking you to construct your CV anew on their website (often with drop downs that don't include the actual job title or skill). Preferably with a five minute web session and no submit confirmation. Couple this with companies increasingly not responding at all due to fear of being sued, and you'll spend hours on an application and won't even know whether the non-response is due to you, or due to the website trashing the submission. As for CV parsing, this has gone so far as to a big news site over here posting helpful articles on how to beat the system. "Favorite" tidbit: Submit two CV - one for humans, one for dumb algorithms.
Oh and btw, I'm applying at non-tech companies increasingly. Maybe humans isn't perfect either. I mean, I submit proof of 25 years of high grade enterprise IT experience, just for some HR person to ask me where my certificate as an "IT technian" is: they don't know what any of that "weird stuff" means, but to them I lack a generic "IT technician" certificate in early career. A thing that didn't even exist back then! But the latter may just well be a quirk of my own, bureaucratic country.
But overall, this is a hot mess already, and I have often times had the same thought: Why can't we have some sort interchangeable format, much like "geek code", just for all the possible job titles, universities, locations, and companies; with some format-dependent, but free text fields because one can never catch all of them in a fixed list?
How "automatized" way could help there? Unifying the CV/resumes for certain company? Sure, if they are have some form - could be stupid Google Form or more sophisticated like Teamtailor [0] - go ahead. You will have a nice databases or resumes and profiles similar to mini-LinkedIn. While I am fan of automation, I don't see any special incentive here that will profit HR team.
I know hundreds of examples, where CV nor initial job interview didn't exactly has shown how good someone is. Also, I personally had experienced a situation I have completely matched the job offer but after talk during interview, I knew it would be waste of time and mentally it will be a bad choice for next year(s) to join their Acme corp.
Do the JSON databases of applicants will help anyhow to solve the human relation job to find out the best candidate for the position? I am highly skeptical and in my humble opinion it will just "dehumanify" the whole process.
Maybe, it is good if you are looking for some warehouse worker like Amazon? /s
My basic rule of thumb is that the more structured and formal the CV submission process is, the worse the applicant to hire ratio will be, and so the more people you are up against.
For those of us in the tech industry, especially later in our careers, that probably isn't an issue, but in many other jobs, and earlier in your carreer, then it's going to be an issue. I remember having to re-enter my CV into ATSs back in 2001 for the big companies hiring graduates because they had so many to get throught, smaller companies just wanted your CVs.
The big job sites have resume parsers that work well enough from a PDF or Word doc, and then they don't have to worry about you forgetting a close tag or a mandatory field. Sure, stuff gets lost, but they get 80% of a billion resumes rather than 100% of a million of them. They can't exchange data or even trust what they have, but it's good enough for them to make money. Meanwhile, a competitor demanding good data from its clients never gets off the ground.
Anyway, every data format for human information ends up being either vague (to allow in everything) or impossible (see the myths that programmers believe about names, time, addresses, etc.) You end up giving a string for each field... Then give up, just accept any string, and hope for the best.
Everybody wants Google or some machine learning solution because the formats never work for the information people want to convey. Better solutions could exist but the hacky ones are first to market, in a natural monopoly where there really only needs one good enough product.
If you think a lack of a good resume format is bad, look at electronic health records. Those are far more important to be correct and exchangeable, and even there the cleanup effort is always enormous.
In the US, those are far more important to be billable.
And that's the problem. Encoding the patient's medical state is simply an afterthought.
The cost of producing such an RFC is so small. guaranteed reduction in inefficiencies including operational costs.
my gut feeling is that 20% improvement could have big butterfly effects.
That was what I learned in ontologies: there is nothing so well understood and immutable that the business case won't change. It's so much easier to be vague than to be clear.
I too was convinced that people would rather have good clean data that they could trust, and it would save them a ton of money in the long term while costing a little up front. Maybe someone out there can sell that idea, but it wasn't me.
You can have the current sloppy parsers AND a jsonresume.org parser besides each other.
You can even hide the latter behind a tiny 'other upload formats' link, if you are afraid this option deters uploads of PDFs or docxs.
But nobody really uses it for data interchange. I use it to render my resume in new layouts now and then.
Although, it does let style dictate content sometimes (some templates force you to have dates down to the day for job start and end dates, etc.)
As you can imagine, I felt like a clown trying to explain that I didn't have a word document because my resume was generated from a JSON file.
I did, however, have a PDF on a USB drive I always kept on me but they refused to accept USBs out of fear that I was trying to give them a virus. Eventually the lady processing my application gave up and printed the PDF off that was hosted on my website but also scolded me for not having a word doc.
The whole ordeal was pointless anyway since they said they can give me 70% of my rent.
Even if there were a turn-key software platform they all used, which natively supported a standard data format, they'd still find a way to screw it up.
I think over 3k+ people use the new Gist hosting. (In our old hosting we had around 10k resumes. Not including those who by pass the free community hosting)
===
On a personal note, I've loved having my resume in a standard;
- Depending on what type of company/person I am applying to I will change my theme on the fly. (Startup vibes I will make it look hipster, if it's a more formal role I will use a simple black and white theme)
- I use to lose my most recent resume constantly, having it in a Gist called resume.json that I just edit seems to have solved that for me.
- Hopefully one day a standard will get integration adoption so I can just upload my resume.json and not have to fill out the same form fields a hundred times.
I think we wanted JSON at the time because it just relied on less extra packages when working inside of the JS ecosystem.
So yeah, if anyone wants to make a resume.yaml, we only need to add an extra step to convert it to json for them to use any of the tooling.
Why should resumes in Vietnam or China be using English, after all.
In HTTP we have Get, Put, Post, Delete, Patch or Options and not obtenir, mettre, poster, supprimer, corriger, options. Yet the French use the web all the time, as do Chinese or Maui.
It would not be about how the fields are named, but about localised concepts. Maybe there are societies that have some educational concept which western Americans cannot fathom, but which is crucial on a CV there.
This,implies the standard needs to be flexible, extensible and localised. Which kindof defeats having a standard.
So I suppose that parallel suggests it depends on whether there's a realistic expectation of WYSIWYG editors for any kind of universal resume format. Which I think seems incredibly unlikely.
A challenge I see is -- resumes change wildly by industry.
a tech resume is totallly different from an actor's resume.
but I think this complexity can be handled.
I totally support json resumes.
I’ve done numerous interviews large corporations where the first part of the interview process involved copying my printed resume by hand onto sheets of paper so that someone could then type in what I had written into a web browser. Why they couldn’t just copy from my printed resume or accept soft copy in word or ascii I have no answers for.
When I joined at Chase Manhattan it was very obvious that their onboarding process is designed for large groups - many dozens of people at a time - but the day I joined I was the only one being hired. I spent a couple hours with just myself and a single HR rep going through a half dozen rooms, in each room I had to sit as far back and to the left as possible whereas she sat at the front right of the room. She could not pass out forms until I was seated, at which point I would have to come get the form from her and return to the far side of the room to fill it out, then bring it back to her, return to my seat, then she would announce we were moving to the next room, and it would begin again. When I tried to sit at the front of the room she became extremely agitated and refused to continue until I returned to the back of the room, when I tried to get a form from her without first sitting in the back of the room same result. The rest of the company is pretty much the same, it never got better.
- worked at a place where they printed A3 excel sheet to write new prices on paper with a pencil
- courthouse procedures are peak redundancy, it's like the opposite of any database normalization 101, the more you copy the same data in various formats the better, and do not question why. It's systemically settled, since everybody expect the data to look like this, any deviation will trigger anxiety, and since they have no information management training they will scream for missing data even though there's still 12 copies of it scattered around the page, just like the emacs keyboard xkcd blended with the old waiting room social mirroring experiment
a good standard is one everyone uses.
Personal opinion: resumes are actually kind of hard. I've personally been involved in HR Open Standards and even though it is a very complete standard, it's still hard to map real world resumes into the format sometimes. There is a shocking amount of ambiguity, and a shocking amount of adjacent standards (some of those have been adopted) for describing work history, education, certifications, people and workplaces.
So... most of the industry just parses resumes into some internal schema, and a lot of employers make job seekers enter their education and history on a job application form so they get it their way. It's really messy. Hope that helps.
HR Open Standards is only available with membership. Doesn't appear very "open", but I'd assume that doesn't matter much to the industry.
JSON Resume seems like the best take so far. I've used it for my resume and at my current job, and, although we've had to extend the schema, it's a great base to start with. It's got all the structured fields one would need to build a resume. It would be trivial for a company to start accepting it, at least as a way to pre-fill all the "education and history" fields that we have to fill out anyway.
Membership is free and you can access the standards (from their website hropenstandards.org):
"The versions of HR Open Standards linked below are available for free public download. You need to be logged in to download the standards. If you're not already an HR Open Standards member, you can register for a free Community membership account."
Not sure I like the format but its good it stresses experience and narrative over just 'formal' data. And they have done it quite nicely that you can either download a template and work offline, or you can work in the browser and then download later again upload/import your CV to continue editing, make versions, etc without any data being stored on the server.
That said, my record in actually ever landing a new job is fairly woeful but that may be more down to being poor in interviews.
There are, inevitably, some people who apply to a lot of jobs. Jobs they aren't qualified for. Low intent applications, where the applicant isn't really that interested. Etc.
Even if these are a minority, they apply to a lot of jobs. In any case, standardizing job applications (OP seems to be talking about application forms that are mostly resume-ish fields) just means more of these. More volume, more noise, probably not many more successful hires.
There's kind of the same dynamic on the other side. Most workers don't love the idea of submitting an indexable resume for employers to leaf through.
Sometimes a modicum of friction is helpful.
I agree that a hoop is needed - I recently posted a job on LinkedIn which has some kind of "click to apply" functionality, and it was clear that most of the applicants were just lazy clickers that probably hadn't even read the posting. On the other hand, if you make people jump through pointless procedural hoops, you're screening for people who are ok doing that.
Ask for a cover letter, you get people who actually want the job and hear from them why they are interested.
A cover letter is a kind of writing contest, or maybe it's perceived that way by a candidate. Writing about yourself can be stressful.
I'm not saying not to, ask for a cover letter. Just saying that this stuff is nuanced. Standardisation is great when you want very low friction. Job applications aren't frictionless, probably can't/shouldn't be. Some copy paste fields might be inelegant, but it's not changing the friction equation by much.
The honest truth about why they want the job for most people is that they provide what you need and that they enjoy things like eating, having a roof over their head, and fun things to do with what's left over of the money you pay them.
Coming up with some drivel about how they've been entranced with Version_Five Inc's tech since they were twelve and how it's been their life-long dream to work with their famous Foobar Widget control language is a nice creative writing exercise but it hardly proves anything. If anything, it rewards lying and deceit to get hired quicker.
Many very capable people suck at writing, even if they are truly driven and interested, especially in the computer science field. A cover letter is a great screen for a job that involves a lot of writing, but for most jobs writing is only a side activity that shouldn't be treated as the main objective.
The thing is it's far more than a "modicum" in practice. There was a recent Harvard Business School study out there revealing that these systems are poorly calibrated (and/or these companies don't know how to use them), and as a result millions of candidates are getting rejected for reasons that are either specious (6-month resume "gaps" that may be due to normal life circumstances) or utterly meaningless reasons (like failing to match certain word combinations).
But I agree though that many HR departments would still love to use any tool that narrows the pool (however lossy the filter may be). Whether that is a good thing or bad thing or not is a matter of perspective.
In my view, it puts HR's own value and utility into question.
Yep, that's me taking care of my mother undergoing cancer treatment.
Sometimes it’s an economics problem. Problems need incentives before they can be solved.
And we have to keep filling them out by hand ...
On the other hand, it makes all sense to have a standard "full" CV out of which to select the things to include.
It's not like people are managing dozens/hundreds of candidates with a pen/paper.
There is definitely a need for a standard format.
It shouldn't take too long to parse the desirable skills from the top after that.
Maybe this standard can match against desired/offered compensation brackets as well to get that sweet spot on the bell curve.
Same when choosing a partner: the first thing you use to filter are looks, assuming the risk of filter out a below average looking person that will be your perfect match.
We, of course, delude ourselves into thinking that our method is 100% objective and unbiased. But it never is. Even if you read each one of the 1,000 CVs, you won't read the first one with the same energy you read the 950, and it's likely that you anchor on a given CV that you read among the first 20, and everyone after that is meassured against it.
CVs are by themselves only a proxy to a real person: why don't skip the CV and just interview everyone? Nobody's life fits in two pages.
This page mentions a few more formats: http://microformats.org/wiki/resume-formats
It seems like the problem isn't a lack of standards, but rather a lack of adoption and/or agreement on which standard to follow
See for example the FoaF ontology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology)
I’m highly skeptical of the whole concept and feel like I should have organically come across it by now.
KDE Itinerary and Apple Wallet make use of this. For the KDE Itinerary part, you can read more on this here: https://volkerkrause.eu/ (look at the KDE Itinerary posts)
Banks, research institutes, universities are joined in large consortiums. The German hotel reservation example above is one of the projects that’s getting attention.
In fact, the underlying technologies are all quite mature (triplestore implementations and the RDF, SPARQL, OWL, etc. standards) and used heavily in certain domains, such as biology and language. The standards are designed for easy serialisation and interoperability which is the antithesis of the "modern" walled garden and/or commercial API approach of the big Internet companies, although they also use semantic web tech to a certain extent.
In Europe, you will run into RDF quite often in academia (and research in general). I'm working on the newest version of the Danish WordNet, for example, which is published as RDF and OWL (in the turtle format) and which runs in Apache Jena. Coincidentally, I am actually developing this new version in Clojure which stole the triplestore concept from the semantic web stack and made it a mainstream database type in the Clojure ecosystem (Datomic, Datascript, Datahike, Datalevin, Asami).
Some of these old AAA XHTML 1.1+RDFa websites were well engineered and a joy for both man and machine to behold.
Only downside is that it gets tricky to edit unless you use that online editor. You have to re-import it and edit it that way unless you want to play around with Microsoft Word. But the format is consistent and its easy to read.
I do not love it very much, but I appreciate the online tools to create/update them from XML descriptors, without having to mess with Word; on the other side, being a generic template, is not very fit to expose CS skills.
An employer I know (in the startup scene) said he trashed all europass CV as he assumed you are a dull corporate droid who did not even take time to write a customized CV...
(edit: grammar)
* There are multiple protocols for exchanging EDI documents (AS1, SMTP, FTPS, SFTP...)
* There are multiple standards for the documents themselves (EDIFACT, X12, GS1 XML...)
* There are partner-specific business rules that need to be set up (this partner needs an ASN, that partner requires invoices to be for only one PO each, the other partner can only accept invoices which use their ERP’s internal codes...)
Some of these problems can be papered over with a “VAN” that can translate between standards, but I have yet to see one business send a non-PDF invoice to another without a lot of fuss.
Of course, being a SERIOUS, CORPORATE standard it needs to be overly complex, based on XML and SOAP and WebServices and whatnot: https://www.agenziaentrate.gov.it/portale/documents/20143/23...
There can be. You can create a universal data format for résumés.
You can make the universal data format a world standard in 7 steps:
1. Create a committee comprised of stakeholders.
2. Agree on a protocol for establishing consensus on requirements.
3. Consult all stakeholders about their requirements, and process these requirements through the committee in the form of a requirements document.
4. Develop a résumé format that meets the requirements through the committee.
5. Ratify and publish the résumé format standard through the committee.
6. Publicise the résumé standard.
7. Evangelise the résumé standard until it achieves widespread adoption.
That's almost all there is to it. You just need money, time, expertise, charisma, luck, and for the stakeholders to want you to succeed.
- Find a common problem of these different stakeholders that will actually get solved by your new standard.
Often, the standards talk is just a solution in search of a problem. It is easy to build a standard. It is not so easy to build a standard which really solves some stakeholder pain and gets adopted by multiple organizations.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%B1%A5%E6%AD%B4%E6%9B%B8&...
You list your school info, job history (not what you did, just date, company, title), and have room for about 2 sentences of personal description. You also have to put your picture so you can be judged on appearance.
Japan has some really nice features but treatment of employees, good salaries, good work culture, good hiring practices, are not among them
There is a bit of flexibility with these formats, but they're standard enough—and many teaching resources are available. Most Japanese university students are already using them to apply for companies in their final year. This contrasts with my time at a California university, where many of my peers had no idea how to write a resume even after graduating.
Linked in recommendations are a scam.
There is no easy solution. I suggest agencies setup and optimize a way to get a lot of people in vet and get the people out that don’t work out. For most companies this is a world of pain because they are not setup for it. We hire folks as 1099, give them a few tasks and within a week or two know if they will work out. Not perfect but better than waiting 6mo.
Things like the font choice, the paper itself (recycled paper for example), the length (big isn't always better), the formatting choice, having subtle paper decorations... all of these small things can work in your favor if done in moderation. Obviously you need the qualification to go along with it, but if you're competing with someone who has the same qualification and you don't use platforms like Europass and edit everything yourself to stand from the crowd, well, your odds might just increase.
Obviously take this with a grain of salt. I've heard it from two people, but that's not a large enough sample and not everyone is the same.
My guess it twofold. First, none of the resume sites is even remotely interested in data portability - they want you to use their site and their site alone. Why make it easier to go to the competitor? Second, despite all efforts, the usage of semantic web paradigms and all the automatic data processing that it enables is still minuscule outside of very niche communities - so most people aren't even aware of these solutions, and if nobody uses them, then nobody supports them, forming a vicious circle.
* "Why do people like JSON so much?"
* No work history on LinkedIn except a <1 year contract in 2005
> "This got posted to Hacker News. I'm tempted to create an account and join the discussion, but I'm holding off for now because I've already got plenty of time-eating social venues to post on."
So, never heard of HN before, then deciding that despite being unemployed and spending too much time on social media already, those other sites are still a more important use of time?
> I've decided it's my job to whine, complain, and refuse to eat my vegetables until the employers start fixing the whole job-hunting process, because it really sucks.
Maybe the problem lies with the OP's value metrics
Does the author want the resume to be objectively judged? Maybe not
The technical details are irrelevant.
Recruitment agency sends you CV. That CV has all names, address, phone numbers and email addresses removed. This is to stop the recruiter from bypassing the expensive agency and contacting the applicant directly to save agency fees
Next, no age or DOB is displayed. That's against the equality act here.
Next, the recruitment agency pastes their logos at the top of your CV for advertising purposes
End result is that your CV looks nothing like it did when you sent it. The formatting is broken, it prints over 6+ pages. That's why they don't take PDFs, as they can't edit it.
A business card conveys much more than purely the name, title and contact information of its bearer.
My CV/résumé is done using exquisite typography (since I studied that) and the choice of fonts and layout has a message too.
There is an interesting symmetry between the early role role of business cards and résumés today btw.[1]
These things can not be captured by the contents alone.
[1] https://www.caseyprinting.com/blog/what-is-the-history-of-bu...
Edit: typos
I think that https://jsonresume.org/ is the modern equivalent (with much less XML, thankfully :).
My view is to have it similar to html/css paradigm of web. I started working with TOML based schemas for defining CV's, actually wrote my CV in the schema.
If you wanna go forward, I would love to be a contributor, also I would love to get your opinions.
1. It lacks diversity (e.g. GenderType is incompatible with German laws, requiring "diverse" gender in official forms, which is definitely not "unisex" defined in the format).
2. It looks very much like a US-centric God Object. It is not clear why DUNS, ISICv4 or NAICS are there, but other identifiers like national ID or SSN are not. It would be better to have a single "identifiers" key-value map instead of them, that would be extensible.
3. Contacts would deserve a dedicated structure and key-value map (why single telephone field? why messenger IDs not there?).
The typical advice is to write your resume as a series of impact stories. “Saved my company X% of costs by automating a key process.” Or “increased revenue by Y% by always showing up for my shifts on time” or whatever.
But for many (most?) listed jobs [1], employers want competencies. They have a list of things that need to get done and they want people who can do those things quickly and cheaply.
So if there is going to be a universal data format, I think it’s probably going to try to document competencies (which is what employers actually care about) and not the vague brag sheets that many resumes are.
[1] By listed jobs I mean jobs you’ll find on a public job board like “front end developer” or “marketing manager.” As opposed to leadership positions or unlisted jobs which are more focused on impact and more likely to be filled by referral or recruiting.
From https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51315725/resume-work-his... :
> Schema.org's Occupation example 4, illustrates how to use Role and hasOccupation to associate an array of work history, like so:
There's already a https://schema.org/JobPosting .
They need the software to be built first. But the software won't be built unless there is demand for it.
XYZ Corp is interested in learning more about you, so we are pleased to offer you the opportunity to now submit an XYZ Corp resume: Please follow [this link] for instructions on filling out the XYZ resume format correctly!
https://www.hropenstandards.org
You must join (via email) in order to have access to the standards. Documentation for implementing the standards is via paid membership.
However, I have never seen a job site that will accept a conforming .XML file as an upload. They all want a .DOCX or .PDF, which they then proceed to mangle.
I can't explain why companies implement (bad) first-tier filtering via software, other than it's likely from their recruiters complaining to their bosses about all the spam and inappropriate candidates they get for openings.
Like a job market that matches employees to employers but in an open database. I can't think of an easy way to monetize it in an open data sense, sadly, but it seems like everyone would benefit from it and so you could charge a small fee and kill recruiters if your job match engine was good.
The market being so lucrative, I imagine that someone has already tried it and the devil is in the details. Perhaps if I cared more about this and didn't have a great network, I might give it a shot. Could bootstrap off Github profiles or something, and be tech focused to start with.
I partner in a firm these days (20 years) and in the past I was a permie and then a contractor (UK). 'résumé (henceforth "CV")' - I've seen a few and written one or two. I'm an IT sysadmin (time served) with an Engineering degree. My firm is an IT firm - not a cool one and rather small.
There is a trade off between prose and detail. You need to get across your persona and your skills. Skills are more important in general, but some particular detail may score highly. A decent layout and formatting may score too (I used to teach DTP) - don't bother with handwritten unless your cursive is prettier than mine and instantly legible.
When I'm faced with a waffle of CVs then I sort them into piles, most of which is a bin. It's tough, really tough and I do know what it is like on the other side too, so I do take pity occasionally, when I spot something that piques my interest on a CV that is probably doomed.
So, my advice is (for IT): * Two sides max (duplex, so one sheet printed on both sides). Front side has pertinent detail and back side has extra stuff. You need to be brief. Even a pdf has "pages", but P1 should present you effectively. * Keep the schooling (pre college) bit very concise. Bear in mind that's confirmatory stuff and not so important but we are used to seeing your life in roughly timeline order so don't be too cute! * Describe your skills. Now this is hard to get right. I suggest you dump modern names of systems but not versions unless it is important. * Previous employment. Keep it very concise. I don't really care who they are but I might be interested in particular technologies.
Now I've written the above, it's a bit more complicated than that ... ish.
When you are on one side of a desk and some bloke who might pay you is on the other side, just remember that a contract is two sided. Make sure that when you agree to a contract (employment for example) that you are as happy to do so as the other side.
Data format for CVs? RLY?
Also, once you start engineering a data format for résumés you are going to feel like you want a UUID for every company, university, organizational unit and position. Then some sort of weight they have in valuation of a candidate experience. Then...
My opinion is we don't need résumés at all. I mean they can probably be replaced with a 4-step process: an on-line choose-right test, then a test task, then an interview with an HR specialist who can evaluate the candidate's overall adequacy and then an interview with a specialist experienced in the actual job. I even suspect résumés are harmful.
At the end of the post, "The larger employers and job-hosting web sites need to get their acts together and work this out".
In a comment right below, the author says that this would be "giving job-seekers more control over their data".
Obviously, the larger employees and job-hosting web sites have no interest in allowing job-seekers more control over their data, quite the opposite, so they won't. And their active cooperation is absolutely required for such a data format to be adopted - so it won't be, at least not in a way that satisfies the author's wish of gaining more control over their data. That's it, it's that simple.
The reason the author is trapped long enough in meat grinder hiring to notice this "problem" is likely precisely because of some indistinguishable cookie cutter bullet point soup getting them nowhere. If you can capture it in a data structure, it's not a resume!
See also: why isn't there a universal UI for web sites?
Pretty sure a Word file is a data structure.
On the employer front: I always hated looking at 1000x pieces of white paper that all look the same. It was mind numbing.
On the employee front: I always ensured I used very graphical resumes that stood out. They always got the attention of the hiring managers, and it was a great filter of either "You're boring so you threw my resume away" or "You're awesome and the kind of company I want to work for by having some fun with it".
Does anyone have first hand experience of working for a company which does implement automated CV parsing?
https://www.jobscan.co/blog/fortune-500-use-applicant-tracki...
I can't see anything in that link that suggests those companies are doing automated CV parsing.
> Some ATS, like Taleo, even automatically rank applicants by comparing the uploaded resume to the job description. This allows recruiters to cherry pick candidates at the top of the ranking.
Outside of tech jobs if you apply to a big-five or something they’re absolutely doing this.
[0] https://xkcd.com/927/ [1] https://europa.eu/europass/en/create-europass-cv
Any solution for resumes is going to fall into the much harder category of social change, rather than technical solutions.
I would be more likely to locate the problem in increasing numbers of applicants rather than increasing numbers of applications per applicant, but I wouldn't be opposed to seeing a more centralized system go up. American medical schools accept students through such a centralized system. Chinese university admissions isn't centralized to the same degree as American medical schools, but it's still quite centralized, and more formalized.
https://workforce.com/news/what-hr-xml-means-and-why-youll-c...
But I don't think anyone really cared.
It’s a fairly well thought out spec in my opinion. Most issues I’ve run into have been from individuals that hate any use of XML and hastily convert the data to an ad hoc JSON format without thinking about why the XML is formatted the way it is. I presume this issue is why they created HR-JSON as a companion for uses where JSON is preferable.
Is is a good think? For most of the job positions it is okay, but if you want to stand out you need to make something unique.
Automatically match them up, hiring can get pre-filtered resumes and hirees stop having to actively apply to jobs.
The universal data format for resume has attempted - both by public and private sector actors. The Europass CV is a good example of the former, a universal profile for all EU citizens, which can used to apply for any job posted on the platform. LinkedIn might be considered a private sector attempt of the same.
The issue that confronts both is adoption rate.
Without forcing it through via mandate, employers will continue to accept resumes in whichever format and so job seekers will continue to optimise for the format they think will give them the best chance with said employer.
Diversification comes from the simple fact that there is no single authority enforcing standardisation
When hire I also like to receive custom resume that helps me to understand better why hire. Again I am totally uninterested tailoring my offering to formalized set of checkboxes concocted by some "industry expert".
Until choosing candidates actually becomes automated, no one will care enough to do this.
It's not like making a data format for invoicing which even so has quite a large number of competing formats.
Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/927/
So I’ve thought about this a lot :)
Properly understood, a resume is an advertisement to your future boss to get you interview requests for a job you can succeed in.
Why isn’t there a single format to do this? At the core, the reason is a combination of personal expression and xkcd #927: https://xkcd.com/927/
We already know what is the most effective resume format for hiring managers. We’ve done the research, the focus groups, the AB tests, and longitudinal studies. The reverse chronological, one-column structure with black web standard fonts only, a single level of bullet points, and a simple professional summary and technology section, is, hands down, the most effective format. Google has studied it as well and came to the same conclusions: https://www.leetresumes.com/blog/what-google-recruiters-look...
Almost all of the top search results on Google vary from this format, however, because search results are based on what’s popular, not what’s effective.
Psychologically, professionals have only one document in their lives to sum up their careers. Even though the true purpose of the resume is to get you interview requests for a job you can succeed in, professionals can’t help writing their resume to satisfy their own aesthetic or narrative goals, rather than the hiring manager’s. There’s a desire to express oneself on a resume in ways that are irrelevant, or often actually harmful, to the goal of getting hired.
At Leet, when we launched on Hacker News last year, we had great conversations with many of you about why simplifying your format would be for the best. I recall one experienced engineer who had custom built something in LaTeX to automatically generate his resume as he incrementally updated it. I pointed out that ATSs were unable to read the document because of how it was encoded. Multiply that story times 90 million professionals, each of whom may bring just a few small extremely damaging customizations to the process, and you’ll see why a single standard hasn’t been adopted from the professional’s side.
From the hiring manager’s side, standardizing a resume format has largely followed the xkcd story line. A company or coalition tries to introduce a standard, which varies from other best practices, and the end result is an additional competing standard.
So the long answer is that standards would be excellent, except for the fact that users won’t adhere to them :).
Happy to answer questions!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
And as such, it should be rigorously boycotted, no matter what benefit it may bring to the drones in HR.
Specifically?
Yes there are obviously companies that strip mine every nugget of "data" they can possibly find about an individual, and then pass this along to whoever may be willing to buy, garbage-in, garbage-out style.
But actually verifying that this information has anything to do with the real world (the way background check companies do) is a completely different, and very expensive endeavour.