Can you elaborate on the exact layout syntax these ML idiot savant agents want to read? Lack of an industry wide standard data interface makes this terrible.
That's it. That's all you need to do.
The reason? My resume lists my name as follows, where I means the initial for my middle name:
Firstname I. (Nickname) Lastname
And yes, even professionally I do use my nickname and my last name, except for things which must match my government ID, such as offer letters and payroll/tax records, where of course I omit Nickname and use the legal Firstname as well as sometimes the middle initial or full middle name.
With this format, how does Personio parse my name? It thinks I’m called Firstname Nickname. No human would make this mistake, nor would a copy-paste into Notepad cause a human to do that.
And if it has any LLM intelligence at all, it should know that this is unlikely, because Nickname is actually a very common nickname for Firstname, so it should suspect a disperse and have a human double-check its conclusion. Alas.
I’ve also had other issues with these systems misparsing my employment history, since they don’t always properly parse jobs that span corporate acquisitions (changing title and employer at that point but being the same job) and are accurately reflected as such on the resume.
sounds like they did something like:
first_name, last_name = name.split(" ")
I call this easily avoidable because name is usually a separate field in the application or referral forms, so this is the bad auto-parsing overriding accurate manual input.
Some examples that come to mind from my experience are applicants with Chinese names that also use a western name professionally ("Yu-Chen Liew, but I go by Janet"), Spanish names that include patronymics ("Penelope Cruz Sanchez") and cultures that place the family name first ("Park Lee"). Maybe (f,l) = split(name, " ") works in some very homogeneous country like Iceland, but it sure doesnt work in the US.
By contrast, Spanish last names simply use two last names, with a child taking one last name from each parent. Traditionally this is the father's first last name followed by the mother's first last name, though efforts toward gender equality have made the law more flexible nowadays in both Spain and many other countries.
It doesn't violate Spanish naming conventions for given names to be reused in the next generation, and some families do that, but that isn't patronymic since it's not a "son/daughter of X" name, just a reused given name.
In my case, I had a simple layout with sections clearly delineated and very simple formatting (bulleted lists). Dates were spelled out eg September 2024 rather than 9/24. UTF-8 throughout. No difficult latex packages, just classic ones like enumitem and fancyhdr.
Frankly, plain text rendered to PDF is probably going to be the most easily parsed by their systems. If they let you add attachments separate from your resume, then stick your "beautified" resume there.
[0] For the curious: https://www.hropenstandards.org/
I've spoken with two technical recruiters who say they prefer reading templates instead of hand-crafted Resumes on top of them also parsing better in the ATS system ):