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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

I have to admit, I'm having some trouble seeing the value in this... JSON does not strike me as a great format for a document of this nature, although it's certainly possible. Offhand, I'd think XML is a more natural fit for this.

Anyway, more to the point, there has been some existing work done on developing standards for representing resumes. I would highly, highly encourage you guys to look at this and consider making whatever you do compatible with the existing work as much as possible. Consider ResumeRDF[1] for example. Maybe consider doing JSON-LD and using the FOAF and ResumeRDF vocabularies?

[1]: http://rdfs.org/resume-rdf/

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I just had a look at ResumeRDF.

    Class: cv:Person

    Person - CV subclass of WordNet person

    in-range-of:	cv:aboutPerson cv:referenceBy
    in-domain-of:	cv:gender cv:birthPlace cv:hasCitizenship cv:hasNationality cv:maritalStatus cv:noOfChildren cv:hasDriversLicense

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It's probably a bad idea to encourage people to list protected characteristics on a CV / resume. Employers (except vary rare exceptions) can't use this information so there's no point including it.

That's an interesting point. And to be honest, I'm not sure what the rationale was for including those terms (I wasn't involved with defining ResumeRDF or anything).

I'm guessing it happened because they "borrowed" a generic notion of "person attributes" from some other, less specific, source, and didn't really consider the legal implications you mention.

I guess it's an open question whether or not there's any actual valid scenario where somebody would want to put that stuff. It seems unlikely to me, but maybe in other countries or something? Hmmm... dunno.

In Europe, at least in Germany and Switzerland, it's normal and expected to state your birthday and place of birth. You also include a passport-sized photo of yourself, usually in the top right corner.

See for example this guide to resume writing by a German university [pdf]: https://www.uni-muenster.de/imperia/md/content/math_nat_faku...

Aah, OK. That's pretty interesting, actually. Here in the US it's practically verboten to ask anything about nationality, religion, ethnicity, etc., and conversely pretty much nobody ever volunteers that stuff either.

In some countries this completely legal, and if it wants to be an international standard it should have space for it. (I hope there would be standard filters for each legal area e.g. filter out all protected characteristics for US applications)

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