At higher professional levels I think this is a bad idea. There's just too much variation in the kinds of things a resume might want to express. (Source: my own experience writing stupid amounts of code to get my academic CV into a CI pipeline on the web because no preexisting format for anything allowed me to express quite what I wanted)
Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?
101–110 of 472 posts
Re: Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?
#102I worked on the problem of resume parsing for a year and a half. Pretrained language models helped us generate tons of Named Entity Recognition models that do a pretty decent job finding entities! This worked out pretty great for cities, names, businesses, universities. The real hard part is piping all the NERs to groupers that yield accurate groupings. Sometimes your NER misses a school but has a degree, related project descriptions and a graduation date. You have to re-run the NER on that area and make a best guess or give up. Lots of interesting applied NLP engineering problems there! I gave up though. If someone has more patience, I think this approach can really improve things.
Re: Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?
#103There is HRXML: https://workforce.com/news/what-hr-xml-means-and-why-youll-c... But I don't think anyone really cared.
Actually a lot of vendors care. In the past I’ve built Resume search engines using HRXML components. There are parsers, classifiers, viewers, search engines, and many other tools available for HRXML.
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.
Re: Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?
#104In my opinion, there shouldn't be. 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 en…
>Documents like these shouldn't be automatically processed, they should be reviewed by humans. 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 st…
So what? You're looking at it one job at a time, and for any one given job it might indeed suck. But collectively, the times when you're unfairly tossed out are balanced by the times when other people are, and you benefit from being in a smaller pool. If you spell it "nodejs," surely some HR person somewhere does too.
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.
Re: Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?
#105There is! https://jsonresume.org/ 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.)
I used a JSON resume once and I like the idea. It didn't help when I had to apply for an unemployment benefit (while still trying to enter the industry) and they asked for my resume as a word document. 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 refu…
One of those pdf-to-docx online converters would’ve probably been good enough for this.
Re: Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?
#106In my opinion, there shouldn't be. 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 en…
>Documents like these shouldn't be automatically processed, they should be reviewed by humans. 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 st…
> 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
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.
Re: Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?
#107In my opinion, there shouldn't be. 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 en…
I wonder if there's any advantage in using fonts and layout that are adversarial to automated resume processing, as in if something fails to scan then perhaps a human is more likely to actually look at it. But perhaps HR just throws those out.
Some people do add an emoji in their name on linkedIn to know whether they are being contacted by someone who read the page, or by a bot.
Re: Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?
#108HR people don’t like changing their procedures. 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 Manha…
That's a practical example on why we are so prone to associate "HR people" to "HR drones"!
Re: Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?
#109In my opinion, there shouldn't be. 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 en…
As a hiring manager you’d be inclined to disagree. 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…
What if the blue checking organization becomes politicized and rejects your resume for arbitrary reasons?
Re: Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?
#110In my opinion, there shouldn't be. 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 en…
As a hiring manager you’d be inclined to disagree. 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…
> If resumes could be standardized and easily searchable for information it would help find candidates much more accurately and quickly without having to read.
I see how that can be useful from the recruiting side of the table, but fail to see how the candidate benefits.