Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?

To add a little more detail, there are two general resumes you submit to companies in Japan, one is the condensed one that the parent google linked (Rirekisho). The other is a more detailed "Keirekisho" which can be many pages and allows you to go into a lot of detail about your previous work and why you want to join your prospective company: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%E7%B5%8C%E6%AD%B4%E6%9B%B8&t=ffab...

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.

Yep. And it comes with network search too which your PDF resume does not have.

I have a lot of merge requests in some pretty big projects correcting SASS to Sass in the code and documentation. I'm surprised no one ever seems to question their notion of spelling proper names when it's a quick web search away.

The thing is that it's nowhere close to 2 minutes. Heck, it's optimistic even if you're straight out of college or if you're explicitly asking for just the most recent employment; but if your system is asking for everything and there's a few decades of data to enter in a weird form, you'd be lucky to do it in half an hour.

I’ll start with my background, not for ego, but for context on what I know about why this remains a problem. I’ve written 3 Amazon Careers #1 Bestsellers on resume writing. A decade ago I ran the largest paid resume writing service in the country. I currently run Leet Resumes, the largest free professional writing service in the USA. My company did the famous eye tracking study showing that recruiters only spend 6 seconds on their initial screen of a resume. I’ve interviewed the CEOs and technical experts at the five largest resume parsing companies. And I regularly interview the CEOs of the ATSs.

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!