[HN Gopher] Why isn't there a universal data format for resumes?
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Why isn't there a universal data format for resumes?
Author : ColinWright
Score : 79 points
Date : 2022-01-16 21:27 UTC (1 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (toot.cat)
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| There is. It's called LinkedIn.
| alberto7 wrote:
| That's like asking "Why isn't there a universal format for
| dating?"
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I think the same thing about invoicing... especially given the
| different hoops every company makes you jump through to make your
| invoice compliant.
| dqv wrote:
| Don't they kind of do that at larger organizations with EDI? Or
| is it still nonstandard between organizations?
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| EDI is only semi-standardized; in my experience usually each
| pair of trading partners requires a separate effort (usually
| the bigger partner imposes the requirement and the smaller
| one has to make changes). Some difficulties include:
|
| * 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.
| frabert wrote:
| Italy actually has a standard for electronic invoicing, and
| most companies are required to use it ("Fattura Elettronica").
| It works by having a centralized portal to which invoices are
| submitted.
|
| 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...
| jfengel wrote:
| I used to work in ontologies, and what I learned is that people
| would rather get an 80% heuristic solution for dirty data rather
| than a 100% correct solution for data they have to clean.
|
| 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.
| kaderno wrote:
| Nobody? https://xkcd.com/927/
| wintorez wrote:
| CTRL+F
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| Anti-competitive practise. If they make entering your resume
| suck, maybe you will only do it on one site (theirs).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I've been hearing people react to current (American) college
| admissions by saying the problem is the Common Application
| allowing people to apply to many schools at once.
|
| 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.
| ianai wrote:
| I'm pretty sure PDFs are the universal for resumes or close to
| it. Don't send a word doc though.
| netcan wrote:
| Hiring companies might prefer to just have this as a "hoop."
|
| 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.
| version_five wrote:
| They should ask for a cover letter.
|
| 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.
| aaron695 wrote:
| ardel95 wrote:
| Because humans are too complex to fit into schemas.
| simonw wrote:
| Because there's no demand for it. The vast majority of people who
| read and write resumes have no idea what an "open standard" is,
| and would be unable to create or read any resume that used such a
| format.
|
| They need the software to be built first. But the software won't
| be built unless there is demand for it.
| FpUser wrote:
| I very much like to write my resume the way I think represents me
| the best. The last think I need is to tailor it so some
| programmer who struggles with parsing.
|
| 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".
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Indeed there is a lack of a standard format for CVs, but this is
| the same for many other things in computing/IT/software in
| general. See the well known XKCD comic for standards [0] :-) I
| don't know if it helps, but in EU we have a well known and
| familiar format for the Europass CV [1] allowing someone to
| create a CV and then store it in 29 languages and also download
| it in various formats (xml included).
|
| [0] https://xkcd.com/927/ [1]
| https://europa.eu/europass/en/create-europass-cv
| nojito wrote:
| Because a resume isn't a job application. It's a description of
| who/what you think you are.
| DamonHD wrote:
| Could one use schema.org/Person to mark up HTML5 with appropriate
| microdata?
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| schema.org/Person is a terribly designed format, that I would
| not bring into new projects. Here are some of the reasons:
|
| 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?).
| jeroenhd wrote:
| In 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 encouraged.
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| Does anyone OCR? The systems I've heard of just extract the
| text from PDFs/docs. Then if some bits cannot be extracted, I
| was asked to type them myself.
| brunellus wrote:
| Indeed if there were a standard format, there would be
| competitive advantages to using other channels to showcase your
| experience
| gingkoguy wrote:
| Also having this it will give you the User to make 1 resume and
| apply to millions of jobs. It's a win / win situation
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| Downside is when you have to make slight changes each time to
| better emphasize some aspect of your experience, depending on
| the job applied for. Recruiting agencies often do this to sex
| up their candidates chance of winning the job lottery.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Unless you're the employer being deluged
| stemlord wrote:
| There is maybe 1 in 50 jobs that I'd actually want, so I
| imagine bulk applying to would guarantee I land something
| awful.
| lethologica wrote:
| Not everyone has the luxury of choice though when it comes
| to employment.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| .docx
| vortico wrote:
| Was going to say PDF but this is close enough :)
| d--b wrote:
| Well... Would you rather apply to a job by sending a pdf that you
| carefully crafted, or by sending your linkedin profile?
| Kiro wrote:
| LinkedIn profile for sure.
| grayclhn wrote:
| LinkedIn profile
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| Why should there be? Resumes have to be read by humans to judge
| if they match what is needed. Checking boxes and matching
| buzzwords only gets you so far.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Because many job applications make me check boxes already; I'd
| rather automate filling the same details into forms over and
| over again.
| duxup wrote:
| I think because some things like work history, education, they
| lend themselves to pretty standardized fields.
|
| And we have to keep filling them out by hand ...
| threeseed wrote:
| Resumes go through many systems i.e. job sites, recruiters, HR,
| hiring managers and are often poorly parsed by many of them.
|
| It's not like people are managing dozens/hundreds of candidates
| with a pen/paper.
|
| There is definitely a need for a standard format.
| scollet wrote:
| I think the most charitable and equitable function would be
| sorting and solving without filtering.
|
| 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.
| complexworld wrote:
| I don't think it's used very much but there is this one
| http://xml.coverpages.org/HR-XML-ResumeSpecification200205.h...
|
| 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
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| If companies wanted switching jobs or hiring to be streamlined
| and simple, they wouldn't do the job games they play.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I have had a lot of success with "September 2019 - September
| 2020." Seems to work fine in nearly every case.
| ghaff wrote:
| Note that there is some number of people who feel pretty
| strongly about obfuscating their age. I'm not sure what to feel
| about it personally but it's understandable.
| [deleted]
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I would have found it much more interesting and useful if the
| author had tried to sincerely answer or even ask the question of
| the title. Instead it's just a complaint.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I guess the answer must be: Companies have no incentive to make
| it easy to apply to their job without manual intervention.
| Which makes sense -- if it were easy enough to apply to
| companies automatically, I guess some people would just write a
| script to apply to every company in their field, right?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The underlying problem is you need a JSON format about the
| company. But the things candidates care for generally are
| easy to lie about (good culture, career progression, even
| remote working options), so scatter guns are required. As
| they say recruitment is broken - but its not easily fixable
| because it's broken because of game theory and human
| behaviour.
| ghaff wrote:
| This is something of an issue with conference proposals as
| well. In fact, I've seen some conferences recently that put a
| strict limit on number of submittals. As a sometimes
| conference reviewer, I hate people throwing a bunch of
| overlapping and often generic stuff at the wall.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Please insert girder.
| dClauzel wrote:
| There is, thanks to the semantic web (the real web 3 :) ).
|
| See for example the FoaF ontology
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology)
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| I do miss the glory days of when the W3C was still in control
| and had some very good ideas that browsers did not like.
|
| Some of these old AAA XHTML 1.1+RDFa websites were well
| engineered and a joy for both man and machine to behold.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Is the "semantic web" used in sensible, productive ways these
| days or does it remain an academic daydream?
|
| I'm highly skeptical of the whole concept and feel like I
| should have organically come across it by now.
| codingdave wrote:
| Yeah, it is - not to the level people envisioned years ago
| where people made up their own tags and found a blend of XML
| and HTML, but it absolutely is in place for more meaningful
| HTML. We have tags that tell you the purpose of content -
| header, nav, section, article, footer, etc. Those tags are
| read by screen readers and other accessibility tools, and do
| bring semantic value to those readers.
| ognarb wrote:
| There is some neat application for example many tickets/hotel
| reservation/restaurant do include them and this allow to make
| some email clients displays these tickets in a standard way.
|
| 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)
| gregoryl wrote:
| Parsing CVs is awful. We outsource this entire feature to Daxtra,
| who do a very average job (but, to be fair, better than anything
| we have time to write!).
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| HR 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 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.
| csmcg wrote:
| That sounds like an incredibly unsettling experience.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I'm for it. The resume _is_ just data and the least interesting
| thing in an implication. The folio / work sample and the cover
| letter is the interesting part that will get you an interview.
| 6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote:
| Because individuality is as valuable a commodity in the workplace
| as elsewhere.
| Traster wrote:
| If you really want a job at my company, and the level at which
| you decide "this isn't worth my time" is 2 minutes to enter your
| details then you weren't a good fit in the first place. There are
| genuine reasons to turn down stupid requests in interview
| (ridiculous coding tests) but "Re-enter all your details into
| this form" isn't that hard, and if you really think you want the
| job then it's a very small price to pay. What is does is force
| unqualified candidates to distill their lack of qualifications.
| So for the hiring company it let's them cut out that bottom 50%
| of applications (not candidates, applications) that are just
| absurd. If you standardize it all you're doing is giving the
| mass-application candidates a cheat sheet.
| version_five wrote:
| There are two separate things going on in the linked post. One is
| the absence of a standard format as identified. The second is
| that HR software generally is enterprise software sold to
| leadership where usability is an afterthought, and so it only
| gets minimal development focus on having a quality resume
| ingestion algorithm. So you get the terrible parsing the author
| complains about. I'm confident that if any buyer really
| prioritized this feature being better, it would be.
| polote wrote:
| There is one, it is just proprietary https://linkedin.com
| CalRobert wrote:
| There 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.)
| spondyl wrote:
| 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 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| My JSON resume is transformed to docx, and only latter to PDF
| for exactly this reason.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| tl;dr - HR is underfunded / under-resourced / un-
| aspirational.
|
| 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.
| version_five wrote:
| I have my resume in markdown so I can create a word/pdf/html
| etc. with pandoc. It would be possible to write something
| that parses a json resume into markdown so it could be
| trivially format shifted
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| Json Resume is still going strong. I am one of the founders, I
| try to do a couple major maintenance periods per year.
| Currently I am working on updating all the community projects
| built, still got quite a few to add but currently there is ->
| https://jsonresume.org/projects/
|
| 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.
| rospaya wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody mentioned Europass. Personally, I'm not a
| fan precisely because it only shows raw info and doesn't leave
| anything for interpretation - it's cold and bureaucratic. But I
| understand why people love to us it. Around half of the CVs I see
| (in Europe) are in this format.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europass
| jim-jim-jim wrote:
| iirc there is a standard cv form in Japan. I never had to go
| through the job search in this manner, but a colleague said he
| just picked up a pack from a convenience store, filled them out,
| and sent them to every company.
| pestaa wrote:
| I always liked the idea of Europass, but it's easy to understand
| why it didn't get traction.
|
| https://europa.eu/europass/en/create-europass-cv
| boomer918 wrote:
| Let's make one. A universal format could help with bias and
| resume anxiety.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| It's because the function of a resume is largely social
| signaling, not a matter-of-fact reporting of career history. You
| can't make a data format to encode that information, which is why
| a lot of job platforms require a resume _and_ a list of your past
| jobs in a form.
|
| Any solution for resumes is going to fall into the much harder
| category of social change, rather than technical solutions.
| kzrdude wrote:
| resumes are an adversarial game; the author and the reader have
| partly different goals.
|
| Does the author want the resume to be objectively judged? Maybe
| not
| awb wrote:
| Exactly. The goal is to stand out from the crowd, not be part
| of it.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I think that would be very cool. Coupled with a universal data-
| format for jobs, one could imagine a much better job match engine
| that doesn't rely on the right person finding the right job!
|
| 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.
| stillicidious wrote:
| Clearly written by an applicant rather than employer. Your resume
| is your chance to shine, use the opportunity or pay a service to
| do it for you.
|
| 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?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > If you can capture it in a data structure, it's not a resume!
|
| Pretty sure a Word file is a data structure.
| [deleted]
| _jal wrote:
| There is HRXML:
|
| https://workforce.com/news/what-hr-xml-means-and-why-youll-c...
|
| But I don't think anyone really cared.
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(page generated 2022-01-16 23:00 UTC)