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.
>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 standard format would at least allow people to classify themselves/others correctly and without ambiguity.
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.
Fixing that would require not only a universal data format but also a universal taxonomy of terms to describe skills. That would need everyone to agree on how to describe what they do. Easy enough when you're describing programming languages, but effectively impossible for any softer skills. This is precisely why you need the human aspect.
The way to fix the issue you describe is to educate HR people, not to try to apply technology to a non-tech problem.
That's very nice to think about but in the real world if people don't match some exact keywords they get thrown away.
This isn't the "real world" you're referring to here -- it's the fin-de-big-tech bubble world where everyone and their dog is not only sold, smack-down drunk on the idea that Algorithms and Data are the Solution to Your Problems. They aren't of course -- it's just a giant hornswoggle. This "world" needs to end, and it needs to end soon.
My belief is that it will. But until it does, companies that run crappy ATSs (like there's any other kind) deserve the buzzword-gurgling, keyword-dropping candidate pool get. And developers who get "rejected" by these companies should be grateful for the sublime gift of this rejection -- and for the opportunity to laser focus on companies and teams that use their heads to hire, rather than a fleet of bots.
Snark aside - hiring managers that actually read resumes (and yes, actually at least skim each and every one -- really it ain't that hard) are golden to work for (other factors being equal). Really, you don't want to waste your time with companies that have drunken the ATS kool-aid. Really you don't.
That said, however:
HR is looking for "node.js" but you wrote it like "nodejs"? Though luck pal, bye.
It's "Node.js" with a dot. If you spell it "nodejs", that's a serious red flag and you shouldn't be surprised if it gets you automatically discarded -- even by a human reviewer.
That's what resumes used to be, after all -- a kind of a take-home test where you really do have enough time (and perfect knowledge) to get everything 100 percent right. And also a test of your awareness of the fact that, yes, in critical business communications at least -- this level of correctness does matter, and it matters a lot.
I review every single resume and applicant I hire. My experience tells me talent acquisition professionals don’t really know how to match and will often suggest poor matches and not bring forward odd fits with interesting backgrounds.
I get hundreds posting into some of the roles I’ve hired for and I’ve got to look at every single one in order to find a possible match. It generally takes me about 30 seconds to a minute to assess a resume. A kernel of interest stands out quickly or a smoke screen of buzz words tells me it’s the wrong candidate.
Algorithms aren’t a substitute for an active hiring manager being really interested in finding the right candidate to join their team.
> 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.
Wouldn't those issues be more likely to occur as a result of automated processing? I imagine that most humans who deal with technical hiring would guess that "node.js" and "nodejs" are probably the same thing.
> 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.
I'm not sure if I'd mind that. If HR is made up of robots that stupid, that sounds like a terrible company to work for.
A standard format wouldn't solve the problems you described. There's no comprehensive list of frameworks and programming languages, let alone for types of experience outside computer science. The data would be structured, but HR would still throw out the bits of data that need to be filled in manually.
I believe I understand your point – therefore I would like to take this opportunity to channel something that 'patio11 wrote on Twitter many years ago:
“Do not send in a job application before you have an actual human
being who has expressed enthusiasm for reading or forwarding it.”[0]
I believe this is sound advice, and the pitfalls you mentioned was probably the reasons that he gave this advice.
This is really not an issue. If the company as such a dumb HR department on automatic mode, I’m glad I’ll never be hired there.
But to be honest, I’ve never seen so stupid HR people. Like a lot of people, they have goals to reach and they’ll happily accept an interview from any CV as long as there are computer-related keywords and roughly the required experience.
HRs are one of the most important department when it comes to a company potential shitiness. So I’m glad they have the power to kick you from the hiring process for stupid reasons.
> If anything, a standard format would at least allow people to classify themselves/others correctly and without ambiguity.
Except it doesn't, because a lot of things in life doesn't fit in that boxes that well.
You might not have experience in node.js, but in JS and some of the node.js-alike server side VMs.
Even just a "degree in computer science" can mean many things. Furthermore you might have something which for the position is "equivalent", like a "master of science in cognitive systems with a specialization on AI" which contained a lot of CS courses, and maybe also some pr-axis experience. Or you just started working as a programming free lancer with 16. Or ...
Furthermore a resume is quite individualistic, beyond just the raw content it contains. How that content is represented can sometimes give you hints, about what kind of questions you want to ask during an interview.
I have seen a bunch of standardized forms for resumes some companies opted into, they _always_ caused endless problems.
This is why applying for jobs using a resume is a losing battle. Make connections, get introductions, get recommendations. Plenty of ways to explore new jobs without being resume 123 out of 500 who applied. No telling what arbitrary filtering criteria will knock you out of the competition. Absolutely no feedback on why you weren't considered.
This is a how things are handled at companies that get 500+ applications for each open position and/or are just incompetent. At smaller companies it is very likely that actual humans read a résumé without the keyword matching bullshit.
I’m curious if you have much evidence that this is common? I suspect it’s mostly a myth that is easy to believe (it can feel good to believe it because it means you were removed from the applicant pipeline because of stupid computer reasons rather than because you don’t appear to meet some bar to a human, even if that bar is a stupid thing like prestige) and oft repeated.
I definitely think it’s likely that most people on hn don’t work for companies that do this, but maybe hn just skews toward certain kinds of tech jobs.
Sadly I think this is a bit idealistic. Even in healthcare, doctors can't agree on abbreviations to put into a patient's records, and sadly the state of EMRs (electronic medical records) is a shambles due to this sort of data impedance mismatch.
Come to think of it, the latter is probably why many of us will always have a job.
In my company our HR department actually reads all applications.
This is not true for the largest corporations of course. But that is a solvable problem, just provide a standardized form. You can even adapt it to the needs of the industry in question. This is actually a great boon because you can specifically ask for qualifications. There should be enough budget for that at least.
If you company easily discards applications your HR is either incompetent or it just isn't looking for candidates. But even then you try to build a connection to people applying to you. You may meet them later because they tend to work in your industry.
Again, there are special rules for the largest of corporations although I think HR should be manned enough to have a sensible recruitment process.
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.
If a company is choosing which candidates to interview using grep, it's very likely the rest of their hiring process is similarly broken, and quite possibly other aspects of their corporate culture as well. They're actually doing candidates a favour by giving a clear indicator of how shit they are, much like a candidate who turns up to an interview drunk.
If you put an idiot in charge of your recruiting, that is the real problem. A perfect AI that would tell you meant "node.js" when your iPhone's autocorrect changed it to "nodule jesus" won't protect you from the jackass running your hiring. There's no protection from being a moron.
I recall people copy-pasting the job description and hiding it in their resume by making the text invisible just so that automated software would see a 100% keyword match. Bonus here if you use 2-3 alternate spelling for each buzzword (C++ and c++). Is that no longer done?
Applicant Tracking systems, like Bullhorn, actually do a pretty decent job of fuzzy matching and normalising CV/resumés. Of course there is room for improvement and you need to ‘SEO’ your particular CV, but you really should do that for each job application anyway.
The examples are a stretch though. I've never heard of anyone losing an interview due to their spelling of nodejs or computer science. I don't buy that's something that happens often enough to spread FUD over.
I think you might be underestimating the number of applicants that some companies deal with. I used to work for a firm that did analytics and surveying for the recruitment industry. While applicant to hire ratios in the tech industry might be 10 to 1, in many jobs you can easily be looking at 100 to 1. At those scales companies are using automated CV scanning tools and outsourced humans to whittle them down to a set that hiring managers can actually cope with. This is why many companies insist that you enter all the information into a structured form.
My basic rule of thumb is that the more structured and formal the CV submission process is, the worse the applicant to hire ratio will be, and so the more people you are up against.
For those of us in the tech industry, especially later in our careers, that probably isn't an issue, but in many other jobs, and earlier in your carreer, then it's going to be an issue. I remember having to re-enter my CV into ATSs back in 2001 for the big companies hiring graduates because they had so many to get throught, smaller companies just wanted your CVs.
That's already the case. You're much more likely to get hired if you know someone on the inside, if you've been recommended. If you apply through the official channels, you might not even get a response.
But I think an official format for CVs might not work so well because CVs in different fields aren't formatted in the same way. A programmer isn't going to put forward the same kinds of things as a musician or a professor in psychology.
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 to verified resumes and do less investigation or third party background checking.
That sounds like it pushes hiring managers forward, not industries. You get a benefit out of making it easier to fill open spaces, at the cost of everyone else's unique life experiences.
We have a "verification standard" in the form of diplomas and certificates and neither of those have fixed the hiring issue so far.
If you want to skip background checking, just make people bring their proof of certification with them to the job interview. Of course, those certifications barely mean anything in most fields of work, but it's an exact equivalent of the blue checkmark system you propose.
I get that hiring is hard, but that's why hiring managers exist in the first place. If we used a nicely standardised, automatically validated system, all recruiters and hiring managers would be out of a job. Why pay someone to do that stuff when you could pay a cheap machine learned AI to fill a list of requirements for you?
> 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.
You could probably only try to verify local education - for the foreign education not that easy. Even employment (even local) is very hard if possible at all. For example, I work for a large corp X as a contractor. It pays my agency Y. Y pays my umbrella company Z. Z pays me as its employee. There is hardly an easy way to link me to company X yet I've been there for 9 years.
I see what you're driving at -- but that implementing that "verification standard" (i.e. standardized, continually updating 3rd-party background checks) would be a huge undertaking, and a larger than cottage-sized industry in itself.
Way, way more than a matter of parsing a bunch of standardized resume documents.
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.
Quaint to think so, but no. If a system is using automated scanning and the document doesn’t scan correctly the recruiter is not going through the ones that didn’t work.
I’d wager in many cases they aren’t even aware of an failure to process a resume occurring.
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.
Whether or not it should happen doesn't answer the question of why it hasn't happened. The fact is that the very companies that do automated processing of applications probably would welcome resume standardization, so why didn't they do it yet? It's in their power to propose a standard, settle on it, and require it.
I suspect the answer as to why it hasn't happened is simply because most laypeople applicants would find it too difficult to do something like LaTeX or whatever other thing would be necessary to make this a reality, and also, firms in general suck at adopting new technology.
> laypeople applicants would find it too difficult
> to do something like LaTeX or whatever
Those people where a CV and certificates matter, they already construct a CV in the closed system of LinkedIn or Monster's websites. Nobody needs to use LaTeX, there will be websites where anyone can do it, if anything that's an additional business opportunity.
No, I suspect the actual reason is: Nobody will do it unless the big players (LinkedIn etc.) will adopt it. And the big players don't do it because interoperability, and a CV that can be migrated anywhere, isn't in their interests.
" Reducing someone's life history to a list of educational institutions and employers feels robotic ... but that kind of behaviour shouldn't be encouraged."
Reviewing CVs is boring. They should be made easy for the human who is reading. Imagine being a person in a human resources department going through 100s of these... If there was a good portable format, that process becomes far more efficient and interesting.
A good interview after the resume has been accepted would go into precisely what you are advocating for -- the life history and interpersonal context.
Reality is, however and in my experience, that more and more HR departments fall for promises of AI snake oil. Virtually every employer I apply with has it's own portal, often times asking you to construct your CV anew on their website (often with drop downs that don't include the actual job title or skill). Preferably with a five minute web session and no submit confirmation. Couple this with companies increasingly not responding at all due to fear of being sued, and you'll spend hours on an application and won't even know whether the non-response is due to you, or due to the website trashing the submission. As for CV parsing, this has gone so far as to a big news site over here posting helpful articles on how to beat the system. "Favorite" tidbit: Submit two CV - one for humans, one for dumb algorithms.
Oh and btw, I'm applying at non-tech companies increasingly. Maybe humans isn't perfect either. I mean, I submit proof of 25 years of high grade enterprise IT experience, just for some HR person to ask me where my certificate as an "IT technian" is: they don't know what any of that "weird stuff" means, but to them I lack a generic "IT technician" certificate in early career. A thing that didn't even exist back then! But the latter may just well be a quirk of my own, bureaucratic country.
But overall, this is a hot mess already, and I have often times had the same thought: Why can't we have some sort interchangeable format, much like "geek code", just for all the possible job titles, universities, locations, and companies; with some format-dependent, but free text fields because one can never catch all of them in a fixed list?
> I understand that there are real life problems because companies do use automated processing on applications
I'll always remember but never find the post, where someone just hid tons of keywords in a joke resume and got interviews with an alarmingly high success rate.
I agree they should be read by humans, but (and I feel most comments are missing that point) a standard format would help with that.
Having been reading resumes a lot lately, I always breathe a sigh of relief when people hand in the standard latex template, with maybe only the colors changed. The structure is immediately familiar and easy to navigate. I could use a client app that presents a hypothetical standard data format in such a way. My colleagues in sales or customer success on the other hand seem to prefer other formatting styles; they could look at their candidates in that way.
Unfortunately the lack of a standardised format hasn’t stopped technology from being developed which automatically reviews CVs before they hit a human. The tech is already out there.
The problem we have currently is that some CVs fail that review because they’re in a format that the tools cannot parse. If you’re CV is strong but you’re seeing fewer responses despite having a prettier CV compared to your peers, then that might be the reason. So from your stance standardisation might actually help the industry rather than harm it.
> The problem we have currently is that some CVs fail that review because they’re in a format that the tools cannot parse.
My company (we have software for responding to applicants in real time... think apply... instant conversation with a human recruiter) did a study of about 1,200 resumes and found that 14% of resumes had inaccuracies that would cause them to be screened out... and about 9% of resumes were in a unparsable format. A lot of the screening we see out there is really bad - mostly text search looking for key phrases like specific colleges, specific employers or specific skills. If you are imagining indexing resumes with elastic search and making queries, that may actually be better than state of the art which is usually something that turns into a SQL query.
CV or resume analyzed by non-human? Or in an universal format? I hope this will never happen.
How "automatized" way could help there? Unifying the CV/resumes for certain company? Sure, if they are have some form - could be stupid Google Form or more sophisticated like Teamtailor [0] - go ahead. You will have a nice databases or resumes and profiles similar to mini-LinkedIn. While I am fan of automation, I don't see any special incentive here that will profit HR team.
I know hundreds of examples, where CV nor initial job interview didn't exactly has shown how good someone is. Also, I personally had experienced a situation I have completely matched the job offer but after talk during interview, I knew it would be waste of time and mentally it will be a bad choice for next year(s) to join their Acme corp.
Do the JSON databases of applicants will help anyhow to solve the human relation job to find out the best candidate for the position? I am highly skeptical and in my humble opinion it will just "dehumanify" the whole process.
Maybe, it is good if you are looking for some warehouse worker like Amazon? /s
I totally agree but we are fighting the tide (ran a resume, linkedin profile, and interview prep shop for 6 years). Everything in the process is being analyzed, parsed and benchmarked using AI, soon to a more granular level. I even came across some interview analysis software which measured the angle of the person's head along with tone and a bunch of other factors!
> Documents like these shouldn't be automatically processed, they should be reviewed by humans.
Human review is fraught with bias. A lot of attention and column inches are devoted to algorithmic bias these days, but let's not confuse that for evidence that human review is perfect or even better. It's just harder to audit.
I don't think anyone is confusing algorithmic bias for evidence that humans are better. It's the other way around -- the argument has always been that algorithms are biased because humans are biased. Having a systemic bias that masquerades as neutral seems worse than having people in the loop.
When submitting my resume and interviewing for jobs, I'd certainly prefer to be subject to: 1) multiple people with different biases, 2) humans that can change their mind and/or recognize their biases, 3) humans that can explain their rationale, and 4) humans that can grasp and weight eccentric and non-conforming experience. I'm not interested in being ranked in a standardized way, because I'm not interested in being a pure cog in wheel.
I also think people who want standardized resumes and automated processing are vastly underestimating the SEO effect it will have on hiring. If resumes are automated, then many people more aggressive than you will game the system to the Nth degree. The same thing that happens to Google and the internet will happen to jobs: the loudest and spammiest will win, and the good content will go mostly unnoticed and unrewarded.
I think resistance to algorithms is about failure modes. If an algorithm becomes standard and you are an edge case then you are in trouble, much the same way you are in trouble today with companies that have automated customer support and make it hard to contact a human being. Losing your email account is annoying but not being able to have a job is worse. Automated systems are designed to avoid mistakes but are bad at correcting mistakes. I would argue that even with humans involved the hiring process is harder to some people, even discounting bias, just because it is more or less standard but at least they have hope in the variance that remains.
I've seen thousands of resumes... it would be nice to have a baseline of requirements for specific positions. An RFC style guide for human parsing . Too many resumes miss what is important.
> 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.
Ignoring the web, we already do some formatting with the common Education/Work experience trope. We could arrange resumes arbitrarily just to mess with employers, perhaps? They are already pretty easy to parse.
Knowing life, the end result would be multiple competing standards and weird clans would form along with studies proving that, statistically speaking, standard X people are different from standard Z people.
Edit: Humans are weird. I guess current ecosystem is not as bad as it could be ( even though it does suck ).
Yet, companies use AST tools, which automatically processes the CVs and resumes.
One person that is developing such a tool recommended collage students not to add too much links to their CVs because otherwise, their CV will be flagged as a malicious document.
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.
A really great resume gets beyond the company names and educational institutions to demonstrate, with concrete numbers, how you improved things at your employer.
Reduced latency by 350 ms
Increased engagement by 18%
Reduced AWS spending by 23%
Scaled from 13 to over 300 virtual machines
That sort of specificity and numerical quantification is what makes a great resume stand out.
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.
that still doesn't really explain why big companies have not initiated a RFC for resume format. they only have to come up with an RFC and just ask everyone to follow.
The cost of producing such an RFC is so small. guaranteed reduction in inefficiencies including operational costs.
my gut feeling is that 20% improvement could have big butterfly effects.
Because they don't want to commit to it. It would instantly become legacy and an increasing thorn in their sides.
That was what I learned in ontologies: there is nothing so well understood and immutable that the business case won't change. It's so much easier to be vague than to be clear.
I too was convinced that people would rather have good clean data that they could trust, and it would save them a ton of money in the long term while costing a little up front. Maybe someone out there can sell that idea, but it wasn't me.
This is exactly what is done with invoices.
You can get them as pdf that embed its content as xml, and the receiving ERP software that will load it will try to find the xml, or default to OCR.
Ideally, there would be software to save your resume in this standardized format (perhaps a word extension), which would mean there would be no cases like missing close-tags.
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.
Hey thanks for maintaining this project! I have been using it this round of applications and it’s just so much more convenient than trying to edit a historical doc(x) file with a rotating cast of word editors over the years.
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.
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
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.
That's not really a "universal format", though. That's an "English language format". Actually, it's an "American format" since I see it specifies "organization" instead of "organisation".
Why should resumes in Vietnam or China be using English, after all.
In HTTP we have Get, Put, Post, Delete, Patch or Options and not obtenir, mettre, poster, supprimer, corriger, options. Yet the French use the web all the time, as do Chinese or Maui.
It would not be about how the fields are named, but about localised concepts. Maybe there are societies that have some educational concept which western Americans cannot fathom, but which is crucial on a CV there.
This,implies the standard needs to be flexible, extensible and localised. Which kindof defeats having a standard.
That's true of the fields in the JSON, but for what it's worth you can output your resume in templates for any language you like. I've updated mine to use Hiberno English for instance.
This is great, thank you for sharing. I love the idea of defining the data once and then having different templates and layouts to choose from. Very CSS Zen Garden.
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.
It might be. On the other hand such a company is a dream come true if you want a stable paycheck, do piss-all and focus on your own projects instead. Just do your bare minimum and relax.
Not sure why it would be. Huge companies are bureaucracies and bureaucracies have procedures. The HR person was just following the procedure so she didn't get fired. You really can't blame her for that. I could see finding it frustrating but I don't think of it as strange or frightening.
- worked at a place where they printed A3 excel sheet to write new prices on paper with a pencil
- courthouse procedures are peak redundancy, it's like the opposite of any database normalization 101, the more you copy the same data in various formats the better, and do not question why. It's systemically settled, since everybody expect the data to look like this, any deviation will trigger anxiety, and since they have no information management training they will scream for missing data even though there's still 12 copies of it scattered around the page, just like the emacs keyboard xkcd blended with the old waiting room social mirroring experiment
There are three different common standards: HR Open Standards Candidate, schema.org and JSON Resume. HROS (which does XML and JSON) is used as a data exchange format between enterprise ATS and HRIS it's very comprehensive and is very detailed (perhaps too detailed). Schema.org seems mostly like Google and friends just making something up (without even trying to work with other existing standards) and trying to get everyone to use it. JSON resume is about what it sounds like it is. Oh, and then there are various de facto standards where ATSes that work with job boards like Indeed or data vendors like People Data Labs... So there's a lot of standards. The problem is:
a good standard is one everyone uses.
Personal opinion: resumes are actually kind of hard. I've personally been involved in HR Open Standards and even though it is a very complete standard, it's still hard to map real world resumes into the format sometimes. There is a shocking amount of ambiguity, and a shocking amount of adjacent standards (some of those have been adopted) for describing work history, education, certifications, people and workplaces.
So... most of the industry just parses resumes into some internal schema, and a lot of employers make job seekers enter their education and history on a job application form so they get it their way. It's really messy. Hope that helps.
Schema.org doesn't have anything for the resume side of things. They have a model for a job listing, so job listings can appear in search results with special formatting, but nothing for resumes.
HR Open Standards is only available with membership. Doesn't appear very "open", but I'd assume that doesn't matter much to the industry.
JSON Resume seems like the best take so far. I've used it for my resume and at my current job, and, although we've had to extend the schema, it's a great base to start with. It's got all the structured fields one would need to build a resume. It would be trivial for a company to start accepting it, at least as a way to pre-fill all the "education and history" fields that we have to fill out anyway.
>HR Open Standards is only available with membership. Doesn't appear very "open", but I'd assume that doesn't matter much to the industry.
Membership is free and you can access the standards (from their website hropenstandards.org):
"The versions of HR Open Standards linked below are available for free public download. You need to be logged in to download the standards. If you're not already an HR Open Standards member, you can register for a free Community membership account."
Schema.org treats resume data as an extension of person. There's hasOccupation and role and alumniOf and organizationRole. It's not a "resume" it's a profile (old joke for job board people).
The EU has tried to put one in place, and it is used for all EU funding programmes and by a number of national and local administrations in Europe, so probably tens of millions used per year.
Not sure I like the format but its good it stresses experience and narrative over just 'formal' data. And they have done it quite nicely that you can either download a template and work offline, or you can work in the browser and then download later again upload/import your CV to continue editing, make versions, etc without any data being stored on the server.
Yes - this is Europass CV. The XML schema is described at https://europa.eu/europass/en/eportfolio-interoperability (the web builder and I'm sure other tools attach the XML to the PDF you download so HR apps can easily make sense of it). It's a specialisation of HR-XML which was one of the first standards groups in this area (now part of https://www.hropenstandards.org).
I always use the Europass format. For an IT sysadmin job, it's not like I'm trying to prove that I know how to use a basic word processor. Or demonstrate the type of artistic design skills that go into coming up with my own format. I like the fact that by using something standard, I'm less likely to be judged on stuff like choice of font etc. It tends to cover key details in a fairly terse format well which at least leaves scope for more wordy explanations in a cover letter. I find I don't end up needing to tweak the CV much when adapting it for different job applications while any cover letter does tend to then be fully one-off.
That said, my record in actually ever landing a new job is fairly woeful but that may be more down to being poor in interviews.
Amazing - I have recently created a CV at the EU's job advert aggregation website, EURES, and that appears to be a separate thing? Great to have a standard when the own organization doesn't appear to follow it? wonder
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.
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.
What's the point of a machine-compatible CV and a human-written cover letter? A human will need to sift through the same amount of information, except now they also need to read the long suck-up prose that you asked for.
The honest truth about why they want the job for most people is that they provide what you need and that they enjoy things like eating, having a roof over their head, and fun things to do with what's left over of the money you pay them.
Coming up with some drivel about how they've been entranced with Version_Five Inc's tech since they were twelve and how it's been their life-long dream to work with their famous Foobar Widget control language is a nice creative writing exercise but it hardly proves anything. If anything, it rewards lying and deceit to get hired quicker.
Many very capable people suck at writing, even if they are truly driven and interested, especially in the computer science field. A cover letter is a great screen for a job that involves a lot of writing, but for most jobs writing is only a side activity that shouldn't be treated as the main objective.
A cover letter is a kind of writing contest, or maybe it's perceived that way by a candidate. Writing about yourself can be stressful.
I'm not saying not to, ask for a cover letter. Just saying that this stuff is nuanced. Standardisation is great when you want very low friction. Job applications aren't frictionless, probably can't/shouldn't be. Some copy paste fields might be inelegant, but it's not changing the friction equation by much.
The thing is it's far more than a "modicum" in practice. There was a recent Harvard Business School study out there revealing that these systems are poorly calibrated (and/or these companies don't know how to use them), and as a result millions of candidates are getting rejected for reasons that are either specious (6-month resume "gaps" that may be due to normal life circumstances) or utterly meaningless reasons (like failing to match certain word combinations).
But I agree though that many HR departments would still love to use any tool that narrows the pool (however lossy the filter may be). Whether that is a good thing or bad thing or not is a matter of perspective.
In my view, it puts HR's own value and utility into question.
people are coming from the angle of “why do I have to fill out a webform and not just upload a standard file for ingestion” but in terms of how much of computing is experienced today, that’s starting to seem like an antiquated notion… how many people are using phones or tablets to apply for jobs? they’re not doing much file managing directly… linkedin is already supplanting resumes
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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.
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 standard format would at least allow people to classify themselves/others correctly and without ambiguity.
Fixing that would require not only a universal data format but also a universal taxonomy of terms to describe skills. That would need everyone to agree on how to describe what they do. Easy enough when you're describing programming languages, but effectively impossible for any softer skills. This is precisely why you need the human aspect.
The way to fix the issue you describe is to educate HR people, not to try to apply technology to a non-tech problem.
This isn't the "real world" you're referring to here -- it's the fin-de-big-tech bubble world where everyone and their dog is not only sold, smack-down drunk on the idea that Algorithms and Data are the Solution to Your Problems. They aren't of course -- it's just a giant hornswoggle. This "world" needs to end, and it needs to end soon.
My belief is that it will. But until it does, companies that run crappy ATSs (like there's any other kind) deserve the buzzword-gurgling, keyword-dropping candidate pool get. And developers who get "rejected" by these companies should be grateful for the sublime gift of this rejection -- and for the opportunity to laser focus on companies and teams that use their heads to hire, rather than a fleet of bots.
Snark aside - hiring managers that actually read resumes (and yes, actually at least skim each and every one -- really it ain't that hard) are golden to work for (other factors being equal). Really, you don't want to waste your time with companies that have drunken the ATS kool-aid. Really you don't.
That said, however:
HR is looking for "node.js" but you wrote it like "nodejs"? Though luck pal, bye.
It's "Node.js" with a dot. If you spell it "nodejs", that's a serious red flag and you shouldn't be surprised if it gets you automatically discarded -- even by a human reviewer.
That's what resumes used to be, after all -- a kind of a take-home test where you really do have enough time (and perfect knowledge) to get everything 100 percent right. And also a test of your awareness of the fact that, yes, in critical business communications at least -- this level of correctness does matter, and it matters a lot.
I get hundreds posting into some of the roles I’ve hired for and I’ve got to look at every single one in order to find a possible match. It generally takes me about 30 seconds to a minute to assess a resume. A kernel of interest stands out quickly or a smoke screen of buzz words tells me it’s the wrong candidate.
Algorithms aren’t a substitute for an active hiring manager being really interested in finding the right candidate to join their team.
Wouldn't those issues be more likely to occur as a result of automated processing? I imagine that most humans who deal with technical hiring would guess that "node.js" and "nodejs" are probably the same thing.
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.
A standard format wouldn't solve the problems you described. There's no comprehensive list of frameworks and programming languages, let alone for types of experience outside computer science. The data would be structured, but HR would still throw out the bits of data that need to be filled in manually.
“Do not send in a job application before you have an actual human being who has expressed enthusiasm for reading or forwarding it.”[0]
I believe this is sound advice, and the pitfalls you mentioned was probably the reasons that he gave this advice.
[0] https://twitter.com/patio11/status/770807498802540544
But to be honest, I’ve never seen so stupid HR people. Like a lot of people, they have goals to reach and they’ll happily accept an interview from any CV as long as there are computer-related keywords and roughly the required experience.
HRs are one of the most important department when it comes to a company potential shitiness. So I’m glad they have the power to kick you from the hiring process for stupid reasons.
He said he looked at about 1000 resumes a week. After a while, you can tell in 2 seconds if it is worth pursuing or not.
Except it doesn't, because a lot of things in life doesn't fit in that boxes that well.
You might not have experience in node.js, but in JS and some of the node.js-alike server side VMs.
Even just a "degree in computer science" can mean many things. Furthermore you might have something which for the position is "equivalent", like a "master of science in cognitive systems with a specialization on AI" which contained a lot of CS courses, and maybe also some pr-axis experience. Or you just started working as a programming free lancer with 16. Or ...
Furthermore a resume is quite individualistic, beyond just the raw content it contains. How that content is represented can sometimes give you hints, about what kind of questions you want to ask during an interview.
I have seen a bunch of standardized forms for resumes some companies opted into, they _always_ caused endless problems.
I definitely think it’s likely that most people on hn don’t work for companies that do this, but maybe hn just skews toward certain kinds of tech jobs.
Come to think of it, the latter is probably why many of us will always have a job.
This is not true for the largest corporations of course. But that is a solvable problem, just provide a standardized form. You can even adapt it to the needs of the industry in question. This is actually a great boon because you can specifically ask for qualifications. There should be enough budget for that at least.
If you company easily discards applications your HR is either incompetent or it just isn't looking for candidates. But even then you try to build a connection to people applying to you. You may meet them later because they tend to work in your industry.
Again, there are special rules for the largest of corporations although I think HR should be manned enough to have a sensible recruitment process.
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.
If a company is choosing which candidates to interview using grep, it's very likely the rest of their hiring process is similarly broken, and quite possibly other aspects of their corporate culture as well. They're actually doing candidates a favour by giving a clear indicator of how shit they are, much like a candidate who turns up to an interview drunk.
The examples are a stretch though. I've never heard of anyone losing an interview due to their spelling of nodejs or computer science. I don't buy that's something that happens often enough to spread FUD over.
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Recruiters, hiring managers, and specialized software is all I see.
My basic rule of thumb is that the more structured and formal the CV submission process is, the worse the applicant to hire ratio will be, and so the more people you are up against.
For those of us in the tech industry, especially later in our careers, that probably isn't an issue, but in many other jobs, and earlier in your carreer, then it's going to be an issue. I remember having to re-enter my CV into ATSs back in 2001 for the big companies hiring graduates because they had so many to get throught, smaller companies just wanted your CVs.
But I think an official format for CVs might not work so well because CVs in different fields aren't formatted in the same way. A programmer isn't going to put forward the same kinds of things as a musician or a professor in psychology.
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 to verified resumes and do less investigation or third party background checking.
It pushes industries forward.
We have a "verification standard" in the form of diplomas and certificates and neither of those have fixed the hiring issue so far.
If you want to skip background checking, just make people bring their proof of certification with them to the job interview. Of course, those certifications barely mean anything in most fields of work, but it's an exact equivalent of the blue checkmark system you propose.
I get that hiring is hard, but that's why hiring managers exist in the first place. If we used a nicely standardised, automatically validated system, all recruiters and hiring managers would be out of a job. Why pay someone to do that stuff when you could pay a cheap machine learned AI to fill a list of requirements for you?
I see how that can be useful from the recruiting side of the table, but fail to see how the candidate benefits.
Way, way more than a matter of parsing a bunch of standardized resume documents.
I’d wager in many cases they aren’t even aware of an failure to process a resume occurring.
I suspect the answer as to why it hasn't happened is simply because most laypeople applicants would find it too difficult to do something like LaTeX or whatever other thing would be necessary to make this a reality, and also, firms in general suck at adopting new technology.
Those people where a CV and certificates matter, they already construct a CV in the closed system of LinkedIn or Monster's websites. Nobody needs to use LaTeX, there will be websites where anyone can do it, if anything that's an additional business opportunity.
No, I suspect the actual reason is: Nobody will do it unless the big players (LinkedIn etc.) will adopt it. And the big players don't do it because interoperability, and a CV that can be migrated anywhere, isn't in their interests.
Reviewing CVs is boring. They should be made easy for the human who is reading. Imagine being a person in a human resources department going through 100s of these... If there was a good portable format, that process becomes far more efficient and interesting.
A good interview after the resume has been accepted would go into precisely what you are advocating for -- the life history and interpersonal context.
Reality is, however and in my experience, that more and more HR departments fall for promises of AI snake oil. Virtually every employer I apply with has it's own portal, often times asking you to construct your CV anew on their website (often with drop downs that don't include the actual job title or skill). Preferably with a five minute web session and no submit confirmation. Couple this with companies increasingly not responding at all due to fear of being sued, and you'll spend hours on an application and won't even know whether the non-response is due to you, or due to the website trashing the submission. As for CV parsing, this has gone so far as to a big news site over here posting helpful articles on how to beat the system. "Favorite" tidbit: Submit two CV - one for humans, one for dumb algorithms.
Oh and btw, I'm applying at non-tech companies increasingly. Maybe humans isn't perfect either. I mean, I submit proof of 25 years of high grade enterprise IT experience, just for some HR person to ask me where my certificate as an "IT technian" is: they don't know what any of that "weird stuff" means, but to them I lack a generic "IT technician" certificate in early career. A thing that didn't even exist back then! But the latter may just well be a quirk of my own, bureaucratic country.
But overall, this is a hot mess already, and I have often times had the same thought: Why can't we have some sort interchangeable format, much like "geek code", just for all the possible job titles, universities, locations, and companies; with some format-dependent, but free text fields because one can never catch all of them in a fixed list?
I'll always remember but never find the post, where someone just hid tons of keywords in a joke resume and got interviews with an alarmingly high success rate.
It might be this one?
Having been reading resumes a lot lately, I always breathe a sigh of relief when people hand in the standard latex template, with maybe only the colors changed. The structure is immediately familiar and easy to navigate. I could use a client app that presents a hypothetical standard data format in such a way. My colleagues in sales or customer success on the other hand seem to prefer other formatting styles; they could look at their candidates in that way.
The problem we have currently is that some CVs fail that review because they’re in a format that the tools cannot parse. If you’re CV is strong but you’re seeing fewer responses despite having a prettier CV compared to your peers, then that might be the reason. So from your stance standardisation might actually help the industry rather than harm it.
My company (we have software for responding to applicants in real time... think apply... instant conversation with a human recruiter) did a study of about 1,200 resumes and found that 14% of resumes had inaccuracies that would cause them to be screened out... and about 9% of resumes were in a unparsable format. A lot of the screening we see out there is really bad - mostly text search looking for key phrases like specific colleges, specific employers or specific skills. If you are imagining indexing resumes with elastic search and making queries, that may actually be better than state of the art which is usually something that turns into a SQL query.
How "automatized" way could help there? Unifying the CV/resumes for certain company? Sure, if they are have some form - could be stupid Google Form or more sophisticated like Teamtailor [0] - go ahead. You will have a nice databases or resumes and profiles similar to mini-LinkedIn. While I am fan of automation, I don't see any special incentive here that will profit HR team.
I know hundreds of examples, where CV nor initial job interview didn't exactly has shown how good someone is. Also, I personally had experienced a situation I have completely matched the job offer but after talk during interview, I knew it would be waste of time and mentally it will be a bad choice for next year(s) to join their Acme corp.
Do the JSON databases of applicants will help anyhow to solve the human relation job to find out the best candidate for the position? I am highly skeptical and in my humble opinion it will just "dehumanify" the whole process.
Maybe, it is good if you are looking for some warehouse worker like Amazon? /s
[0]: https://www.teamtailor.com/en/
Human review is fraught with bias. A lot of attention and column inches are devoted to algorithmic bias these days, but let's not confuse that for evidence that human review is perfect or even better. It's just harder to audit.
When submitting my resume and interviewing for jobs, I'd certainly prefer to be subject to: 1) multiple people with different biases, 2) humans that can change their mind and/or recognize their biases, 3) humans that can explain their rationale, and 4) humans that can grasp and weight eccentric and non-conforming experience. I'm not interested in being ranked in a standardized way, because I'm not interested in being a pure cog in wheel.
I also think people who want standardized resumes and automated processing are vastly underestimating the SEO effect it will have on hiring. If resumes are automated, then many people more aggressive than you will game the system to the Nth degree. The same thing that happens to Google and the internet will happen to jobs: the loudest and spammiest will win, and the good content will go mostly unnoticed and unrewarded.
that's a flawed view imo.
there could be plenty of catch-all sections to maintain "descriptions"
resume content expectations are largely driven by industry.
i've not heard of someone reading resume more than 10s.
the whole job posting industry dug themselves into a meaningless, needless task: parsing resume pdfs. heck, some even use "AI" for it.
Ignoring the web, we already do some formatting with the common Education/Work experience trope. We could arrange resumes arbitrarily just to mess with employers, perhaps? They are already pretty easy to parse.
Edit: Humans are weird. I guess current ecosystem is not as bad as it could be ( even though it does suck ).
One person that is developing such a tool recommended collage students not to add too much links to their CVs because otherwise, their CV will be flagged as a malicious document.
Reduced latency by 350 ms Increased engagement by 18% Reduced AWS spending by 23% Scaled from 13 to over 300 virtual machines
That sort of specificity and numerical quantification is what makes a great resume stand out.
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.
The cost of producing such an RFC is so small. guaranteed reduction in inefficiencies including operational costs.
my gut feeling is that 20% improvement could have big butterfly effects.
That was what I learned in ontologies: there is nothing so well understood and immutable that the business case won't change. It's so much easier to be vague than to be clear.
I too was convinced that people would rather have good clean data that they could trust, and it would save them a ton of money in the long term while costing a little up front. Maybe someone out there can sell that idea, but it wasn't me.
You can have the current sloppy parsers AND a jsonresume.org parser besides each other.
You can even hide the latter behind a tiny 'other upload formats' link, if you are afraid this option deters uploads of PDFs or docxs.
In the US, those are far more important to be billable.
And that's the problem. Encoding the patient's medical state is simply an afterthought.
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 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)
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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.
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.
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.
A challenge I see is -- resumes change wildly by industry.
a tech resume is totallly different from an actor's resume.
Why should resumes in Vietnam or China be using English, after all.
In HTTP we have Get, Put, Post, Delete, Patch or Options and not obtenir, mettre, poster, supprimer, corriger, options. Yet the French use the web all the time, as do Chinese or Maui.
It would not be about how the fields are named, but about localised concepts. Maybe there are societies that have some educational concept which western Americans cannot fathom, but which is crucial on a CV there.
This,implies the standard needs to be flexible, extensible and localised. Which kindof defeats having a standard.
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.
- worked at a place where they printed A3 excel sheet to write new prices on paper with a pencil
- courthouse procedures are peak redundancy, it's like the opposite of any database normalization 101, the more you copy the same data in various formats the better, and do not question why. It's systemically settled, since everybody expect the data to look like this, any deviation will trigger anxiety, and since they have no information management training they will scream for missing data even though there's still 12 copies of it scattered around the page, just like the emacs keyboard xkcd blended with the old waiting room social mirroring experiment
a good standard is one everyone uses.
Personal opinion: resumes are actually kind of hard. I've personally been involved in HR Open Standards and even though it is a very complete standard, it's still hard to map real world resumes into the format sometimes. There is a shocking amount of ambiguity, and a shocking amount of adjacent standards (some of those have been adopted) for describing work history, education, certifications, people and workplaces.
So... most of the industry just parses resumes into some internal schema, and a lot of employers make job seekers enter their education and history on a job application form so they get it their way. It's really messy. Hope that helps.
HR Open Standards is only available with membership. Doesn't appear very "open", but I'd assume that doesn't matter much to the industry.
JSON Resume seems like the best take so far. I've used it for my resume and at my current job, and, although we've had to extend the schema, it's a great base to start with. It's got all the structured fields one would need to build a resume. It would be trivial for a company to start accepting it, at least as a way to pre-fill all the "education and history" fields that we have to fill out anyway.
Membership is free and you can access the standards (from their website hropenstandards.org):
"The versions of HR Open Standards linked below are available for free public download. You need to be logged in to download the standards. If you're not already an HR Open Standards member, you can register for a free Community membership account."
Not sure I like the format but its good it stresses experience and narrative over just 'formal' data. And they have done it quite nicely that you can either download a template and work offline, or you can work in the browser and then download later again upload/import your CV to continue editing, make versions, etc without any data being stored on the server.
https://europa.eu/europass/en
That said, my record in actually ever landing a new job is fairly woeful but that may be more down to being poor in interviews.
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.
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.
The honest truth about why they want the job for most people is that they provide what you need and that they enjoy things like eating, having a roof over their head, and fun things to do with what's left over of the money you pay them.
Coming up with some drivel about how they've been entranced with Version_Five Inc's tech since they were twelve and how it's been their life-long dream to work with their famous Foobar Widget control language is a nice creative writing exercise but it hardly proves anything. If anything, it rewards lying and deceit to get hired quicker.
Many very capable people suck at writing, even if they are truly driven and interested, especially in the computer science field. A cover letter is a great screen for a job that involves a lot of writing, but for most jobs writing is only a side activity that shouldn't be treated as the main objective.
A cover letter is a kind of writing contest, or maybe it's perceived that way by a candidate. Writing about yourself can be stressful.
I'm not saying not to, ask for a cover letter. Just saying that this stuff is nuanced. Standardisation is great when you want very low friction. Job applications aren't frictionless, probably can't/shouldn't be. Some copy paste fields might be inelegant, but it's not changing the friction equation by much.
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The thing is it's far more than a "modicum" in practice. There was a recent Harvard Business School study out there revealing that these systems are poorly calibrated (and/or these companies don't know how to use them), and as a result millions of candidates are getting rejected for reasons that are either specious (6-month resume "gaps" that may be due to normal life circumstances) or utterly meaningless reasons (like failing to match certain word combinations).
But I agree though that many HR departments would still love to use any tool that narrows the pool (however lossy the filter may be). Whether that is a good thing or bad thing or not is a matter of perspective.
In my view, it puts HR's own value and utility into question.
Yep, that's me taking care of my mother undergoing cancer treatment.
Sometimes it’s an economics problem. Problems need incentives before they can be solved.
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