I spent five years of my life working on this problem, and even got involved with the standards-making process. First, there already is a standard for resumes a

I spent five years of my life working on this problem, and even got involved with the standards-making process. First, there already is a standard for resumes and has been for 20 years. It's called HR Open Standards Candidate (it is the successor to the old HR-XML standard, which in turn was based on OASYS). There are also five or six other attempts at making a standard CV / Resume too. The problem with all of them is that every time one gets adoption, another standard, usually created because the author was unaware or did not like the existing standard for some use case. In some cases the standard is de-facto, like the XML format Indeed uses, and in others it is a formal spec (like the HR Open Standards JSON family). The reason this problem is hard is that a resume is an intersection of multiple kinds of data: education, licenses, contact information, work history, and narrative text. Business can't even agree on how to best organize this data, or even how to represent it. Individuals? Well, the CV is all about me, and I want mine to uniquely be me -- even in that means using comic sans. Also, people don't look for jobs every day, so many make a new resume and a new profile whenever they start searching. So you have consumers of data (businesses) and creators of data (job seekers) who really are misaligned. Finally, business want perfect candidates, and people are not perfect. There's actually an incentive in job hunting for people to stretch the truth, which makes CV data unreliable regardless of format. In some cases, the automated screening is so tight that only a lie will get through the filter.