3 ms·

Can you elaborate on the exact layout syntax these ML idiot savant agents want to read? Lack of an industry wide standard data interface makes this terrible.

willquack 2y ago
Get a boring LaTeX template like "Jake's Resume" I've spoken with two technical recruiters who say they prefer reading templates instead of hand-crafted Resumes on top of them also parsing better in the ATS system ):
- kleiba 2y ago
  Can confirm a similar attitude from an HR person - they prefer a single-column, easy to scan resume that follows a tried and trusted standard structure and layout.
paxys 2y ago
Word/Google Docs -> PDF conversion is perfectly fine, and every system will understand it. Just don't try to get fancy with layouts and stick to headings, subheadings and bullets. People reading the resume will appreciate this as well.
- jareds 2y ago
  This is how I formatted my resume using Pandoc to generate a word document from a Markdown file. Having everything in Markdown also made it easy to quickly create customized resumes by reordering specific sections or lists in a section as well as tracking changes in Git.
kjellsbells 2y ago
I can only speak for what worked for me. A shorthand heuristic might be that if the resume can be read in linear fashion by a screenreader without any weirdness or non sequiturs, it's probably pretty good (another argument in favor of paying attention to accessibility!) In my case, I had a simple layout with sections clearly delineated and very simple formatting (bulleted lists). Dates were spelled out eg September 2024 rather than 9/24. UTF-8 throughout. No difficult latex packages, just classic ones like enumitem and fancyhdr.
chiph 2y ago
There is an industry standard - HR-XML[0] (disclaimer: I was on the committee for a little while). But I would be surprised if any of the job boards let you import it directly. Frankly, plain text rendered to PDF is probably going to be the most easily parsed by their systems. If they let you add attachments separate from your resume, then stick your "beautified" resume there. [0] For the curious: https://www.hropenstandards.org/ https://www.hropenstandards.org/
belinder 2y ago
Take your resume, select all, copy, paste into notepad. Does it still look how you expect? Then youre ok. Otherwise, fix it until it does. That's it. That's all you need to do.
- kccqzy 2y ago
  This depends on the PDF viewer. I recommend trying a couple different ones (at least Acrobat and macOS Preview).
- jkaplowitz 2y ago
  Even that can fail. I’ve had multiple cases now where my name (!) was auto-parsed wrong in a way human would never do, not even after copy-pasting into Notepad. The reason? My resume lists my name as follows, where I means the initial for my middle name: Firstname I. (Nickname) Lastname And yes, even professionally I do use my nickname and my last name, except for things which must match my government ID, such as offer letters and payroll/tax records, where of course I omit Nickname and use the legal Firstname as well as sometimes the middle initial or full middle name. With this format, how does Personio parse my name? It thinks I’m called Firstname Nickname. No human would make this mistake, nor would a copy-paste into Notepad cause a human to do that. And if it has any LLM intelligence at all, it should know that this is unlikely, because Nickname is actually a very common nickname for Firstname, so it should suspect a disperse and have a human double-check its conclusion. Alas. I’ve also had other issues with these systems misparsing my employment history, since they don’t always properly parse jobs that span corporate acquisitions (changing title and employer at that point but being the same job) and are accurately reflected as such on the resume.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >Even that can fail. I’ve had multiple cases now where my name (!) was auto-parsed wrong in a way human would never do, not even after copy-pasting into Notepad. [...] sounds like they did something like: first_name, last_name = name.split(" ") which is an issue, but unrelated to what everyone else is talking about, which seems to be how text data is being parsed/encoded inside pdfs. Pasting into notepad would check for that issue, but obviously wouldn't do anything for bad first name/last name extraction logic.

willquack 2y ago

Get a boring LaTeX template like "Jake's Resume" I've spoken with two technical recruiters who say they prefer reading templates instead of hand-crafted Resumes on top of them also parsing better in the ATS system ):

kleiba 2y ago
Can confirm a similar attitude from an HR person - they prefer a single-column, easy to scan resume that follows a tried and trusted standard structure and layout.

paxys 2y ago

Word/Google Docs -> PDF conversion is perfectly fine, and every system will understand it. Just don't try to get fancy with layouts and stick to headings, subheadings and bullets. People reading the resume will appreciate this as well.

jareds 2y ago
This is how I formatted my resume using Pandoc to generate a word document from a Markdown file. Having everything in Markdown also made it easy to quickly create customized resumes by reordering specific sections or lists in a section as well as tracking changes in Git.

kjellsbells 2y ago

I can only speak for what worked for me. A shorthand heuristic might be that if the resume can be read in linear fashion by a screenreader without any weirdness or non sequiturs, it's probably pretty good (another argument in favor of paying attention to accessibility!) In my case, I had a simple layout with sections clearly delineated and very simple formatting (bulleted lists). Dates were spelled out eg September 2024 rather than 9/24. UTF-8 throughout. No difficult latex packages, just classic ones like enumitem and fancyhdr.

chiph 2y ago

There is an industry standard - HR-XML[0] (disclaimer: I was on the committee for a little while). But I would be surprised if any of the job boards let you import it directly. Frankly, plain text rendered to PDF is probably going to be the most easily parsed by their systems. If they let you add attachments separate from your resume, then stick your "beautified" resume there. [0] For the curious: https://www.hropenstandards.org/ https://www.hropenstandards.org/

belinder 2y ago

Take your resume, select all, copy, paste into notepad. Does it still look how you expect? Then youre ok. Otherwise, fix it until it does. That's it. That's all you need to do.

kccqzy 2y ago
This depends on the PDF viewer. I recommend trying a couple different ones (at least Acrobat and macOS Preview).
jkaplowitz 2y ago
Even that can fail. I’ve had multiple cases now where my name (!) was auto-parsed wrong in a way human would never do, not even after copy-pasting into Notepad. The reason? My resume lists my name as follows, where I means the initial for my middle name: Firstname I. (Nickname) Lastname And yes, even professionally I do use my nickname and my last name, except for things which must match my government ID, such as offer letters and payroll/tax records, where of course I omit Nickname and use the legal Firstname as well as sometimes the middle initial or full middle name. With this format, how does Personio parse my name? It thinks I’m called Firstname Nickname. No human would make this mistake, nor would a copy-paste into Notepad cause a human to do that. And if it has any LLM intelligence at all, it should know that this is unlikely, because Nickname is actually a very common nickname for Firstname, so it should suspect a disperse and have a human double-check its conclusion. Alas. I’ve also had other issues with these systems misparsing my employment history, since they don’t always properly parse jobs that span corporate acquisitions (changing title and employer at that point but being the same job) and are accurately reflected as such on the resume.
- gruez 2y ago
  >Even that can fail. I’ve had multiple cases now where my name (!) was auto-parsed wrong in a way human would never do, not even after copy-pasting into Notepad. [...] sounds like they did something like: first_name, last_name = name.split(" ") which is an issue, but unrelated to what everyone else is talking about, which seems to be how text data is being parsed/encoded inside pdfs. Pasting into notepad would check for that issue, but obviously wouldn't do anything for bad first name/last name extraction logic.