So, yeah, making it machine readable will help. This does not really negate what you said, but is another perspective.
Speaking for myself, I've never gotten a job through a process either initiated by a cold email from a recruiter or from filtering through an automatic process on the HR side of things, and I have a boatload of experience and I like to say I'm pretty good at The Technical Thing. I get jobs from talking to people, and I help folks get jobs (at Mux, hi, we're hiring!) through talking to people. I got an email yesterday from a new hire who came onboard because he saw a Who's Hiring post on HN, shot me an email, and I connected him with our recruiters 'cause he sounded like he'd be a good fit. No robots involved, except the SMTP ones. This happens pretty regularly and a lot of the candidates might be ones who'd look like a bad fit for a keyword filter.
There are jobs and there are people fit for jobs where keyword matching is a thing. There's also a monstrously large chunk of the industry where neither the job nor the ideal candidate can be expressed as such. So look at that, and then be that. And if you're finding walls, find the right person to talk to to help you get around those walls, because at places you want to be, people want more good folks to be there.
</snark>
I think that the success criteria in situations like this should be whether the project results in effective matches between employers and employees, and avoids as much ineffective matching / wastage-of-time as possible.
“Do you have some resources for me?” “What kind?” “Human is fine, nice and flexible”
In case the tone comes across harsh, I was trying to hold back just how I really feel. I can read and write in Go, but I hate the entire language and it’s ecosystem. It’s obvious to me that it was designed to be a better Java for Googlers at Google living in a monorepo world… the only positives I have to say about it are that talented people have somehow managed to write excellent and useful tools and software using it, but I really can’t like a language that makes me feel like I’m programming with the accidental child of BASIC and Java. However this isn’t a thread about Go, I just wish the poor choice of name had doomed it to obscurity and a quick death.
There is another language called "Go!"
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9#issuecomment-66047478
Russ Cox's response was, "The naming similarity is unfortunate. However, there are many computing products and services named Go. In the 11 months since our release, there has been minimal confusion of the two languages, so we are closing this issue."
Naming the standard Mac is also an issue (due to a product by Apple Inc.) but since its an acronym you should always format it as MAC
That's the American convention, but it can vary elsewhere. If you look at BBC articles, you'll find that initialisms (like HIV) will be capitalized, but acronyms (like Aids) will only have an initial capital letter. Since "Mac" will be pronounced rather than saying "M-A-C", the style in a lot of the world would be to only capitalize the "M".
Wikipedia's English language style guide specifically notes that it doesn't follow the convention of distinguishing between acronyms and initialisms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Capi.... There's more information in the article about acronyms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Case
"Some publications choose to capitalize only the first letter of acronyms, reserving all-caps styling for initialisms, writing the pronounced acronyms "Nato" and "Aids" in mixed case, but the initialisms "USA" and "FBI" in all caps."
1. You want to apply to one position but you only have your data on LinkedIn. If you wanna export it, you only have PDF as an option. You can't adapt or update it. 2. Even if you can adapt or update it, if the company or service where you want to apply doesn't support a standard format, you will have to re-enter the data, one by one.
Finally, all this friction discourages some candidates to apply to some positions.
"Finally, all this friction discourages some candidates to apply to some positions." Doesn't this just validate that the benefit is for recruiting firms rather than applicants?
The actual "job market" is abomination that must be annihilated and companies who can't have enough HR resources for their scale simply must be resized by nature because being unable to humanly process human resources means a bad/too quick/too unbalanced dangerous growth. Similarly for companies who fail to have call centers etc (yes, Alphabet is one of them).
We are not robots, we are human who work to live, not the contrary, and we are a society not a factory.
Now you have to upload the same data to LinkedIn, Angels.co, Hired, and hundreds of other services. With an open standard, you could update your data just once.
We are not robots, we are humans who work to live, and we shouldn't have to build our CV every time we look for that work.
I consider matching platform useful in the modern time because remote work is a thing and cross-country job seeking is common, but for me such platforms MUST NOT be public and must be very limited in terms of data they grab/display because is not a matter of oppression or "build my own CV" but a matter of how we seek workers.
The actual system is antechamber of the Chinese one in western sauce, that need a social score, witch can be in various forms, including "number of stars/upvote and positive comments", and the social score is harmful for the society because no one can really control "the honesty" of the score and many can trade it. You probably know well the river of cyclic polemics about Amazon reviews/buyer feedback, same for TripAdvisor etc: in theory the social score is good, in practice the seller give something to the buyer in exchange of a good review (corruption, cronyism), the platform manipulate reviews for it's own interests, the State give bad scoring to political opponent etc, see China for a practical example.
The society of interpersonal relation have "a bit of risk/incertitude", but can't be manipulated much because of scale and kind of parties involved. The social score still exists, but only at small personal scale, like the personal scoring systems you might have on emails, nntp news, ... anyone have it's own and share it to friends/relatives, it's a limited and distributed one that encourage honestly and can't do big damage on scale when honesty lack.
Also you might have read about other river of polemics from CVs crafted to pass the "initial ML pre-selection" with even people who try to make a business selling crafted CVs to stories like https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me again the solution is simple avoid conditions that can give such outcomes.
Just try a small game: how much people and enterprises in mean have earned in the '60s than now? For my knowledge now VERY few earn far more, but in the mean 99% earn far less. That's means a thing: the system is broken. There is no free market capable of self-regulation, there is no leviathan PUBLIC State that regulate (classic liberalism and socialism) but just a corrupted clepto-corporatocracy. Do you really like actual system? Beware: "coming back" does not means dropping good things born thereafter, does not means travel back in time, means just take the good, correct the bad and keep going. It's name is not time travel but evolution.
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.
So effectively candidates will be rejected before they have even applied.
I agree with the other comments that this should not exist for job applications, and that asking for a job application in machine readable format is basically saying "we're not going to read this". I would never use a channel that asked me to apply this way.
