In applying for a job, I’ve come to realise something is missing in online job applications. A machine readable CV format.

In the past you would write up a CV on 2 sheets of A4 at most. I remember doing this, it wasn’t even that long ago that it stopped being normal. The CV would list your most relevant job experience, qualifications, and other useful skills. But now I have come across so many networking, job recruitment, and HR application platforms that insist on getting all of your information, all of your history, and all of it entered via really annoying forms that sit over a hundred different pages.

It’s flipping¹ annoying. It’s 2024. Data interop is the next big thing². Why is there no single file format that can contain my employment history, my qualifications, my skills, in a single machine readable format. Ideally in a form that a human could easily scan if needed, and that one could store on a personal device.

No, I won’t make a LinkedIn or whatever profile. I won’t trust the formatting of my employment history to a siloed social media platform owned by Microsoft. And even if I did, a URL to a webpage is hardly a strictly typed and portable format any easier to read than a regular CV³.

Why must every single service demand I fill out the exact same information in a hundred different discrete form fields, each with their own formatting eccentricities?

Would XML or JSON be really so difficult to agree upon? I know we’ve kind of given up on the idea of a semantic web and having nicely typed everything, but surely storing this information once in a nice structured manner is better than forcing people to re-type it every time they want to share it with a new platform.

<CurriculumVitae>
    <employment>
        <employer>Dunder Mifflin</employer>
        <start_date>Jan 1 2000</start_date>
        ...
    <qualification>
         <institution>Local Community College</institution>
         <degree>National Certificate</degree>
         ...

What I would love is to have a single format of document, that existing services like LinkedIn or Indeed or Monster or whoever could export profiles as, or that you could use offline apps to craft. When you apply for a job, you select the most relevant entries, add a paragraph or so of flavour text tailored to the job, and upload. Rather than having to re-enter the same stuff on every single Oracle recruitment page.

Now that I think about it, where’s the LLMs in all this? I thought they were supposed to be helping automate busywork tasks like this? Why can’t I just submit my CV as a document and have the system automatically pull out the employment information? Then again considering they’re only just learning how to spell and count properly, maybe it’s for the best they’re not involved.

And really, what’s wrong with the classic CV? Are these obtuse forms and platforms really making it any easier for recruiters to find the right candidates⁴? For candidates to find the right jobs? Is that much time being saved versus just sharing a document full of easy to read, personally crafted, and neatly laid out words?

Anyone else have headaches about this? Please leave a comment.

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1. there are other words I could use, but we’re being professional here ↩︎
2. or it will be, if governments and data offices get their acts together ↩︎
3. especially when online platforms have a penchant for randomly changing their interfaces ↩︎
4. if you work in HR please comment with your experience ↩︎