If you've ever conducted an online job search then you know that many of the job sites, and even individual companies, expect you to enter the minutiae of your job and education history into their sites. This has to be one of the country's biggest productivity drains ... well except compared to doing your taxes!
Wouldn't it be great if there was a document standard for
resumes? If there were, you could create your resume once and upload it to all the sites you wish to use.
Well, I went out on the web and looked for the Holy Grail of a resume standard, only to find there is more than one:
- XML Resume Library
- HR-XML
- hResume
XML Resume Library
This is a project at Source Forge that includes a resume standard defined by a DTD and a set of XSL style sheets to allow you to transform your resume to a:
- Web-ready HTML
- Print-ready PDF
- Plain, unformatted text
In addition, if you have more than one profession, for example (Programmer Analyst and Exotic Male Dancer) this standard allows you to keep all this information in one document and only output the relevant tidbits for the targeted job.
Sounds great, but the project appears to be defunct, circa 2004 (see link below).
HR-XML
HR-XML is a broad XML standard for data exchange for all Human Resource related items including resumes. This standard appears to be alive and well but if you can imagine a resume designed by a committee of HR people, then you won't be surprised at the complexity.
hResume
Unlike the other two standards, hResume is not based on XML but instead is an XHTML standard. hResume is one of the standards propagated by the Microformats folks. In brief, a Microformats compliant document has embedded semantic information within the HTML. An hResume document specifies the resume items via the use of the "Class" attribute. For example a resume might have a <p class="objective">Classy Male Dancer Seeks Job at Bachelorette Parties</p>.
Job Sites that use hResume
There are two sites that allegedly use the hResume standard: LinkedIn and Emurse. LinkedIn is a social networking site for the job hunter and entrepreneur. Emurse is a job site which allows you to display your resume in many formats, Word, PDF, HTML, etc.
Because the hResume HTML document has semantic information, sites like Monster or Hot Jobs could take your resume and populate their databases at a push of a button. Sounds great, but will Monster, etc. ever get on board?
For the time being, prepare to wear your fingers to the bone when you begin your next job search.
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