I’ve been reading the Technical Careers @ Microsoft new blog, and specifically, their post on A good one-page resume for a technical candidate, which got me re-thinking putting my resume into XML. I’ve always had it on my todo list, but knowing that once I get my resume into XML, there are a ton of cool ideas I have on making it easier to generate custom views of the resume, and very little time to complete those task, I never got around to it. Plus, I wanted a user friendly application to enter the info. I always thought I would just create a Word Macro to rip thru my resume and generate the XML of my own schema. But in thinking about it, I figured that there must be some consortium of businesses that have already created a standard schema for resumes. With a quick Google search, sure enough, the Hr-Xml Consortium already has a bunch of schemas for HR related info, including resumes. The website pretty much sucks, you have to register to download the documentation (but you get no user id or password, so if you want to download stuff again, you got to re-register), including the schemas, and even then, you have to pull down the large zip files, and search to find what you are looking for. No wonder why most folks don’t know about this good stuff, it is so hard to find.
Now that I had a schema, I need a tool to enter the data. I was going to use XSD to create the .Net classes and create a WinForm app, but then I realized that InfoPath would be perfect for this (since it includes spell check). Before going off and developing my own, I hit Google again, and low and behold Microsoft has already has an Office Solution Accelerator for Recruiting that includes an InfoPath form that will generate the XML according to the Hr-Xml schema. Way cool.
So now there is a quick and easy way to get your resume into XML based on a standard schema, and you no longer have an excuse to not do it (well, assuming you have InfoPath). There are a bunch of additional things I would like to create to help enhance the whole process:
- Create a new resume formatting metadata schema to supplement the Hr-Xml schema. The metadata would be used to create targeting filters that could be used to create customized views of your resume (to focus on specific experiences/technologies, like WinForms or ASP.Net), similar to the XmlResume Library project (which doesn't use the Hr-XML schema, and is in Java).
- Create XSLTs to translate the Hr-Xml schema to WordML, and HTML, using the resume formatting metadata.
- Create an XSL-FO to translate the Hr-Xml schema to PDF.
- Add the ability to use these new features in .Text. How many people have their resume off .Text, but in HTML, or Word format, and could really use it in XML and take advantage of the formatting metadata?
As soon as I get a chance, I’ll upload the schema and the InfoPath form up to my site, so that it will be easier to get. Until then, you’ll have to download the Accelerator.