I’ve been researching about this lately and I’ve found some links you might be interested in looking out:

- Format transformation webservices:
http://cvt.eife-l.org/index.php?language=en

- Europass: a nice webservice for building some sort of custom Europass HR-XML, that later can be transformed with the above link
http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/europass/home/vernav/Europass+Documents/Europass+CV.csp
(check the first link)

I hope it helps!

Regards.

So I tried to move to using XML ( in the form of XML Resume Library). Like you, I was the potential of the project. I was really pleased by the tagging feature, considering that one resume does not fit all. On the other hand, like most sourceforge projects, interested wanes quickly. Something that had potential, falls by the wayside.

So what is the next solution? I am not really feeling HR-XSL, and have run out of other options. What direction have to moved to? I noticed that you pulled your example resumes off of your blog.

The HR-XML 3.0 resume will be a good deal “flatter” than its predecessor and have some data type problems cleared up. This should make generating a supporting form using XForms and InfoPath easier. This may be some help.

Also some of the things that make usable, portable structured resumes so hard aren’t necessarily technical reasons. Every social network site, job board, etc. has a resume/profile building tool. Once they have collected structured, fielded data, it would be very easy to generate some sort of “portable” XML file for the candidate. But you then have to ask yourself, what would be the incentive for those sites to want to enable such portability? I know of only one site (a non-profit cooperative arrangement among group of leading German employers) that will return an HR-XML resume to job seekers. Each participating employer will then accept such resume directly.

Is there something out there that would give candidates control and flexibility? I’m not sure there is something immediately on the horizon. Some of the plugins for WordPress and blogging/social networking platforms seem to have some promise. An ideal plugin might provide a form-driven profile builder that creates the hResume for search engine discovery of some level of detail (skills, location, etc.), but that also captured sufficient detail to allow full profile/resume exchange via HR-XML. Such exchange of might be regulated using a protocol like Liberty’s ID-SIS (some work on this in Europe: http://projectconcordia.org/images/9/9a/Draft-symlabs-id-hr-xml-1.0-01.pdf ) or using something like the emerging OpenID Attribute Exchange ( http://openid.net/specs/openid-attribute-exchange-1_0-07.html ).

All that said, anyone dreaming of Resume interchange nirvana also needs to be aware that for employers, a resume is starting point. I don’t think the above vision of user-maintained and controlled structured resumes would eliminate those dreaded applications forms. However, what it might do is to provide an easy way to pre-populate those forms with all the usual stuff (contact info, employment history, education, skill summary, etc.).

Short of all of the above – some of the best, but still underutilized technology for simplifying applications for job seekers are Resume parsers (almost all of which use HR-XML as their intermediate format). The way these work is that they allow candidates to upload their word, pdf, or html (even hresume) resume. The file is then passed to the parser web service, which returns HR-XML, that is used to pre-populate the application form. The job seeker can then make any corrections and fill-in any additional information required. More job sites should have this technology deployed. Unlike all what I’ve described in the preceding paragraphs, the resume parsers have been around for 9+ years. They work. They save candidates a lot of typing and reduce the “drop rates” for career sites and employers.