Resume Eye-Tracking Study, PDF

The most important part of a resume today isn't the formatting, but getting past the "applicant tracking systems", or ATS. They are all generally horrible and wildly different, so formatting your resume in a unique, well designed way that humans can parse is actually a disadvantage. I wonder if anyone actually sees original resumes any more.

It would be nice if the major job boards would define a meta-data standard for resumes that could be included in PDFs, docxs and web pages so the automated systems could process them more accurately. There's a lot of semantic-web style attempts out there, but there's not a set of definitive rules that are widely used. Instead there's custom fields, categories, keywords, etc. on every site and "general guidelines" on document format types - for example, docx is better than PDF because it's more easily parsed. (Which is silly... PDF files are semi-sentient bundles of data, so I assume it can embed meta-data if there was an editor that bothered adding it, but I doubt any common word processors will ever bother.)

This seems like such low hanging fruit for standardization.