- What reaches them
- An extraction report against their own file: how many work entries and skills a parser recovers, and which layout choice dropped them.
- What it means from there
- The failure was in the document rather than in the record, and it is fixable before submission rather than inferable afterwards.
- What happens next
- Re-exports single-column with text headings, re-checks, and submits the version that survives extraction.
Candidate ATS Parser Conformance Test Utility
Provide candidates with an open-source parsing validation tool to verify CV machine-readability before submission.
Intervention I-005 Actor: candidate action Scope: individual Cost: low Evidence: supported
On the canonical path
Applied, and told so — The application is submitted and acknowledged. The record holds what the candidate actually wrote, and the candidate can tell that it arrived.
Machine work stays mechanical — Automation deduplicates, extracts and orders. It does not decide. Where a rule does end an application, the rule is stated and it is one a person would defend out loud.
This entry is one of the things that holds that commitment up.
What it looks like when this intervention is in place
Composite excerpts, written to be typical rather than copied. No particular message, company or person is quoted here.
Title: hoba-parse-check · cv.pdf
Extraction score: 41/100
Work experience entries recovered: 0 of 5 — two-column layout detected
Skills recovered: 0 of 24 — rendered inside a graphic
Suggested: single-column export, text-based headings, skills as plain text.
Re-check after changes: extraction score 93/100, 5 of 5 entries, 24 of 24 skills.
What to notice: This is the one mechanism on the candidate side of the line. Seeing what the parser sees turns an invisible failure into a fixable file.
What this targets
Expected effects
- Eliminate formatting-induced silent parsing failures
- Increase candidate confidence in resume ingestion fidelity
What to measure
parser_extraction_error_rateingestion_pass_rate
From each side
The same entry from inside each position that meets it: what reaches them, what it means from there, and what happens next given what they control.
- What reaches them
- A complete profile in the queue: work history in fields, skills in fields, orderable against the rest.
- What it means from there
- A profile with nothing in the experience field and a profile whose experience did not extract read identically from here; this removes one of the two before it arrives.
- What happens next
- Screens on the content, and in the applications that still arrive empty, an unreadable file and a thin record remain indistinguishable.
ATS vendorNot visible from here
From this position the entry is not visible. That is not a gap in the atlas — it is the finding: the decision is made where nobody in this position can see it.
Employer policyNot visible from here
From this position the entry is not visible. That is not a gap in the atlas — it is the finding: the decision is made where nobody in this position can see it.
Hiring managerNot visible from here
From this position the entry is not visible. That is not a gap in the atlas — it is the finding: the decision is made where nobody in this position can see it.
Public policy and industry standardsNot visible from here
From this position the entry is not visible. That is not a gap in the atlas — it is the finding: the decision is made where nobody in this position can see it.
