[uf-discuss] hResume and Job-Listing

[Nicholas H.Tollervey]

Hi,

I've recently been looking at the (related) hResume and Job-Listing
uFormats as I want to use uFormats for marking up information in an HR
application I am writing.

Put crudely, the standard (funnel) recruitment process is finding the
best match between a job listing's requirements (e.g. required skills,
experience and education level) and what candidate's have to offer (or
vice-versa if using the reverse funnel process). Obviously, hResume and
Job-Listing markup information on either "side" of this matching process.

Evidence from the many examples listed on the wiki for job-listings show
that recruitment officers often list within the job description the
desired skills AND an indication of skill level or experience (e.g. "At
least three years strong C#/ASP.NET with good knowledge of SQL.
Knowledge of nUnit would be an advantage.").

hResume already includes a section for skills but doesn't include a
means of describing levels of attainment  or experience (something also
mentioned on hResume's feedback and issues pages on the wiki). This is a
shame as it would be an *insanely useful* feature to be able to marry
hResume and the job-listing uFormat so they complement each other in
terms of skill definition.

How might one indicate more information about a skill? I've found
several examples:

Although not a job-site, I like Sourceforge.net's skill inventory
feature (that captures both a level and length of experience) within a
user's profile. This information is simply presented in a table with
columns for skill name, level attained and length of experience with
nothing "semantically" helpful to the likes of us.

Another example comes from the guys over at hr-xml.org. They obviously
have a different set of aims to microformats but reading their
specification is a fertile source for ideas. They encode what we'd call
"skills" as "competencies", an example of which is pasted below:

<Competency name="Communication Skills">
    <Competency name="Written Communication Skills">
        <CompetencyEvidence name="WRITTENTEST1-A"
dateOfIncident="1995-01-01" lastUsed="2000-01-01">
            <NumericValue minValue="3" maxValue="5"
description="SEP-equivalent Skill-Level Range">5</NumericValue>
        </CompetencyEvidence>
        <CompetencyWeight>
            <NumericValue minValue="0" maxValue="100">35</NumericValue>
        </CompetencyWeight>
    </Competency>
</Competency>

I also started thinking about re-using hReview as a means of indicating
skill level. This was quickly dropped as it doesn't quite fit although I
like the use of a rating scale 1-5 as a language independent means of
indicating level.

I mixed together ideas from these examples and (desiring something very
simple) initially got this:

<span class="competency"><a class="skill" rel="tag"
href="http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/default.aspx">C#</a> -
<abbr title="4" class="rating">Expert</abbr></span>

Where the inner text of the abbr tag might be something like
"Basic","Competent","Strong","Expert" or "Guru" (or something similar in
the user's own language).

As for amount (duration) of experience, this will have to piggy back on
how the measurement uFormat ends up - but if I base my example on one
from the measure-brainstorming page on the wiki then the above example
transmogrifies into this:

<span class="competency"><a class="skill" rel="tag"
href="http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/default.aspx">C#</a> -
<abbr title="4" class="rating">Expert</abbr> (<span
class="duration"><abbr class="value" title="5">five</abbr> <abbr
class="unit" title="YR">years</abbr></span>)</span>

and should render like this: "C# - Expert (five years)"

Ideas, comments and suggestions?

Thanks for getting this far and being so patient with my first post! I
look forward to moving this forward...

Best wishes,

Nicholas

ntoll at ntoll.org