[uf-discuss] hResume and Job-Listing

[Nicholas H.Tollervey]

Hi Dan,

I'm in the UK... :-) see comments in-line:

Daniel Hilton wrote:
>>
>> and should render like this: "C# - Expert (five years)"
>>
>>
>
> Hi Nicholas
>
> In the UK, recent legislation has ruled that you can't discriminate on
> age when advertising a post.
>
> See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5326774.stm
> for more info.
>
The law is, in fact, EU wide. This consideration crossed my mind when I
wrote my original email but I came to the following conclusion: the
Internet is international in scope and my impression is that uFormats
should mirror how real people use information rather than how
legislators in particular locations think information should be used. If
people need to mark-up years experience then they should be able to. We
just have to assume that HR depts in the EU obey the law.

That being said, the HR system for the Council of Europe (the
organisation that runs the EU's legal infrastructure such as the Court
of Human Rights) collects information like date-of-birth, years
experience and other such indicators of age. In fact, they have a
stipulation that the maximum age for applying for work is 65 (how do I
know this? I was contracted to work on this project and remember
reviewing the code that checks the applicant's dob during the validation
of the online application form!)
...
> In a nutshell, you can't (or shouldn't according to the law) advertise
> jobs based on years of experience but rather on skills and
> competencies.
> Thus your notion of rating a particular skill level is probably best.
> Again in the UK the National Health Service(NHS) has recently gone
> through a
> period of evaluating every job role in it's organisation (3rd largest
> employer in the world) and settled on having a system called the
> Knowledge and
> Skills framework, a large mapping of every role in the NHS to a new
> pay scale.
>
> See http://www.skillsforhealth.org.uk/ksfcomps.php
>
This is quite common in large state-sector organisations - the EU has
something similar as do LEAs (Local Education Authorities) in the UK.
They count as yet more evidence of "levels" based skill/competency markup.

> for an example of  types of levels used.  I think the idea of having
> some sort of levels are great, however I would worry down the line
> about job spam, a problem already on Job sites, where recruitment
> agencies post non-existent jobs to get CV's.
I think this is more a reflection on the ethics within recruitment
agencies rather than the capabilities of uFormats. I like how Feynman
describes this dilemma:

"...knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad - but it
does not carry instructions on how to use it.  Such power has evident
value - even though the power may be negated by what one does with it.

I learned a way of expressing this common human problem on a trip to
Honolulu.  In a Buddhist temple there, the man in charge explained a
little bit about the Buddhist religion for tourists, and then ended his
talk by telling them he had something to say to them that they would
*never* forget - and I have never forgotten it.  It was a proverb of the
Buddhist religion:/

/To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key
opens the gates of hell."

:-)
>
> Hope that helps a bit,
> cheers,
> Dan