[jkaplowitz]

Even that can fail. I’ve had multiple cases now where my name (!) was auto-parsed wrong in a way human would never do, not even after copy-pasting into Notepad.

The reason? My resume lists my name as follows, where I means the initial for my middle name:

Firstname I. (Nickname) Lastname

And yes, even professionally I do use my nickname and my last name, except for things which must match my government ID, such as offer letters and payroll/tax records, where of course I omit Nickname and use the legal Firstname as well as sometimes the middle initial or full middle name.

With this format, how does Personio parse my name? It thinks I’m called Firstname Nickname. No human would make this mistake, nor would a copy-paste into Notepad cause a human to do that.

And if it has any LLM intelligence at all, it should know that this is unlikely, because Nickname is actually a very common nickname for Firstname, so it should suspect a disperse and have a human double-check its conclusion. Alas.

I’ve also had other issues with these systems misparsing my employment history, since they don’t always properly parse jobs that span corporate acquisitions (changing title and employer at that point but being the same job) and are accurately reflected as such on the resume.

[gruez]

>Even that can fail. I’ve had multiple cases now where my name (!) was auto-parsed wrong in a way human would never do, not even after copy-pasting into Notepad. [...]

sounds like they did something like:

    first_name, last_name = name.split(" ")

which is an issue, but unrelated to what everyone else is talking about, which seems to be how text data is being parsed/encoded inside pdfs. Pasting into notepad would check for that issue, but obviously wouldn't do anything for bad first name/last name extraction logic.

[jkaplowitz]

I felt that the general topic was "software failing to do the right thing parsing the text in PDF resumes in ways a human would get right", which includes all of these types of problems, not specific to encoding issues. But, sure.

[nuancebydefault]

I think mashing up of names happens a lot, since they are not common words. Personally I don't see what the problem is of your name being mangled in a parsed resume, other than when it would look offensive. The name mangling can get easily cleared up after first contact with a real person.

[jkaplowitz]

I’ve indeed cleared it up quickly every time it’s happened, but in my opinion, it makes the company look unprofessional in an easily avoidable way. (And yes, I’ve been in the hiring manager role myself - I’d feel the same way if this happened to one of my candidates.)

I call this easily avoidable because name is usually a separate field in the application or referral forms, so this is the bad auto-parsing overriding accurate manual input.

[kjellsbells]

Parsing names is like writing a time library. Sounds easy until you learn the hard way that it definitely isnt.

Some examples that come to mind from my experience are applicants with Chinese names that also use a western name professionally ("Yu-Chen Liew, but I go by Janet"), Spanish names that include patronymics ("Penelope Cruz Sanchez") and cultures that place the family name first ("Park Lee"). Maybe (f,l) = split(name, " ") works in some very homogeneous country like Iceland, but it sure doesnt work in the US.

[jkaplowitz]

Yes, agreed - except that the Spanish name convention you describe isn't about patronymics exactly. Patronymics are something like a given language's version of "son [or daughter] of X" where X is a given name of the parent (usually the father).

By contrast, Spanish last names simply use two last names, with a child taking one last name from each parent. Traditionally this is the father's first last name followed by the mother's first last name, though efforts toward gender equality have made the law more flexible nowadays in both Spain and many other countries.

It doesn't violate Spanish naming conventions for given names to be reused in the next generation, and some families do that, but that isn't patronymic since it's not a "son/daughter of X" name, just a reused given name.

[jkaplowitz]

Gah. Once again I notice an autocorrect typo beyond the edit window: “disperse” should of course read “misparse”. Thank you iPhone keyboard.