Resume Parsing into Access (1 Viewer)

I work for a recruiting agency and use Access to manage applicants. I receive tons of resumes via email and have to manually enter candidates' information (name, phone number, email, etc.). Is there a way I can import a resume from a file and have Access parse information into a form to help eliminate the manual entry?

automation is possible/practical if the resume file is constructed to an agreed standard - whether csv, xml, or even embedded in particular html tags in an email.

do you have a standard layout?

If you force all candidates to format their resumes in a similar fashion then yes, otherwise a human is better at this. Alternatively get the submissions through a website, so the basic data can be required input in some consistent fashion, and the cv is a supplement.

Unfortunately, no standard format is used. I receive resumes, usually as a Word attachment, via email so people send me their resumes in all different styles and templates. I know there are different applicant tracking systems that have this capability, but they are very expensive to purchase.

Our website has our job listings, however we do not currently have the ability to have people apply via our website. We use FrontPage to manage the website. Would that offer the ability to set up an application page and use that to import the data into Access?

Pay somebody to set up a mail form on your site, covering the basics, with facility to add attachments. It's one hour's job . You could then parse that basic data from the email (or get an application that does that, and puts it in an access db: http://www.email2db.com/ - takes an hour to set up).

To code a webpage to get all required info and put it in a db is much more work.

But - there is so much free code and templates out there, then perhaps there is a ready made job-site thing available.

If you're going to get CVs mostly in Word format then you want to ask this question in a Word forum as to how to extract parts of text and transform it into a reasonable format, then we in the Access forum will be able to provide mechanisms for reading the data into your table.

But note, this isn't an easy task and lots of people have spent considerable time to get the algorithm right.

If you can just create a "template" resume form and require its use, this is easy. If you take the path of accepting anything in any format, you will get chaos. I'm noted for doing crazy things with text parsing, particularly during my recent genealogy project, but even I would balk at this one.

I don't have an exact scenario to match this but I have a relevant experience. We allowed our users to do check-in of equipment. (And also check-out.) The best solution to make this painless was to build a Word template document with a tabular work area.

The user was given a blank copy of the document. We protected the document so that they could not edit the instructions or the row names in column 1 of the tabular work area, but they could fill in column 2. This tabular work area was, in fact, a Word table. Not just laid out like one, but a real table.

Then it became easy to open the Word file, find the table in the document's Tables collection (it was always ActiveDocument.Tables(1) in this case), and read column 2 of each row in the .Tables(1).Rows collection.

Note that for Word, if you are reading the Rows collection, column 2 was found in the row's Cells collection i.e. ActiveDocument.Table(1).Rows.Cells(2). (Oddly enough, if you were doing this by focusing on the table's Columns collection, the rows are part of the COLUMN'S Cells collection.)

Then it becomes a matter of ... the applicant fills in the blanks; you pick up what they filled out. This is almost trivial if you set it up right AND can use Word to assure proper format.

The other solution is based on the idea that you can't expect everyone to have Word available, so instead you say that you DO NOT ACCEPT any resume that does not conform to a given format and submission method.

Tell applicants that you REQUIRE a format for submission and that you will define the specific format for them. Require that electronic submissions will be in Notepad format. Then require them to have data in a specified order and with specified element labels. Then give them an example. E.g.


Then your parsing becomes a matter of reading the file one line at a time. Open the file via an VBA Open statement and do Line Input to read it. For each line, determine the keyword on the line so you know where to store stuff. Then the rest of that line is your data.

Make it clear that you don't want data to be multi-line unless you were expecting that it might be. Then your parsing involves just reading the line, looking at the first thing on the line, and deciding whether it is a keyword that you expected or whether it appears to be a continuation of an expected multi-line response.

Even though someone might have a pretty resume, your problem is (a) if it comes in via snail-mail, you have to enter it manually or scan it to a readable document and (b) there is no telling what formats you will get. Therefore, make it clear that you do NOT want to see a resume UNLESS it is in a format that allows you to process the data electronically. If they cannot understand that motive then you don't want them for employees anyway because they are chowderheads.

it's a bit of a balancing exercise though. Depends whether you are prepared to put up with the re-entry issue to get the candidates.

You don't want to end up with no applicants, I assume.

If you want to help them, then you really need to give them a nice easy template to use on the web.

@ Doc


How did you get to resurrect a 7 year old thread? I presume accidentally.

I am having issues reading things these days and sometimes misread the dates. I'm overdue for my cataract operation so I can get some decent (and working) eyeglasses, but right now I'm having serious glare issues. I need to be more careful, but the truth is that sometimes I really have to squint to see.

The good news is my next check for this will be in September. Maybe soon the Ophthalmologist will see it my way and schedule me for the surgery. Until then, all bets are off.