What CV parsing fills in on an Invenias record
Everybody says "the CV is parsed". Almost nobody says which fields. This page names them — what gets written, what is deliberately left alone, and the one distinction that matters more than any of it.
The distinction that matters: new candidate or returning one
Everything below depends on which of these you are looking at, and the difference is larger than most people expect.
- A candidate who is new to your database
- The record is created and populated from the CV — details, employment history, education, the document itself.
- A candidate already on file
- The CV is attached to their existing record. Beyond that, what happens is your choice — two settings in your portal decide it, and you can change either at any time.
The reason it is a choice at all: a consultant who has spent two years curating a record — correcting a job title, noting what the candidate is actually looking for — should not have it quietly replaced by whatever that candidate last wrote about themselves in a CV. The newest document is not always the most accurate record. But a record that never moves goes stale, so each half of the problem gets its own switch.
- Fill in what is missing — on unless you turn it off
- Previous roles and education their record does not already have are added. Nothing already there is changed or removed, and their current job is left exactly as it is — so somebody who has moved on gets their earlier roles filled in and no new current role.
- Update the current job — off unless you turn it on
- When the CV shows a new current role, it is added, it becomes the job at the top of the record, and the job it replaced is end-dated — dated the day the new one began. Only the job that was showing at the top is closed; board seats and anything else they still hold stay open. Nothing happens if the CV is older than what you already have, or if it gives no start date.
With both off, a re-import adds a document and changes nothing else, which is how this started and is still a reasonable way to run it.
Updating the current job is the only thing in CV Mailroom that changes an entry already on a record rather than adding to it. That is why it is the one setting that starts off, and why ending a job cannot be undone from the portal.
On a new person record
- Name
- First, middle and family name as parsed. A narrow set of professional credentials and clerical titles that are commonly mis-parsed into the surname are moved to the Suffix and Title fields instead — it is a specific patch list, not general name cleaning.
- Current job title and employer
- Taken from the current position on the CV.
- Employment history
- The whole history the CV carries, not only the latest role — up to 25 roles, each with its job title, employer and dates. Detail below.
- Education
- Up to 15 entries — the qualification, the subject and the place of study. Detail below.
- Contact details
- Email and mobile, and the home address fields the CV carries — street, town, county, postcode and country.
- Business address
- Left blank. It is not on a CV, and inventing it from the employer name would put a guess into your database.
Employment history
Up to 25 previous roles, each with its job title, the company, and the start and end dates the CV gives. The company is matched against the companies already in your database and created only if it is genuinely not there — the matching is conservative, because a wrong match is harder to find and undo than a duplicate company.
A role already on the record is not written a second time, so re-importing a CV does not multiply somebody's career.
Education
Up to 15 entries, each with the qualification, the subject and the place of study. Same rule: an entry already present is not duplicated.
Documents
The CV is attached under its original filename, not a generated one, so the document in Invenias is recognisably the one that was sent. Any cover letter or other attachments on the same email are uploaded alongside it.
Parsed formats are PDF, DOC, DOCX and HTML. Other attachment types are still uploaded to the record; they are simply not parsed as a CV.
Where the record came from
Nothing appears in your database without an explanation attached to it.
A journal note on every record it touches — person, programme or assignment — recording that the CV arrived through CV Mailroom.
A programme you nominate, for CVs that arrive with no reference, so speculative approaches land somewhere findable.
The assignment and the source, when the CV came in reply to an advertisement and the subject line carried the reference.
What is never written
- Skills. Not for a new candidate, not for a returning one. CV skill lists are the least reliable thing on the page and the hardest to unpick once they are in a database.
- Anything on an existing record that you have not asked for. The two settings above are the whole of what a returning candidate's record can gain, and only one of them changes an entry rather than adding one. Free-text notes, and any field a consultant has typed into, are never touched by either.
- Record type. Whether somebody is a candidate, client, partner or supplier is left exactly as Invenias has it.
- A guess. Where the CV does not say, the field stays empty. An empty field is something a consultant can see and fill; a plausible wrong one is something nobody ever checks.
How a candidate is recognised
By the email address on their CV — an exact match, with no fuzzy matching on name. The consequence is worth stating plainly: a candidate who has changed email address will occasionally get a second record, and a CV will never be filed against the wrong person. Of those two failure modes, the duplicate is the one you can see and merge.
Questions
Invenias's own. CV Mailroom sends the document to the Invenias parsing service on your licence and writes the result back through the API, so what you get is what Invenias would have produced anyway — without anyone having to be at a PC to start it.
Parsing quality follows the document. A CV with an unusual layout produces a thinner record, exactly as it would if a consultant had parsed it by hand. If the file cannot be read at all, it comes back to your nominated address with the CV attached, so nothing is lost.
Every import is listed in your portal with the match decision that was made, and the original email is retained so it can be checked against what actually arrived. You can also put a CV through the public demo, which shows the record it would create and writes nothing anywhere.
Only a specific, known set of professional credentials and clerical titles that the parser tends to put in the surname field. It is a short patch list rather than general name cleaning, and it is not claimed to be more than that.
Median 28 seconds from the email arriving to the record being in Invenias, measured across 40 live imports. Most of that is the parse.
See it on a real CV
Reading a field list is one thing. Put a CV through and look at the record it would produce — no sign-up, nothing written to any system, and the file is deleted the moment it has been read.
Also worth reading: the three ways a CV gets into Invenias · filing a candidate from your phone · security and GDPR