Parse UW Co-op Package PDFs

Parse out relevant information from co-op student resume package PDFs provided by the University of Waterloo.

NOTE: This program is not perfect, and the results (email address, etc.) will need to be manually inspected for errors and fixed.

Installation

Ensure that Go is installed and setup with a working $GOPATH.

Installation and sanity check:

$ go get github.com/curvegrid/parse-uw-coop-package
$ parse-uw-coop-package -h

Usage

This assumes you are an employer of University of Waterloo co-operative education (co-op, interns) students and have a valid Employer login on WaterlooWorks.

Post a job on WaterlooWorks and wait for student applications to become available.
Contact your Co-operative & Career Action (CECA) representative and request a bulk download of student application packages. You can also download them from WaterlooWorks directly, but for more than a handful of applicants this is time consuming and tedious. NOTE: you need to request they provide the download as one PDF per applicant, not a single PDF for all applicants.
Download an unzip the consolidated package.
Install this utility, parse-uw-coop-package.
From the directory where you unzipped the consolidated package of PDFs, run parse-uw-coop-package and pipe the output to a CSV file (e.g., parse-uw-coop-package > applicants.csv). You can tweak the options (try parse-uw-coop-package -h) as required.
Import into your spreadsheet of choice. As noted above, manual cleanup will be required.

Running and Command Line Options

By default, searches the current directory for all PDFs that fit a regular expression (-fileregex) and parse the text within for fields specific to UW co-op.

Usage of ./parse-uw-coop-package:
  -averagesRegex string
    	Regex for averages (default "Term Average:\\s*([0-9]{2}\\.*[0-9]*)")
  -concurrency int
    	Number of PDF parsing threads to run in parallel (default 4)
  -coverLetterRegex string
    	Regex for cover letter yes/no (default "[Ss]incerely|[Hh]iring [Mm]anager")
  -emailRegex string
    	Regex for email address (default "[A-Za-z0-9_.-]+\\@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\\.[A-Za-z0-9]+")
  -fileregex string
    	Regex filter for filenames (default "([A-Za-z-]+) ([A-Za-z-]+) \\(([0-9]+)\\).pdf")
  -githubRegex string
    	Regex for Github (default "github.com/[A-Za-z0-9_.-]+")
  -linkedInRegex string
    	Regex for LinkedIn (default "linkedin.com/in/[A-Za-z0-9_.-]+")
  -pdftoascii string
    	PDF to ASCII converter (default "ps2ascii")
  -worktermEvalRegex string
    	Regex for work term evaluations (default "UNSATISFACTORY|MARGINAL|SATISFACTORY|VERY GOOD|EXCELLENT|OUTSTANDING")

Sample Run

$ parse-uw-coop-package 
ID,First name,Last name,Email,Email with name,LinkedIn,Github,Included a cover letter,Work term evaluations,Term averages,Overall average
123456,Able,Baker,able@example.com,Able Baker <abel@example.com>,,,Yes,"OUTSTANDING,OUTSTANDING,OUTSTANDING,GOOD,OUTSTANDING","72,81,84.5,72,78",73.4
...

Known Issues and Limitations

This has only been tested on macOS.
The PDF-to-text converter defaults to ps2ascii, which may not be available on your system. See the command line options to adjust.
The PDF-to-text process is not perfect, especially with formatted PDFs. Email addresses seem to be especially problematic, with many of them mangled. For example, we've seen jeff@example.com turn into .com example je ef@ with ps2ascii, even in what seems like a fairly "standard" formatted PDF. Manual cleanup will be required.

Future enhancements

DRY up the whole program
Switch from ps2ascii to a native Go PDF-to-text solution
Improve the parsing accuracy: better regexes, etc.
Direct package download, and integration with tabular info, from WaterlooWorks
Keyword extraction

Contributing

Pull requests welcome.

Development

Assuming parse-uw-coop-package was installed per the previous step, then change to the directory where go get downloaded the source:

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/curvegrid/parse-uw-coop-package
$ go build parse-uw-coop-package.go
$ ./parse-uw-coop-package

Note that you will now have two copies of the parse-uw-coop-package binary on your system, the one in $GOPATH/bin via go install, and the one just built in $GOPATH/src/curvegrid/parse-uw-coop-package via go build.

ShivanshVij/parse-uw-coop-package