Open Talent Protocol

Why Open Talent Protocol?

Existing resume formats — PDF, Word, LinkedIn exports — were designed for humans reading documents. As autonomous hiring agents and career assistants become real, we need a format that software can reason over reliably.

Open Talent Protocol (OTP) is that format. It encodes the things that matter to agents: structured preferences for matching, verification and provenance for trust, and privacy controls so candidates decide what to share and with whom.

Quick start

Validate a document

The validator CLI checks any JSON file against the schema and prints readable errors.

# Install and build the validator
git clone https://github.com/neogene-ai/open-talent-protocol.git
cd open-talent-protocol/tools/validator-cli
npm install && npm run build

# Validate one of the example documents
node dist/index.js ../../examples/developer-junior.json
✓ Valid Open Talent Protocol document

Minimal valid document

Only meta and identity are required. Everything else is optional.

{
  "meta": {
    "schemaVersion": "0.1",
    "language": "en",
    "source": "user"
  },
  "identity": {
    "fullName": "Ada Lovelace",
    "contact": {
      "email": "[email protected]",
      "location": { "city": "London", "country": "GB" }
    }
  }
}

Schema reference

The full schema is a JSON Schema (draft 2020-12) document at schema/opentalent-protocol.schema.json. Below, each section is documented with its fields, types, and intent.

Document-level metadata describing the schema version, language, and provenance of the document itself.

Core personal and contact information. The only required property within identity is fullName.

A short professional summary written in first or third person. Plain text only — no markup. Agents may use this as context in a system prompt but should not rely on it for structured matching; use preferences and skills for that.

Chronological work history array, most recent first. Each entry represents one position.

Formal education history. Each entry requires institution and degree.

Normalized skill inventory. Designed to be machine-matchable across profiles — use canonical names ("TypeScript" not "TS") and consistent levels.

Selected personal, open-source, or professional projects that demonstrate skills.

Degrees, professional certifications, and regulated licenses.

Human language proficiencies.

Job search preferences — the primary input for agentic matching. Agents filter on preferences before reading work history. This is the most important section for agentic marketplace use cases.

Reusable portfolio artifacts and proof-of-work items. Each item is linked to specific skills.

Provenance and trust metadata. Appears in two places: (1) as a top-level section recording document-level provenance, and (2) as an optional nested object on individual work, education, skills, credentials, and evidence items.

Document-level fields

Item-level verification object

Privacy controls. Set a default visibility level for the whole document, then override specific fields using JSON Pointer paths.

"visibility": {
  "defaultVisibility": "recruiters",
  "overrides": [
    { "path": "/identity/contact/phone", "visibility": "private" },
    { "path": "/preferences/salary",          "visibility": "recruiters" }
  ]
}

A free extension object for domain-specific or proprietary fields. Use namespaced keys to avoid collisions with future spec additions.

"custom": {
  "jobgrow:talentScore": 94,
  "myapp:internalId": "cand-00421"
}

Adding data to custom never breaks a conforming parser. Removing custom never breaks core functionality.

Examples

Three complete, schema-conforming documents are included in the repository. They illustrate how preferences, verification, and visibility are used in practice, and demonstrate that the schema is not developer-centric.

Tools

Validator CLI

A Node.js CLI that validates any JSON file against the OTP schema and prints readable errors. Source: tools/validator-cli/

cd tools/validator-cli
npm install && npm run build
node dist/index.js path/to/profile.json

Agent tools

TypeScript stubs for integrating OTP into MCP-compatible agent frameworks. Source: tools/agent-examples/

Provides two composable functions ready to be registered as MCP tools: validateProfile and introspectProfile.

Migration

OTP is designed to be clearly mappable to and from existing formats.

Governance & neutrality

Open Talent Protocol is vendor-neutral. JobGrow and neogene.ai are its initial sponsors, but the spec is designed for broad ecosystem adoption. No single company has veto power over the schema.

The project is governed by a maintainer council using lazy consensus. See GOVERNANCE.md for the full process, and docs/governance-roadmap.md for the long-term direction (including possible neutral foundation hosting).

Licensed under MIT. The spec will always be free to implement.