This doesn't seem to be html, but it's in tags, and HTML::Treebuilder can parse it, so if all you want to do is strip out the tags, maybe this is helpful for a quick and dirty. Probably easier to maintain than the regexes anyway.

use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::TreeBuilder;
use Data::Dumper;

while ( <DATA> ) {
    my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content($_);
    my $body = $tree->look_down("_tag" => "body" );
    my $contents = ( $body->content_list() )[0];
    print "$contents\n";
}

__DATA__
<user_name>$userId</user_name>
<job_id>$jobId</job_id>
<finish_time>$timeF$ampmF</finish_time>
<status>COMPLETED</status>
[download]

outputs:

$userId
$jobId
$timeF$ampmF
COMPLETED
[download]

UPDATED: Same basic idea, but I like this better.