Does anyone still enjoy writing, rewriting and designing their own CV by hand, for example using Latex? Shouldn't it be a signature, a testament to your sense of individualism and craftsmanship?
I did. I had a nice TeX or LaTeX hand-tuned one-pager. Yes, "C++" was a macro, to subdue those ridiculous huge '+' characters, there was no Computer Modern Roman, and I made countless other tweaks.
But turned out that shitty ATS software was throwing away my resume, even though it rendered and text-extracted fine, and with normal PDF fonts (not rasterized, like some DVI convertors would do).
Though, one time that the resume got me to an interview battery at a startup, it was a good conversation-starter with their designer, who could tell it was hand-crafted.
Now, I just have a relatively phoned-in two-pager, with lots of search keywords, that I do in LibreOffice. To hopefully get me found by the right serendipitous sourcer/recruiter/manager/founder, and hopefully not have the resume discarded if they pop it into some shitty corporate hiring pipeline system. Nor mangled too badly, if they parse it, and have some people in the process looking only at their shitty parser's output in a Web page.
I'd prefer making the most of one page, but sometimes idealism has to be flexible to the reality on the ground.
I stopped caring about that when companies started using Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to evaluate resumes based on keywords and other silly criteria without ever having a person actually review it.
Fair. But when you land the face to face interview with the hiring manager and peers, I think it's still good to have a nicely designed CV. And with nicely designed I don't mean lots of graphics and colors, but something that was thought out to read well.
I'm not sure anyone more than glanced at my resume for the past few decades. My interviews were basically through people I had worked with in some fashion.
For what it's worth, there's only one CV in all of history that I can remember: the "My Little Pony" themed one that went viral around 2013.
When getting feedback about my CV from coworkers, my impression is that very few of the people who personally interviewed me ever read my CV before hiring me — recruiting websites like LinkedIn, Xing, talent.io, honeypot.io genuinely seem to have replaced the CV in many cases.
(If you're wondering how I managed to get that kind of feedback from those specific people, it's all the times places have run out of money or the investors wanted a completely different direction with no iPhone app).
This is probably orthogonal to the conversation but I’ve found (later in life) that networking is the single most important thing you can do if you want to find success in business. That’s how I advise younger folks to see the world too.
As an introvert this has been a painful lesson to learn, but the reality for me is that I’ve only landed jobs at 2 out of the 7 companies I’ve worked for in my tech career where I didn’t know someone that would vouch for me from the inside.
I won't say you can't have success applyling blind to job-boards. But, especially, if you're not some cookie-cutter search skills, you're probably playing the "game" on hard level. Yes, some people will win anyway but lots of others will win out because they have a connection.
I was the founding site lead of a Polish office of U.S. tech company, with an initial target of a hundred developers. After looking at… many resumes I realized I strongly disliked custom resumes. As much as I wanted to appreciate uniqueness and creativity, it got in the way. What I really wanted was something as standard and easy to read as possible. Ideally a LinkedIn profile.
Don’t get me started about cute resumes that were written as code, etc. I hated them and hated myself for how much I hated them.
Unfortunately, I've found a negative correlation between CV creativity and candidate quality.
I've got various theories as to why, but in my experience most people with non-standard resumes have turned out to be weaker candidates than people who just type their stuff into a standard template with something approaching the STAR format.
Real pros are busy solving real problems in my experience, taking days or weeks to craft a resume doesn't even occur to people at the top typically. I've gotten high level jobs without submitting a resume, application or almost anything else because the exec recruiters did all of the leg work for me. I think a lot of high performers are familiar with that too.
Sorry no. It took me two days to fix a template I got from the internet to display all the writing systems I want. Plus I had a manually fix a hardcoded value in the bibliography template to use French while I had to use the bibliography in an English context so references don't get screwed with space inserted before colons. My dissertation is filed \foreignlanguage{xxx}{yyy} and \textit and I hate it.
> you should... / git gud
No. I have something to write, in addition to all the other things I do, and any time searching for commands or packages online to make things work is pure wasted. If Word had a better CVS and modular story I would have gladly stick with it.
I did mine by hand using plain HTML+CSS (using A4.css, then rendered to a 2-page PDF) and my employer remarked that it was a sign of attention to detail and care that many other candidates won't even bother with.
I'd argue I spent more time trying to fit everything in two neat pages than actually writing down the resume.
At least it shows I know flexbox, or something. It's mostly a backend position anyway.
I do! Using LaTeX is how I track changes to my resume, look at historic resumes, and keep it all in commits within git, tagging "releases" I send out.
My process is update resume, git commit, git push, then update LinkedIn or whatever social site I want beyond that. The LaTeX files then become the single-source-of-truth.
This is one of the things I enjoy the most these days, but I also had quite a lot of fun with it back in the day... I just looks for designs online and then I reproduce as much as I can using other tooling... I enjoy doing this for anything print, like magazines and corporate image documents too...
Every now and then, I get an itch from the old days of desktop publishing. A while back there was release of a "lost" Bram Stoker short that got transcribed to text (several players using different methods posting their results on github). I fired up InDesign which I had never used, and did a book layout of it. All because I was bored and wanted to think about something other than ; {} [] for a bit. At least I didn't have to fire up the Quadra to run Quark!
Nope. It's a list of shit that I've done, organized in the most effective way to get someone to hire me.
(I hope that) I'm a far more interesting person than my resume would suggest. Unfortunately, no one hiring engineers would put that at the top of the list.
I've interviewed enough people to know what matters, so I highlight that. The fact that I once fell asleep underwater will have to come up at another time.
