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Comment by luso_brazilian | Hacker News Reader

For those in Europe this is already a solved problem: Europass [1]

A service kindly provided by the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training [2] a European Union's agency.

It has a CV builder and outputs an standardized PDF that can even be fed back into the builder for further updates.

It is a joy when going through a pile of CVs to read the ones built by that tool, makes the job a lot easier because it allows the applicant to focus on the relevant data instead of on the layout. Better for the RH, better for the applicant, win win all around.

[1] https://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/en/home

[2] http://www.cedefop.europa.eu/

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FWIW: Europass CV's generally don't go down well with employers. There's an unfair stigma attached to Europass CV's as the candidates are perceived to be of inferior quality.

Speaking as an employer: both receiving one through the regular channels and via recruitment agencies I've never seen anyone perceive Europass as anything like you mentioned.

Maybe it varies from location to location or with the area of expertise but Europass are pretty much ubiquitous around here.

Also speaking as an employer, with the exact same mixed origin as you (judging by your handle!) but working in another European country: Europass CVs are poorly formatted (cut-off tables, meaningless whitespace, poor typography,) too long, too formalistic and fail to put forward the relevant information. Curiously, I only ever got them from recent graduates coming from our home country.

EDIT:typo

It's not a Europass CV problem if it's too long or doesn't put the relevant information forward. That's the applicant's problem imho.

Europass is awesome. Perhaps not perfect but the original aim was to have a standard format for the EU and leave behind all the local national rules of how-a-cv-is-expected-to-be.

Also, I can't help to think that you must suck as a recruiter/interviewer if you draw conclusions from the tool that the applicant used to generate a CV, rather than by its contents.

Despite some criticism of Europass CVs in the comments, they're better than 80% of what I ever see.

Mainly because it's really easy to piece together history, and gaps in history, or overlaps. The 80% I mention is because of these gaps and overlaps.

While my own CV isn't exactly Europass formatted, I make sure I eliminate any questions a CV reader would have in their first 2 minutes (having some kind of timeline makes this easy, as Europass do).

Thanks for the links! I think it would be nice to have this CV builder on AngJobs, created an issue for it

https://github.com/victorantos/AngJobs/issues/37

Is there any reason why this tool can/should only be used by European citizens? Presumably an easy-to-read and nicely formatted resume is something that would be helpful internationally.

I don't know how big of an issue that is, but in the US there are some different conventions with respect to resumes than in the EU.

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