Ask HN: Are plain resumes still relevant today? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are plain resumes still relevant today?

42 pointsenitihas39 comments

I am a Computer Science student in last year of my undergrad. While preparing my resume, I came across two conflicting sets of advice. One recommends a plain resume with minimal formatting, with black text on white background. The other set argues for using a modern looking resume built via sites like enhancv.com. This made me curious: Are plain resumes still used by developers?

View on HN

Plain resume (I use LaTeX).

This also filters companies to an extent. I would rather work for a company that values the content of the resume over the presentation.

Resume: http://willem.co/cv/wp_resume_2016.pdf

Template (LaTeX): http://willem.co/cv/wp_resume_template.tex

Awesome Resume Templates (LaTeX): https://www.rpi.edu/dept/arc/training/latex/resumes/

Your CV's format is irrelevant so long as it doesn't look like a dog's breakfast or a Xmas tree.

When writing your CV, keep in mind that only three things count:

1. Short. You're seriously testing a recruiter's patience if your CV is longer than a page or two.

2. Scannable. Your CV only gets a few seconds of attention before a recruiter decides to read it or not. Make each second count.

3. Results. Don't stick to writing what you worked on. Also spell out the results and how it contributed to the business.

Last but not least, never forget that your CV's only purpose is to get an interview. Just like a marketing brochure for a product that requires a sales meeting, less is often more because it can give an employer a reason for saying "no" before you ever get to talk to them:

https://steveblank.com/2011/08/05/bonfire-of-the-vanities/

Résumé is like raising children: they are plenty of people with definitive advices about the perfect way to do it, all of them being contradictory.

I use a resume which I hand coded in HTML&css and while sending it to HR folks, I manually turn the HTML page into a PDF and usually include a reference to the online version too (http://veerasundar.com/resume)

Looks nice. I like it.

But what are the percentages next to your degrees in the education part, like "B.E. CSE 72%"?

I think in some countries they measure grades with percentages.

GPA/grade I assume?

It's the mark percentage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_India

Looks good! I've done a similar thing hand-coding super tiny HTML+CSS pages for my resume. I have one responsive version online for viewing at http://tomhodgins.com/resume.html and another that I use for printing or generating PDF at http://staticresource.com/printresume.html

Before this I was trying to maintain my resume in .txt format as well as Adobe inDesign and generating PDFs based on that. I'm glad I have something I can version control better!

Yes, I use a plain resume: http://printf.net/resume.pdf

That looks very much like the sorts of resumes I see. (Software development in pharma/biotech.)

I looked at enhancv.com's example. I've never seen resumes like those. They do not have much information content.

Did you use LaTeX for that?

> Did you use LaTeX for that?

I'm not OP, but yes. The "creator" field in the PDF is: "LaTeX with hyperref package" and the "producer" field is "xdvipdfmx (0.7.9)".

Yeah, XeLaTeX via http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex

Chris, you have an impressive resume. Do you mind me asking why you went from vice president of engineering to engineer?

What made you go back into an Engineer role again?

Thanks for the question. It's complicated -- I think the ideal for me is probably to cycle between individual contributor and more senior roles. I don't feel like you can be an effective VP Eng without coding and providing tech leadership, but it's hard to stay up to date enough to be able to provide that leadership while in the VP job.

(And I have young kids, so hacking on an open source project after work isn't possible right now.)

I'd much rather see a plain resume, especially if I have a lot to skim. Only time I've ever seen more slightly creative approaches have been designers.

I'd be a bit wary receiving something like enhancecv - if you have space for a quotes block, what are you leaving out? I might use something like that if putting my CV on my website, but as well as the boring traditional plain format.

Put yourself in an employers shoes. They really care about the content, not the design. They're sifting thru lots of resumes looking to spend 70,80,100k on a person, a templated colorful design just is not an influencing factor at best and a distraction compared to plain white at worst. (Unless it's for a design/creative position).

Depends entirely on the role of the "resume". I call mine a BIO and use it to tell people more about myself when they want my background.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mvn72sci1g2dy9d/lane-bio-rev.pdf?d...

Your resume is so far down the list of things that will get you the job that the formatting question should go to a specific person who can answer the question.

That is, if you can't get the basic question of "best resume format to get through hoops at company x" answered, any formating work you could do is swamped by orders of magnitude by building contacts in the company work.

I am super disappointed that jsonresume.org can't fix their formatting issues surrounding output to pdf and ms word. I am not casting stones as the contributors are all a super talented bunch. Coming from the Python/R-project universes and having started up a professional services firm for individuals in Shanghai; English resume editing, interview coaching and LinkedIn Profile creation, I simply don't have the time to learn and modify the underlying node.js code. The ability to easily ingest and store the resumes I am supplied with and then the highly improved product I create would be invaluable. I have learned the hard way how difficult programmatic formatting for the mass market really is. As a professional resume editor, I concur 1) simpler is always better, 2) white space is as important as what is on the printed page, 3) use 1 1/2 to 2 pages for readability. Many resumes are run through ATS parsers/processors and you do not want to use such fancy fonts and styling that you provide any chance for your document to be rejected by the system. There are other tips and tricks but those are the most basic. Great discussion here.

Is there any online resume solution (beside running my own website) where I can hide some detailed information behind bullet points (like accordions) and I can track the viewers activity on the page? I am curious whether this kind of information could help me to build a better resume.

Do you want to stand out above other CV and make the life of the person who is reviewing the CVs a bit less boring? If you answer is not, then do a plain CV. Otherwise do something different. Put some marketing in your CV, grab the attention of the recruiter and get him out of his routine. I am not talking about a lot of text with funny colors or a weird layout. Just take a look to some CV of designers, they usually do something different to show their creativity. Why wouldn't you do the same? There are a lot visual techniques to show your working skills and past experience.

I use a plain pdf resume that is written in Latex. I host it on Overleaf so its always easy to update.

http://nicklocascio.com/resume.pdf

Mine is not plain-text. I embrace rich-text.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/amirbehzad/pro_resume.pdf

I use the moderncv template in LaTeX [1], which I prefer for a few reasons:

* It's fairly plain and minimal but looks nice and professional, and can still be customized so it doesn't look cookie-cutter.

* Using LaTeX means I can track my resume with Git and easily convert to plain text.

* Using a popular template included with many TeX distributions means finding help is easy.

* Using a template means you can just focus on the content and stop worrying about design.

[1] https://www.ctan.org/pkg/moderncv

Plain resume, hands down. Whenever I see something that is supposed to be "enhanced" I just assume they are trying to get my attention away from the actual contents of the resume itself.

I like how others are using this post to link to their own resumes.

I understand, a picture is worth a thousand words, but this is too convenient.

Anyway, I vote for plain text too, somehow it looks more serious and clean.

I appreciate seeing the concrete examples of people's real resumes, and they're interesting glimpses into somebody else's life that I would have never have experienced, since I'm not a recruiter.

I'd advise plain or simply formatted resumes (unless you're a designer who can apply your specialty in a relevant way to a resume).

At Sun, one of the interns applying to the SunTools desktop user interface group made an interactive GUI version of their resume called ResumeTool!

But now days (at least for software development jobs) isn't it easier to just provide a link to your LinkedIn page and GitHub pages?

LinkedIn has a "View Profile As => Save as PDF" feature. A quick google [1] reveals there are a bunch of tools to convert your LinkedIn profile into a resume, even one from LinkedIn labs [2] (which seems to be offline now, but here's an quora question about it [3]).

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=linkedin+export+profile+as+r...

[2] http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/

[3] https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-useful-tool-for-converting-...

I really like plain resume. I had my resume in .doc/.docx format, but couldn't a proper way to edit it on linux. So I moved to web based resume. Here it is : http://resume.rohittrivedi.com/ .

I've taken the source code from here https://github.com/jglovier/resume-template and made changes according to my requriement.

This may be a cultural thing as I see you are apparently Bengali but I would put your title/responsibilities in bold for the sub-headings, and the employer name smaller. At least internationally speaking, nobody really ever cares more about the employer than what you did there. Secondly, terms like MNC are hyper South Asian and should be dropped 99% of the time in international communication. Something like "...have experience working effectively within all scales of organization" would arguably be more natural/generic/international. Also replace "%age" with "%".

Make a plain PDF resume that's as easy to read as possible. If you want, also make an enhanced portfolio or a personal site.

Someone might print a stack of resumes on a crappy printer that's running out of ink. A recruiter might fax your resume to a client. Someone might want to read your resume on an off brand PDF viewer on a phone with a slow connection. Someone might have 200 resumes to look through and not want to figure out the unique UI for yours.

I think it depends on the company you're applying to. Big companies routinely get thousands of resumes and may use some form of automation to screen them. If the software can't pick out the basic details, the whole thing may be skipped.

On the other hand if a human is reading your resume, creativity may be a plus. So that might apply to small businesses, start-ups, etc.

At an undergrad level, it really matters you understand the fundamentals and are quick to learn both technically (the frameworks in your field) and socially (to interact with people in a team). That said, a plain resume with any past volunteering / team-based appointment would suffice.

I much prefer a plain resume. It's so effortless to pass around a pdf file that sites like enhancv.com should be considered supplements, not requirements.

https://michael.chisari.us/michaelchisari-resume.pdf

Looks good, I would remove the underlines though. In this context makes text harder to read. I would use light blue-black for links instead of underline.

Point very well taken. Updated. Thanks!

My last round of interviewing and taking a new job was resume-free. Most companies just printed out my linked in, and really only to give interviewers something to take into an interview.

Yes; in fact they are preferred.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com