Limecv – A LaTeX CV Document Class | Hacker News Reader

Limecv – A LaTeX CV Document Class

olivierpieters.be

182 pointsopieters75 comments

I've been using this one for my resume and I love it:

http://www.rpi.edu/dept/arc/training/latex/resumes/res.cls

As a hiring manager, I much prefer simpler resumes that are easy to scan. I don't really like the "five stars" self-rating stuff, however. It feels a little strange to distill one's language knowledge down to a number.

One thing I do love is when people include some of their notable open source projects. This gives me a chance to learn about their interests and see their skills first-hand.

Here's my LaTeX resume, built with res.cls and including a section about my OSS work:

https://chrissnell.com/resume?latex

Also: never, ever put a photograph of yourself in your resume. You're just asking for someone to judge you based on your looks, gender, age, or ethnicity. Likewise, don't put your age. If you've been around for a while, trim everything but the last 5-10 years of positions off your resume to avoid the unfortunate but oh-so-common ageism. Even old hiring managers can be ageist! Don't give anyone a chance to judge you on irrelevant characteristics until you've firmly established your appeal to the employer.

> Also: never, ever put a photograph of yourself in your resume. You're just asking for someone to judge you based on your looks, gender, age, or ethnicity. Likewise, don't put your age. If you've been around for a while, trim everything but the last 5-10 years of positions off your resume to avoid the unfortunate but oh-so-common ageism. Even old hiring managers can be ageist! Don't give anyone a chance to judge you on irrelevant characteristics until you've firmly established your appeal to the employer.

In Germany, you ALWAYS put a photograph in your resume.

> In Germany, you ALWAYS put a photograph in your resume.

Not really.

The more educated people are about this topic (e.g. have read "The Google Resume" by Gayle McDowell, which I highly recommend), or have had startup experience, the less common it is.

We all should stop doing it, everybody will benefit.

Not "Not really". It's the majority by far.

Yes "Not really". The majority is not really everybody.

I think something has been lost in translation here. At least in the US and UK, responding with "Not really" to a statement usually implies that the statement is completely incorrect. As in, you aren't offering a simple correction from "everyone" to "a majority", but rather suggesting that it isn't even a majority.

I've lived quite a long time in the U.S if I say not really I don't mean it's completely incorrect - I do mean there are very glaring omissions though.

It depends. Larger companies with traditional HR departments stickung to "the rules" will sort you out.

Smaller companies like startups, especially without large HR, don't care about photos.

I never place a photo, martial status, or birthdate on my CV. Yet, I even got hired by Novartis (in Austria).

If a German company of any size really were to sort me out sure to those "omissions" on my CV, it's probably for the better - I doubt we could ever be a match.

Here, you can use this one: https://portfolio.stavros.io/escapism/escapism@973.jpg

What I actually find more problematic is that you traditionally put your marriage status in your CV in Germany.

If you haven't married your partner but have children together, they might think you are a single parent. If you are married, they worry that you might get kids and take parental leave (which is by law quite generous in Germany compared to other countries). And so on. I personally leave that out now.

It depends on where you apply I guess.

I work at a startup and we get a mixed amount of applications with a photo and without, doesn't really make a difference for us.

You could explicitly specify that you want applications without photos (or age data, or other private stuff). That can encourage people to apply who otherwise might not.

In a number of European countries it's common/required to include a headshot on your CV. Birthdate is also often included. But I agree that, whenever possible, don't include this information.

Starting with your "Passions" felt really offputting and weird. I don't think that that list is stuff you are genuinely "passionate" about. That said I, I don't hire people, maybe it's effective.

A hiring manager needs an easy way to see what you're all about. Many candidates put a word cloud of technologies and software here but I've found that people are often pretty weak on many things included here. Word clouds don't have any context, either. The hiring manager has know way of knowing if this person knows just a little bit of a technology or if they do it all day, every day.

I call them "passions" because these are what I love to do at work. I'm confident about talking at length about any of them.

> As a hiring manager, I much prefer simpler resumes that are easy to scan. I don't really like the "five stars" self-rating stuff, however. It feels a little strange to distill one's language knowledge down to a number.

I don't like it either, and it looks especially bad when coming from someone with little experience. Occasionally I see someone working as a junior developer and putting 4/5 stars in Ruby, 5/5 stars in CSS, 3/5 in JavaScript.

I feel what these people mean is that they are most proficient in CSS, then in Ruby, then in JavaScript, not that they're experts in CSS, but this is not obvious.

Or in a true Socratic way, the less stars they rated for themselves, the more they know about the tech.

Wanted to add that I also dislike rating language proficiency on a scale.

If you have 5/5 for a language, I expect you to be as knowledgeable as the authors of the language

The author of the language is not necessarily the most knowledgeable in how to use it.

Maybe not the best individual but still very likely someone who deserves such a high rating

I think it helps to say "relative proficiency in each language". For example, I would say I have 2/5 in Python, and 5/5 in PHP. I'm not saying that I'm the best PHP developer in the world, just that personally I'm much stronger in PHP than in Python.

But relative to what? How do you compare two candidates with "5/5 in PHP"? I want to know your absolute proficiency.

By looking at everything else on their CV and portfolio. There is no such thing as "absolute proficiency".

> You're just asking for someone to judge you based on your looks, gender, age, or ethnicity

Could that work in your favor too?...

Yep, if you're a cute almost 30 dude with 20-ish looks applying, say, to a CTO position in a startup otherwise consisting of college kids... AKA my situation except I'm not looking right now. Yeah, I'd say there are situations when being judged by your looks gives you an advantage. That said, I didn't hunt a job for a long while and almost never in the Western countries (sending your CV to places that offer visa/relocation and never getting contacted doesn't really count) so maybe I don't know some local specifics, don't quote me on this.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I feel like LaTeX is not an efficient way to create a resume, unless you are very skilled with LaTeX macros and can essentially create your own "template", or modify someone else's. If you don't have those skills, you end up with a very bland, "stock LaTeX document"-looking resume, of which half the LaTeX resumes I see people share look like.

I once tried to redo my resume in LaTeX, and after finding a decent-looking template, spent a lot of time fighting it to do simple things that weren't built in, like add my GPA to my school listing. In the Limecv template, what if I don't want the "stats" bars? Better go browse through a 2000-line template that I didn't write to figure out how to remove them.

I ended up actually doing my resume in HTML/CSS, which provided me the flexibility to lay things out exactly how I wanted, which was quite nice. The main difficulty I had was getting a consistent PDF layout, as Chrome's PDF print is pretty much a black box that you have no control over.

I used to write my resume in Latex. It is pretty satisfying to code and then compile a document and Latex does amazing things with a document.

However it has become more and more painful to edit it.

I have moved to a simple Google Document 3 years ago.

Reasons :

- I dont really need all these advanced Latex features, I am not writing a maths book.

- Docs has everything I need in order to make a resume (tbh I have considered doing it in Photoshop to have more graphical flair but never spent the time to do so)

- I can get feedback directly in the docs.

I am not going to spend the time to do it in Latex again

While some LaTeX templates are more unwieldy, in the case of Limecv, if you don't want the stats bars, just don't include the macro that adds them. It's not always so terrible.

I disagree. I never really used anything but LaTeX/XeLaTeX to generate my CVs but I've seen what people make in text processors and it usually sucks. On the other hand, I agree, open source templates are rarely the best — and unless they are very generic I'd suggest not to use them verbatim. You don't want your CV to look like the other 50 in the pile (yet you don't want it to look too weird either).

Speaking as someone with a LaTeX résumé, I agree with you. I use it because it's the typesetting tool with which I am most comfortable, not because it's the best tool for the job. I would never use HTML/CSS to create a résumé, but that's because I am bad at using them.

I "ported" moderncv LaTeX style in simple XHTML/CSS a while ago here: http://www.benou.fr/~ben/cv/cv.en.ganne.html Feel free to clone it if you find it useful. I use both moderncv for PDF and this for web-based resume.

I wanted to make something like for a while. I'd use a reportlab-based generator though and Jinja2 templates. Ideally, I want something that can generate both compliant and optimized HTML and a PDF, while having easily hackable style sheets and stuff. I'd add just a little bit of Python code to make it easy to add new stuff (new skills, new experience, etc.) and generate CVs with different highlights from the same data and templates (I used to have one for my primary stuff, one concentrating on devops stuff, one for immigration purposes, and yet another one for something I don't remember — it's hard to keep them all up to date when you mostly use just one).

Would be a cool project one day, for now I'll just keep using LaTeX.

I've moved past ModernCV though. Too many people are using it nowadays :)

The part that has been highly efficient for me, is that I can still build my resume today. Adding to it will not break it, and it is just editing a text file then running make. Printing it next year will print the same as this year. Stability is very comfortable.

>unless you...can essentially create your own "template"

This is pretty much what I did. I've learned exactly enough LaTeX to write my resume (and I'm happy with it).

I tried using res.cls (which was recommended elsewhere in these comments) and I didn't like it. It was very opinionated, offering only a few different pre-defined layouts. Using a different layout would've involved modifying the class file, which was more than I could handle as a beginner. Writing my own class file from scratch (with help from some tutorials) was a lot easier.

Funny, but I actually ended up writing my own LaTeX class ( https://github.com/mvarela/orbit-cv ) to reproduce a Hugo-based résumé for which print to PDF worked horribly bad. I probably spent more time trying to find the way to print it to PDF than to whip up the first iteration of the LaTeX class.

I agree. I love LaTeX and spent many hours building a YAML/Markdown document that could be compiled to PDF with a custom LaTeX template, or HTML with custom CSS. But after using that for a year or two, I switched back to Word because it was just too painful trying to get the document to fit nicely on two pages without a WYSIWYG editor.

LaTeX is not an efficient way to create anything.

But, to be fair, it's not supposed to be efficient - it's supposed to be consistent.

But I really wish it was less painful to use.

It's a very efficient way to typeset good looking mathematics. Of course, that's no surprise, because that's what it was built for.

Not just maths. It can be used to typeset books on any topics quite well, I did it for while a few years back. Text format makes it easy to convert any sources to it, and if you don't need many formulae nor tables/figures typesetting becomes pretty trivial. And unlike visual typesetting tools you almost can make an error of moving some guide too far or something, if you say 10mm margin it'll be a 10mm margin (visual tools have their use, I guess, just not when you're a geek and prefers to see code and not a picture). And it even warns you about underfilling/overfilling, what's not to love?

And speaking of word/openoffice/google docs. Those are text processing tools, not typesetting ones. If you need typesetting on any complexity their are the absolute worst choice. If your CV has a very simple structure and style, on the other hand, sure, go ahead.

I wonder if any tech recruiters notice this kind of things... If I wanted to hire nerds, I'd surely notice. CV made in word, marked with "not geek enough" :)

I’d argue it’s effective, not efficient, there. But that might be splitting semantic hairs

Like so many tools that originate in that time, it is very efficient after an initial learning curve. I use LaTeX to typeset theoretical CS things (papers, exercise sheets, ...), and those often contain a fair amount of mathematical notation. Expressing them in LaTeX math notation comes quite naturally to me now and doesn't require much thought at all. And when I do miss some symbol, there are excellent tools like http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html.

I’m curious - what’s your definition of efficiency here? I would include learning time in that, plus cognitive load, and it’s clear you are not.

Here's my attempt at creating a Resume/CV with HTML/CSS: https://github.com/andyfangdz/resume, or https://cv.andyfang.me

A few properties:

* There's no separate CV and Resume. A resume is just the highlighted elements in a CV.

* The "PDF" version is created by print-to-pdf in Chrome.

* `cv` and `resume` pages are statically pre-rendered (google-friendly), with a switch (visible on desktop browsers) to toggle between them.

* Elements are represented in JSON objects, so the entire CV's data can be exported to one JSON string. I also only need to edit the JSON files for changing stuff in my resume.

* Each commit to Github triggers a build in Travis CI, which 1) updates the JS bundles, 2) renders the static pages and 3) updates the rendered PDFs.

Story:

Couple years ago I was doing a re-design on my resume. I started with LaTeX, but in the end did not continue: I wanted my resume to look good on both the Web and on paper, and I couldn't find a LaTeX -> HTML renderer that can be properly indexed by Google.

Then I realized, perhaps I've been doing this backwards: instead of rendering HTML from LaTeX, why don't I just use Chrome's print-to-pdf function to create a PDF from HTML directly? I also wanted to learn React.js, so that was my chance.

Now, if I want to change something in my resume/CV, I can just edit the JSON files, and Travis CI takes care of all the updates, instead of me manually updating multiple versions. I use nightmare.js to capture the PDFs and pre-rendered static HTMLs, and the workflow has been greatly simplified.

Want to hide something in the resume and only show it on the CV? Easy, just change `featured` property to `false`. The "Publication" section even recognizes my frequent co-authors, and render their names as links to their homepages. The possibilities are endless. I have been satisfied ever since.

Pretty cool!

LaTeX has lovely output (thanks Knuth!) but isn’t really achieving the dream of content fully separate from presentation.

http://resume.dammfine.com

Source is an XML document that describes my various experience, a system of XSLT that targets three forms; an HTML landing page, an HTML form of the resume as a document, and a LaTeX output for PDF.

Haven’t updated my resume in 10 years but when I do it’ll be pretty straightforward to keep going with the system I wrote 13 years ago. I should really post it to github, as others have done with theirs.

To be fair, that was never Knuth's goal. And, really, for most documents the presentation is no small part of the content. As much as we might wish otherwise.

A few years ago I had the desire to have a version controlled CV. This is what I came up with after spending a few hours learning about LaTeX https://github.com/mburst/resume

I put out a tutorial about how to make you're own if anyone is curious http://www.maxburstein.com/blog/creating-resume-using-latex/ I still use it to this day

Looks nice. I also like https://github.com/posquit0/Awesome-CV

That does look cool, although arbitrarily making the first three letters of section headings a different colour is really weird to me.

I used to do my resume in LaTeX and it was gorgeous. I switched it to an uglier document in Word because most of the time my resume was getting put into some semi-automated flow and even a LaTeX-generated PDF file didn't do the job.

I started doing my CV in Pandoc Markdown for this reason. I usually produce a nice-looking CV PDF via LaTeX, but if I need Microsoft Word or plain text I can convert to that too.

https://bitbucket.org/hoffman/cv

I've noticed far fewer requests for Word formats than I did in years past. I think that's largely because headhunter agencies have better tools for editing your resume and stripping out your contact info.

I did the same, specifically because my 2-column layout gets mangled by most ATS import processes. limecv has the same issue.

I find this looks to busy, but I guess that's partly because the example tries to show off as many features as possible.

Personally, I use moderncv: https://ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/moderncv/ It doesn't look very fancy, but it's actually simple and clean. (See the exaples directory.)

Do any interviewers notice resumes that are written in LaTeX compared to ones that aren't?

Yep; it’s obviously not a deal breaker/winner, but we definitely notice. I once joked that we ought to mark up candidates with LaTeX CVs, but knock them slightly down if they stuck with Computer Modern :)

Crap. I like Computer Modern. :(

It is not bad, and its history (as well as Metafont's) is remarkable.

However, the Adobe Utopia font, available by using the fourier package, is so much better IMHO.

How can you tell that they used LaTeX if the CV is in PDF format, other than by guessing from the use of Computer Modern?

After a while you can just spot it, LaTeX has a much higher quality typesetting and layout engine than Word or other WYSIWYG on-the-fly editors.

The easy way is usually to spot some of the no-no's of layouting; single words at the last line of a paragraph, sentences spanning over page breaks, spacing in block paragraphs, etc.

It's easiest with letters or invoices with some text, where the spacing and word placing is most obvious but you can usually tell in CVs with less text too.

Of course, sometimes Word gets lucky and does a proper layout, but I've found that it's rare that I get to see properly layouted word documents.

Quality of typesetting. Seriously.

See e.g. the first example at http://www.zinktypografie.nl/latex.php?lang=en

Look at the PDF's "PDF Producer", "Creator", or "Application" metadata fields in a PDF reader application.

I definitely do. I automatically give plus points in my head even though I know I shouldn't.

Should you not?

I'm sure having a LaTeX CV correlates well with other skills which you might deem desirable and, if so, it seems like a perfectly reasonable indicator to use. It shouldn't be used exclusively, but nothing should be.

I must say, I was happy to come across this after putting in the not insignificant effort of converting my resume into a nice looking LaTeX document: http://stevehanov.ca/blog/resume_comic.png

Yes, it's definitely a shibboleth. IMO it's a full duplex signal. When I notice that an interviewer noticed, it can make me more interested in an offer from that place if I think I'll be working with that/those interviewer/s.

I would, probably, depending on the level of customization.

Of course. I mean, of course… https://xkcd.com/1301/

Any recommendations for a plain academic CVtemplate ?

The ideal is to separate content from presentation.

A LaTeX resume template has done that for an extremely small proportion of all the people who have used a LaTeX resume template.

What makes this the ideal? I'm not saying that I want my content completely mixed in with formatting options on every word, but by and large the presentation is a part of the content of anything you do.

To that end, I want it to feel natural and to be somewhat easy to reason about. Not to be absent.

I mean, this is the basis of web design, and the programmers' long-standing criticism of WYSIWYG text editing. Perhaps I worded it wrongly: content should be tightly attached to semantics, but it should be possible to switch out the particular rendering used for those semantics. LaTeX resumes always fail in that regard: for example, in the template given in this thread, the semantics of "measures of experience in different languages" is inextricably bound to the rendering choice of stars. Or even more basically, the semantics of "a job or educational position held for a period of time with summary metadata", is with a LaTeX template tightly bound to a particular layout. Of course it is possible to design a TeX/LaTeX macro system that gives you separation, but, in reality, TeX is very wonderful, but learning the guts of the underlying macros is always going to be a niche audience.

Don't get me wrong. It is a popular taking point. I just think it is wrong now. Specifically empirically. My "hard to manage" macros have maintained better than any of my friends resumes in other formats. With basically no effort, all told.

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