Show HN: A simple interactive resume-making tool | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A simple interactive resume-making tool

danplisetsky.github.io

59 pointsgjiam13 comments

Resumes live in that weird world between documents and data, trying to manage, edit, and share them neatly is invariably going to fall off onto one side of the fence.

I eventually gave up and now just use Microsoft Word stored on Dropbox. Anything that gets primarily touched and read by humans just needs to use a presentation-oriented tool. Building a pandoc workflow for a resume is so far into overkill territory that you may as well direct the soldiers to pour salt into the battered soil of your creative sanity.

My strategy had been latex for resumes, where I can play all the dirty formatting tricks I want in the name of presentation, and pandoc/markdown for my CV, where content is more important and the document needs to be updated frequently.

My favorite dirty LaTex formatting trick is \phantom

Is this LaTeX equivalent of   padding?

Adding onto this, I use the same naming convention across documents (similar to ISO standards). Dump this all in one folder, archive everything after a job is found.

Most companies who get your resume need the following on your file name - .firstname,lastname,dateapplied, positionname.

I personally organize it like so.

FirstnameLastname_Companyshortname_ Fullpositiontitle_08-18

You can automate the FirstnameLastname part and the ending date applied with a script (I have a button that does this for me, filerenaming in directoryOpus). This makes it easy to know whats been sent and whats a draft etc. This script doesnt change at all either since its all formatted same way. You can automatically generate a PDF with this script as well because you generally need both formats (so someone doesnt tamper with your msword.docx file).

If you had to make a cover letter and if the company bothers to read it, and it isnt done through a hiring portal but as an attachment, you can use the same docname and append a suffix like "--coverletter". So you can A-Z sort and find which cover letter came from which job

Longer filenames generally standout more too and its easier to find when HR has to deal with many of these etc

On another singular document, you can have a copy paste doc of all the job descriptions you applied for. Sort this by alphabetical company name, then position title, since this is how you would search it. Doesnt have to be a msword file

Other things you can do pull some automated tools off github for scraping keywords off indeed, hackernews whos hiring,etc for automating application process. Then theres linkedin as well etc

It just depends also how much stuff your applying to. If theres obly a limited selection of jobs that you want then the above mostly manual with some scripts workflow is fine. For more intensive mass apply process you would be better off oneclick applying through indeed, etc and using a generic template

This applies to both tech and nontech jobs, low skill and high skill jobs equally

> Resumes live in that weird world between documents and data

The words you're looking for might be "marketing collateral". A resume is a marketing document

I went all the way down the presentation tool route and created mine in Fireworks. It's pain to update, but it sure looks great, and it managed to get me a (web dev) job back when I had no previous work expereience :)

Resume also needs to have some basic aesthetic value. You're much better off using something like https://latexresu.me/, for example.

There is interactive resume-making tool made by European Union https://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/documents/curriculum-vita...

I’ve had some success in the past years using “Hack My Resume” https://github.com/hacksalot/HackMyResume

Some suggestions:

* The buttons that appear on hover below the name don't have tooltips. That makes it difficult to understand what each button does without trying it.

* The icons for those buttons are also smaller, making some of them look very similar to each other.

I didn't proceed beyond this because it wasn't very easy to use.

I've been lazier in recent years. I keep my Stack Overflow Developer Story updated and send that as a link for something résumé-like in emails. This is usually good enough, if not better because of hyperlinks and a chronological order, for a lead dev or director to get the interview. Usually after everything went well already, HR wants a PDF for whatever bookkeeping reason and I just hit the print button since the design and layout is irrelevant at this point.

Although I have my resume in plain old MS Word, I'd love to automate it to create resumes on the go for various areas I apply to (web dev, SEO, content marketing etc)

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