Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine had a graphical resume she made in Illustrator and it inspired me to learn Illustrator myself and make this:

https://penguindreams.org/files/2018-SumitKhanna-Resume.pdf

I like it, and it's got me some good roles (probably also kept me from some roles as I'm sure some threw it in the trash thinking it smelled of marketing rubbish; but I still like it so whateves), but it's also a pain to update.

I looked at adapting HackMyResume (listed in the comments) and got somethings into the standard JSON format, but I wanted to keep my timeline and getting it to work programmatically was way more difficult than I thought. Someone provided this answer on StackExchange for Laytex, but I never got things to lineup correctly and sorta gave up:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/183046/how-do-i-deve...

Every time I think about doing it programmatically, I start down a path, get frustrated and realize I need something now, and end up just updating the old one in Illustrator. I hesitate to use a tool like this since mine looks unique and don't want anyone to recognize it comes from a standard template. It's still pretty neat though and I like the idea of allowing a preview with a watermark as a means to attempt to monetize it.

I see you did great on the first page and then ran out of time

The second page is more likely to be a traditional style resume with the same information as the first page

I think they were being coy. The resume is tasteful.

As someone who has read a lot of resumes, I really like this! It gets to the core points quickly.

My only suggestion would be to put the names of the companies in italic or differentiate it in some way.

When I read a resume, the very first thing I do is scan the name of the companies you've worked at to see if I recognize any of them as either a place known for great hires or somewhere I've actually worked. I had to go down to your "normal resume" to do that easily.

Edit to clarify: I don't ever cut anyone because of where they worked or went to school. I'm only looking for a signal in the noise or some common experience for us to discuss.

> When I read a resume, the very first thing I do is scan the name of the companies you've worked at to see if I recognize any of them as either a place known for great hires or somewhere I've actually worked.

Ughh, as someone who went to a state school and spent most of his career toiling away at non-name brand companies, please allow me a moment to shake my fist angrily at you over the Internet!

You’ve probably already considered this and accept the trade off, but I can’t help but think that these kinds of filters result in many false negatives and contribute to some of the monocultures we find inside tech companies (everyone here is ex-Microsoft, everyone here is from Stanford or MIT, etc.) When building the content for a resume, Shouldn’t the work content be more important than name dropping celebrity companies? Am I being too naive?

Honestly I wish there was a norm of not mentioning specific companies on resumes, letting your actual skills and experiences speak for themselves, but that ship sailed long before I was born.

I don't ever cut anyone because of where they worked or went to school. I'm only looking for a signal in the noise or some common experience for us to discuss.

>I’m only looking for a signal in the noise or some common experience for us to discuss.

That is a strange thing to do on first read for someone who reads a lot of resumes.

You can be honest. Nobody here will be surprised. When you are held responsible for who you hire, it’s logical to defer to heuristics like that. I have never met anyone truly passionate about hiring black swans. I don’t think it is your fault, but this trend is just as common as it is harmful to society as a whole.

>When I read a resume, the very first thing I do is scan the name of the companies you've worked at to see if I recognize any of them...

I don't know if it really gets to the core points quickly. I think the information hierarchy is a little bit lacking if I can't even tell where the person has worked within a few seconds of looking at their resume - the document designed to convey that specific information. It's also very long in my opinion.

Thanks for sharing, that is indeed a quite complex resume, quite a challenge to keep it programatically.

Actually your same experience is what took me to make this, the pain of having to open Illustrator to edit the resume once again. Atleast for the next time I got this. And thanks for the kind words :)

Thanks for sharing that!

Part of my job involves data visualization, and what better way to flash those skills on a resume then making custom graphics with my work experience as a dataset.

Thank you for the inspiration.

Looks awesome - almost makes me sad to say I saw a spelling mistake on page 2 - "McDonalnds [sic] Monopoly game".

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