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Comment by j-pb | Hacker News Reader

This looks like a solution in search of a problem.

A boring looking resume thats like all the others might be good enough for SAP but would get filtered out my me immediately.

Coding is a creative process which requires a certain sense of craftsmanship, and a resume is like a buisseness card. It's an opportunity to express yourself and show of some of your skills and also your personal style and flavour.

Sending me a Latex, ASCII Art, Minimalist HMTL, Fancy HTML, JSON Chunk, tells me a lot about you as a dev and person already.

Defining a standard for resumes and then sending me a resume in said standard would also be impressive and cool for an individual resume that I receive. But once you take somebody elses standard and send it to me you'll just come across as boring.

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I have the absolute opposite reaction when filtering resumes. I just want something plainly written on 1 page so I can get a feeling for your career. Why do I care if you can format a document in a pretty way? Has literally nothing to do with what a resume is which is explaining your experience and why you would be a good fit. Filtering by style seems like a great way to filter out great candidates

I think you misunderstand what I mean by style. It can also be plaintext if the candidate feels like is the best approach to solve the problem.

But there needs to be a sense of personality behind it. Some reflection on their personal approach to life and problems.

I don't want to hire a set of milestones and qualifications, I want to hire a person.

A resume, for me, is used to communicate as clearly and as accessibly to as many people as possible about your work history and qualifications. We use them as a front line mechanism to filter candidates.

The problem with these approaches is they’re harmful to the goal of resumes while giving minimal signal for filtering. Oh, you know what JSON, HTML, or markdown happen to be? That’s a very limited signal you’re sending for your resume not being clear and accessible (to people and systems).

I also think your attitude may have been sensible in another market, but this one where demand outstrips engineering supply greatly? I could write my resume on crayons and still have people reach out.

Edit: You may also want to look into cover letters? It sounds like that’s what would solve your desire to get a unique, creative response from the candidate while they still maintain an accessible resume. This problem has been solved in other industries.

> (to people and systems)

Any company that does automatic resume analysis is already lost in terms of engineering quality.

Let's go one step further. Why send me a resume in English? Just be creative and use an elvish language. Or invent your own language. Don't just take a standard and try to use it to convey information.

Unless the role has a strong design component just use something simple and plain to present your skills and experience. Make it easy to understand what you can do for us. Thats the important part of the resume.

All those lists of skills and experiences are easily embellished.

Lists of dozens of programming languages, work experiences, and qualifications are a lot of noise that even the worst candidates can just add without any meaningful experience.

The document itself however tells a lot more about the person. It's impossible to fake, and the only truly objectively quantifiable metric of the whole resume.

An applicant that has a deep interest in ConLangs and wants to show that off in their resume sounds super awesome and would definitely get my approval for a fully paid trial run.

> A boring looking resume thats like all the others might be good enough for SAP but would get filtered out my me immediately.

maybe i misunderstood, are you saying you judge candidates on the appearance of their resume, as opposed to the contents??

i always took the opposite view. the more effort in a resume the more desperate it seems. i keep a very basic resume , not even 1 full page and i base it around my current role, so experience is foremost.

I think y'all are probably trying to hire different candidates, and that your preferences are legitimate.

I want to work with people that are interesting.

It's not the apperance per se but the "spirit". A very functional minimalistic resume is as good as a fancy design, what matter is that there is a underlying method/idea/attitude.

Of course the contents are just as important, but a candidate that provides a markdown file with the most important points in their career and their hobbies, is much more interesting to me than a word resume template that lists ever side job, languange, micro skill, scrum certificate and letter of recommendation.

> A boring looking resume thats like all the others might be good enough for SAP but would get filtered out my me immediately.

I could see the point of that approach for a creativity-driven position such as designers, advertisement, marketing, or even front-end development.

For hard technical roles, where substante over style is a mandatory and very basic competence, seems to be a sure way for you to filter out all the candidates you'd be looking for.

If you do backend and don't have any personal opinions about tooling, be it troff, man, pandoc, markdown, plaintext, or whatever, then there's plenty of enterprise opportunity for you, but I personally don't want to work with you. So I think that it's actually a great filter. Maybe it's slightly biased towards candidates with high confidence in their own choices and opinions, but that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.

>then sending me a resume in said standard

But unless requested no one will send it as JSON. Rather they'll export to pdf/html utilizing one of hundred themes (https://jsonresume.org/themes/). Essentially the same thing everyone is doing when using LaTeX but now even easier to do.

Getting a themed resume will also stand out as "plain".

The candidates that are interesting to me have diverse and interesting lives, their resumes should reflect that.

Is “uses novel resume format” really a criteria for the role you’re hiring for? Will the candidate be designing novel resumes throughout their time in the role?

If not, disregarding candidates who just put their experience on a “plain” resume is cutting out a massive chunk of viable candidates so you can signal that you think your roles are above “plain” resumes.

> Will the candidate be designing novel resumes throughout their time in the role?

Probably once they find out what criteria is used to get promoted…

No promotions, we all get paid the same. Everybody is doing their best, and it's a small company, hierarchies and different salaries add unnecessary overhead and friction.

I think you missed the point…

If you have completely arbitrary hiring restrictions which have absolutely nothing to do with your ability to do the job then what other requirements will be hoisted on you?

I left it simple in the original comment so people could fill in the blank with their own witty ‘job requirements’.

This.

If a job description says “must have custom designed resume”, that’s a hint not to apply. If I submit a standard resume and get rejected because “must have custom designed resume” is an undisclosed bar I was expected to clear, I just dodged a bullet.

I prefer jobs where the hiring focus is on hiring people who are good at the job, and using weird side challenges like “is your resume formatted uniquely enough” is a new variant of “not a culture fit” that I hadn’t heard before.

The is a response to both comments above:

The meritocracy argument is usually brought up by people that are shitty colleagues. Personality is more important than being "good at your job", the latter improves with time and mentoring, the former usually doesn't.

We hire the person first and the skillset second.

Then write that in the job description instead of using the amount of bling in the resume as a proxy.

I know not to apply for jobs looking for “friendly, outgoing people” and it saves everyone a bunch of time.

We optimise for the convenience of potential hires, not the convenience of obvious rejects.

Not understanding trade offs in an important process like hiring isn’t great and would be a signal for where not to work.

> The candidates that are interesting to me have diverse and interesting lives, their resumes should reflect that.

Doesn't your resume reflect that if it has that written down somewhere?

Why would a CV be picked over any other if a candidate, say, paid a service to pimp out it's styling?

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