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Comment by drBonkers | Hacker News Reader

The author recommends this resume builder [1]. Everything I've learned about resumes tells me that this style will not be taken seriously— which makes me doubt the veracity of the rest of his post.

Am I wrong? Do hiring managers like to see this style of resume?

[1] https://novoresume.com/

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My CV is styled as a manpage and always seemed to be well received by technical interviewers. I’m not sure how successful it would be with recruitment agents though.

The first time it landed me a job, I eventually went to introduce myself to the CTO and he said “oh I know who you are, you’re the guy with the manpage CV”.

I've been told by recruiters directly that the multicolumn layout style can mess up applicant tracking systems, so it's best to go with the standard format. It looks boring, but it won't cause the system to reject your resume because of extra spacing or formatting.

I'm not a hiring manager and never been on the interviewer side of interviews, but I'm gonna try to elaborate on OP comment, as I'm of similar feelings about most templates - they try to be memorable/standout or focus on wrong things instead of simply being informative and straight to the point

allocating a literal third of space to a self-rated list of skills is kinda bad move, it might seem like you're trying to be honest but to me it speaks ego problems, and that you're too focused on tools instead of solving problems at hand. I would much rather prefer having skills/tech used listed together with each job

imo the most important info on resume is

1. work experience (pet projects/contributions to open source if you're big nerdo)

2. location/timezone

3. name and contacts

I've gotten some complements for my resume's layout and it's basically the exact opposite of that.

It's based off of some latex template that looks roughly like this: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/cv-template-using-t...

Everyone in recruiting and hiring has a different opinion of what makes a good résumé—formatting and content, both. Many of these are mutually exclusive. You can't realistically know which set of preferences you're dealing with before you submit an application, so you've just gotta hope that whatever you've picked doesn't get your application round-filed for arbitrary reasons. Even if you hire a genuine pro to put it together, the result's gonna make someone roll their eyes and toss it in the trash.

(then, of course, there are cultural differences between countries re: how a résumé should or should not look, but that's another matter)

[EDIT] My point is that it's entirely possible this style is loved by some readers, and hated by others. Any (reasonable) formatting or content you pick is going to impress some readers while turning off others. It's dumb, it's frustrating, it's inefficient, it's unfair—but that's how it is.

I think some things are subjective, I personally dislike colour, multicolumn layouts and those arbitrary scales of skills (4 out of 5 stars nodejs!) things. But I appreciate that it's an opinion and some people might like that.

But I think you should never put your picture on a CV. I think it just puts you at a disadvantage, you have no idea what unconscious biases people have when reviewing CV's. Definitely not worth the risk.

In many countries of the western world your CV will be thrown into the garbage bin if you don't have a picture.

Wow, i had never considered including a picture to a resume, it just doesn't sound right. My resume seems to have been working so far.

Here's a scanner, https://www.open-resume.com/resume-parser

You can also build a resume with it (and you can self host it if you want)

@rovr138, thanks for the pointer. I've updated the post and replaced the previous option with this one.

@drBonkers, you're correct about multi-column resume not to be the best option. although I've used the resume generated from NovoResume to get into multiple big tech companies and startups, I agree that a better template is the one from Google Docs --> Resume template. I've updated the post and replace NovoResume with Google Doc resume template. thanks for the note.

> although I've used the resume generated from NovoResume to get into multiple big tech companies and startups

Interesting counter point. Thanks for the tips!

Can you elaborate which parts of the style you feel "will not be taken seriously"? It looks like a pretty standard resume to me.

Oh interesting, I recognize like 3 or 4 of these CV templates from current candidates, haha. Curious to know where they come from.

But on topic - as an admin or developer, style just doesn't matter to me beyond an initial notice of "This looks nice" or so. To me it borders more on a good sign if I can recognize that someone just shoved something through asciidoc to get a PDF.

I much rather care if the CV is put together well and doesn't look sloppy. We had one CV come in that had just broken formatting - linebreaks in headings inside words, typos and such. That's not a good flag. Like, if you can't care to move a linebreak in a CV 8 characters earlier for the same overall space used, what'll you do with critical production data?

And beyond that, the focus in CVs to me is to be easy to skim. A good CV allows me to look at the positions for a minute or so and I can get an initial idea that they're a good fit for something the team needs and I should spend more time on this candidate.

But that being sad, the CVs I got based on novoresume minimalist or elementary were on the good and effective side.

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