Hacker News Reader

Comment by alain94040 | Hacker News Reader

As a former hiring manager, I looked at your 100 first templates, and I must say that I don't like them. Yes, they look amazing and I would hire you to design my site's CSS, but for a job seeker, they are distracting. I want to see the job experience. I don't need special effects around "job experience", I don't need fancy backgrounds which make it harder to read the information.

Sorry to be negative. Again, the designs are very cute, but not "professional". My experience is limited to high-tech hiring.

View on HN

I do my fair share of hiring and interviewing, and I agree with alain94040.

I have very hard time imagining that the rock star developer I'm trying to hire will spend $100 (or hours of their time) to add fancy styling to their resume. Why would they? It just seems like trying too hard. Of course I won't reject anyone because their resume looks "too pretty", but those templates make the resume stand out, and not necessarily in a good way.

I also want to third this, for tech hiring anyway.

I have far more time for a plain text resume that fits on one side of A4/Legal, than I do for anything else.

It's all about how quick I can scan the document and extract information from it that might tell me what experience a candidate might have.

For me, the quickest way I can scan something is to have it feel like something I work with every day: logically laid out text, in fixed width, with related chunks fitting on the same screen.

Give me a plain text resume any day. If you deeply feel the need, add syntax highlighting in the form of very subtle highlights and lowlights to make the most pertinent sections and key facts stand out. But if you do that, bear in mind that such highlights and lowlights should be the minority of your document.

Do I practise what I preach? Yes: http://www.buro9.com/cv.txt

It's not everybody's cup of tea. We understand that and that's fair. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from both hiring managers and job seekers who actually have responded the opposite of what you're feeling. So, I guess it just depends.

Would you be impressed by more subtle qualities? Let's say a design with special effects, but printed with a professional printer on thicker paper. Maybe subtle effects like watermarks or micro embossing.

Not really. After all I want my developers to write code that is, almost above all, simple (next only to working). So, showing a little appreciation for simplicity is a better way to impress me :)

CVs are usually emailed and then printed on the office printer, so thicker paper may be redundant.

What is incredibly useful is understanding how those in a hiring organization read CVs, what they expect, and what they assume.

In terms of format: A lot of organisations, especially larger organisations for roles at more senior levels, output their internal candidate profiles, generated from internal systems, in landscape format. They will print a sent-in portrait document in portrait, but what is internally generated is often in landscape, with one left pane and one right pane. This spreads to computer-based viewing: Widescreen monitors are also becoming common place in offices, while laptop screens also tend towards a widescreen format. Why waste 2 large borders on each side of the page in default Word setup, Word being the default in large organisations.

I've never seen an externally sourced CV in landscape. Food for thought. Creative, or practical?

Also remember that eyesight tends to deteriorate with age. As an applicant, if the interviewer may be older, keep things legible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com