For those in Europe this is already a solved problem: Europass [1]
A service kindly provided by the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training [2] a European Union's agency.
It has a CV builder and outputs an standardized PDF that can even be fed back into the builder for further updates.
It is a joy when going through a pile of CVs to read the ones built by that tool, makes the job a lot easier because it allows the applicant to focus on the relevant data instead of on the layout. Better for the RH, better for the applicant, win win all around.
FWIW: Europass CV's generally don't go down well with employers. There's an unfair stigma attached to Europass CV's as the candidates are perceived to be of inferior quality.
Speaking as an employer: both receiving one through the regular channels and via recruitment agencies I've never seen anyone perceive Europass as anything like you mentioned.
Maybe it varies from location to location or with the area of expertise but Europass are pretty much ubiquitous around here.
Also speaking as an employer, with the exact same mixed origin as you (judging by your handle!) but working in another European country: Europass CVs are poorly formatted (cut-off tables, meaningless whitespace, poor typography,) too long, too formalistic and fail to put forward the relevant information. Curiously, I only ever got them from recent graduates coming from our home country.
It's not a Europass CV problem if it's too long or doesn't put the relevant information forward. That's the applicant's problem imho.
Europass is awesome. Perhaps not perfect but the original aim was to have a standard format for the EU and leave behind all the local national rules of how-a-cv-is-expected-to-be.
Also, I can't help to think that you must suck as a recruiter/interviewer if you draw conclusions from the tool that the applicant used to generate a CV, rather than by its contents.
Despite some criticism of Europass CVs in the comments, they're better than 80% of what I ever see.
Mainly because it's really easy to piece together history, and gaps in history, or overlaps. The 80% I mention is because of these gaps and overlaps.
While my own CV isn't exactly Europass formatted, I make sure I eliminate any questions a CV reader would have in their first 2 minutes (having some kind of timeline makes this easy, as Europass do).
Is there any reason why this tool can/should only be used by European citizens? Presumably an easy-to-read and nicely formatted resume is something that would be helpful internationally.
Resume tip : don't say "I was responsible for ...."
use the STAR system : Situation, Task, Action, Results
While I was part of the Transport Team I reviewed the delivery schedules by analysing historic data in Excel. I was able to reduce transport costs by 10% per year and increase utilisation by 3%.
Don't be afraid of : we found that there were no improvements possible which resulted in no extra spending for the coming year.
- Where We Were
- Where We Needed To Go
- How We Got There
A variation on this:
Visualize being on one side of a chasm. Describe this side of the chasm, emphasizing the bad stuff. Describe why we want to go to the other side, emphasizing the good stuff. Describe the chasm, emphasizing how deep, wide, and impassible it is.
Now describe the bridge you built, your role in building it, challenges you faced, &c. But always start with describing both sides and the chasm. You can use any format you like for describing the bridge and your role in building it, the important thing is that the reader has the chasm firmly fixed in their midn while reading about your accomplishment.
So what if you were part of a failed startup? You did your job, and did your job pretty well, but the actual products failed to find its audience due to factors (mostly) outside of your control, since you weren't making the decisions on what to make or how to market it?
How do you use STAR to not make that sound bad? I think I currently say I delivered the projects on time and on budget and talk about what I was responsible for, and I know I personally gained a lot of experience from the projects, but every time I see STAR suggested, I'm like "Well, if I did that, I'd basically have to say that my work resulted in the company losing money and ultimately folding."
I get plenty of attention for my resume as it is, it just always bugged me when people suggest STAR as if it's the only way to write a job description on a resume.
When I replaced the VP of Engineering at BloatCo, it had 4,000 engineers, producing a mediocre social media product that was roundly criticized for such failures as being unable to edit posts and having no control over online harassment.
Task:
Cut costs and get the product and feature pipeline flowing.
Action:
Implemented a thorough review of functional teams, engaging both front-line management and customer representatives to distinguish the individual and practices that were delivering value from those who weren’t.
Established a customer council, including social activist and freedom of speech advocates, to advise on anti-harassment policies.
Result:
After a painful transition lasting two quarters, we are reviving public kudos on new features and our reputation as a tool for scumbags has been turned around.
Our burn rate is down by 40% in engineering, proving that sometimes, you can cut costs and increase production.
post scriptum:
Alas, this did not increase any advertising revenue, so the company was sold to Yahoo, who fired me and are rewriting everything in Perl 6. But fixing those problems were outside of the scope of my authority.
Very amusing and informative. I think I can incorporate some of this in my resume in the future, thanks. Also it should help me organize my thoughts for job interviews.
Yeah, I don't say I was responsible for a failed product, and yes of course I learned a ton and saw it as a valuable experience regardless.
But as far as I know, most employers don't care too much to see something like "I didn't really help the business make money, but I learned a lot while I was there!"
So instead it's more like "Lead team of X people in the development of {{productName}} using {{technology}} for {{platform}} on time and on budget."
Which is fine, but it doesn't seem to really fit in with STAR so well, especially the "R = Result" part.
When I think "elegant text", I think Tex. My resume is in Tex (fork it and your may be too). And do not forget to use Sharelatex and you are not installing any software to get a nicely typeset PDF resume.
Yeah, another comment (now dead) asks what you do when someone asks for a Word format version.
My CV (I think that's what you're all talking about - took a little while to work out you weren't actually resuming anything) is in LaTeX format. Places regularly got confused with being sent a PDF, and demanded Word instead, so I would just convert each page to a bitmap and load into a Word document as an image. Inelegant, but functional.
Back in the days when I was applying via job agencies, I even had one complain that there was something "wrong" with my Word document, as they couldn't work out how to edit any of it. I told them I thought that was a feature, not a bug.
I don't think I've ever had a place ask me for my resume in word format. The closest is a Microsoft interview where they sent me some forms in docx format that I had to send back filled in.
Also you can do some basic conversion from Tex to word using pandoc http://pandoc.org/
I've had a recruiter ask for a Word version of my CV so that he could make minor edits to it for each relevant position, which makes sense. Otherwise, I don't think there's an excuse for not accepting a PDF.
My previous position I got through a recruiter. Demanded my resume in a Word, which ended up being a butchered and ugly version of my beautiful LaTeX-generated PDF. I understood that he was going to make a few edits, but about a year later I was going through some documents and managed to find the copy of the Word resume that he had made changes to. DRASTIC changes.
He had completely re-written huge chunks of my previous experience, changed the order of things to make me look like I had experience in areas that I definitely did not, and countless other minor changes. I couldn't believe it. His native language was definitely not English, so all of his changes had horrible spelling and grammar mistakes peppered in.
In the end I got the job, but only one other person had applied besides myself and the government agency the job was for desperately needed a body to fill a seat so I was kind of hired by default. Ended up being a crazy mess of a programming shop that I brought a bit of order to before leaving.
Be wary of those "minor edits": one recruiter took it upon themselves to add to my CV the "fact" that I was an experienced Java programmer (I'm not a programmer of any sort, at least not professionally).
CVs that I've been sent recently by recruitment agencies have been heavily edited to remove any direct contact details then add their own company headers to it anyway. I assume that's why they want it in word format.
Even if you make sure your CV is a work of art, there's no guarantee it's going to be received in that state.
Yeah, the majority of the places I apply to require word format I assume because they use some kind of proprietary scanning tool that can only read word documents. Who knows.
I usually keep mine in straight .txt format. If that doesn't work, I move on. I've usually investigated a number of places I might consider working and things like this help me narrow it down further.
Well, if you're applying to a position with the HR department, I guess you wouldn't.
For the vast majority of people posting here, we're working in departments that have nothing to do with HR, and HR's ability to read PDF files has no bearing on our (potential) boss's ability to read PDF files.
Hum, that's probably true, however stupid HR departments correlate very well with places that will soon turn into a hell to work in. (Unless they are powerless to decide who gets into - but then the CV wouldn't be a problem.)
If one can choose, I guess that is one of the most important signals.
I have to say that although interesting, you're still in a situation where potential employers will print off copies of your CV and hand them around for people to comment on.
The golden rule I stick to is your CV (excluding detailed work history) should fit on one page. I'm not sure this supports this.
I go for two pages (two sides of a single page) myself. But I think US resumes are a slightly different concept that goes into exhaustive detail about work history. As somebody that has acted as hiring manager in the past, I definitely preferred the shorter curriculum vitae format - it shows attention to detail and an understanding of what is relevant to the job at hand. I have had feedback on my own CV from time to time that it didn't go into enough detail, so it's horses for courses I suppose ...
You've got it backwards. Resumes are typically one page. CVs are detailed. In the USA most places will ask for a one page resume. I've noticed some tech companies want a longer resume or a CV though.
Oh my CV is 3 pages in length, but you know what I can do and most of where I have worked on the first page. The last 2 pages are detailed breakdowns of where and what I have done.
From my experience in the US, most two page resumes can be consolidated down to 1 page. Remove the soft skills like good listener and quick learner, and other extra cruft most soft skill resumes have. A good rule of thumb is 1 page for every 10 years of experience.
I recently applied for a program called Google Brain Residency. The idea is that you do deep learning research for one year using Google's resources. Based on the job description, I thought I would be a good match for that program. My biggest selling point where some of the side-projects I had done, which were similar to what they were asking. I used a two page resume layout and described each project on the second page.
I got just got a generic rejection email. I am now wondering if it was a big mistake to use two pages, because whoever scanned my resume didn't even make it to the second page. I would be glad if someone with insight into the recruiting process at big tech companies could confirm that.
I guess my question would be, why did you have all this potentially awesome stuff on the second page instead of the first? I typically tweak my resume every time I send it out, mostly reorganizing or rewording bullet points to emphasize different things. And, of course, the "about me" section -- the very first thing after my contact details -- is basically a short cover letter, custom written to point out exactly what I want them to read.
Well you should focus on putting the stuff that's most relevant first, either by editing your "standard" resume or (if you want it to strictly be date-ordered) by including a cover letter that contains that information.
No offense, but I think it's common-sense that people will start reading from the beginning of the document, and a really popular company like Google is going to have at least hundreds of resumes to scan.
I thought it looks odd to put side projects first in a resume. I know I would be confused if I saw a resume like that. It's not like eduction and work experience are irrelevant.
Hey, guys! I'm one of the core collaborators for JSON Resume[0], an alternative to this project.
Markdown is cool, but as scrollaway said,
> JSON Resume wants to standardize CV fields to improve compatibility between tools, ease conversion, ease theming and such.
In fact, we have a notion of "themes", and this sort of markdown-based format can be generated from your JSONResume. We think that JSON is a saner default interchange format than markdown.
If you've been following JSONResume development, you might have thought the project died, but myself, along with @aloisdg and others are reviving it and working towards a stable v1.0.0 release. Feel free to suggest changes and make PRs :)
Echoing what a lot of other folks are saying the design of the resume isn't great. Note I don't work hiring programmers but a portion of my job is in recruiting.
- It is hard to scan. Often times a recruiter will be scanning through 100+ resumes. The fact that it doesn't follow the 'standard' format of resumes makes me have to break out of my usual pattern of how I'd scan a resume.
- I don't care about what you're reading. Sorry but it's true. I kind of don't care about your blog posts. I'm not going to click on the links though. I might if you make it past the initial screen.
- I do like the skill sets under each job. That's handy. I don't care for 'favorites'. Just tell me what you know how to do preferably in a more concise manner.
- Don't give me three emails on how to contact you. I'm a tired stressed out recruiter I don't wanna play a game on which email I think you'll respond to.
"Don't make me think" is just as valid as it is for hiring as it is for web design. Help the recruiter make the case as to why you're a great hire. I don't think that the non-standard formatting helps with that.
That's because you're a recruiter. As someone who interviews, I absolutely care what you're reading, and I often ask what the last technical book you read was.
And you should care about my favorite technologies, else you're going to call me for a job in Flex or Struts because I worked on it a few years ago and waste your time.
Now, it's worth me pointing out my PL/SQL experience because some places are working on old and new technology, and my fluency with diverse technologies is a competitive advantage, but favorites should matter to you.
That's a totally valid counter point about the reading. Also as I said the recruiting work I do(which is about 30% of my job) isn't hiring programmers. In the field I'm in I doubt the last book you read question comes up too much.
To be honest I'd have favorites go either in an executive summary in the top or a cover letter, not a resume. I'd mention like I'm really excited to work at XYZ because of your use of a React.JS combined with your Fortran to JS transpiler, in fact I worked on this project that uses that Fortran->JS program when I was at ABC company.
You bring up an interesting point how the needs of a recruiter(internal or external) are different from a hiring manager in terms of detail/information.
I've never had a cover letter sent to me behind the scenes, but other companies may be different. Tech resumes have moved away from executive summaries.
As a recruiter, do you prefer to see technologies listed under each job, or in a separate "technologies/skills" section?
Writing that "list of words that constitute all the things I know" has always been the most difficult for me, and I'm never quite sure what people are looking for, or what kind of assumptions they're making about it (e.g. I should hope it's obvious, given my resume, that I can use the command line. Do I really need to say that? Should I break out 'tangentially-related programming skills' into a separate list? I have no idea!)
Sorry this reply screams "I don't care, I'm tired, I'm stressed, don't make me think." What exactly is your value here? All you're doing is fitting a cog in the machinery.
Since my impression is that a good developer can deal with any situation necessary, I never understood the laundry list of technologies way of fitting a candidate to a "good hire."
We know this is the reality of recruiters. Maybe on HN do a better job of selling the industry of tired, stressed, people that don't care working to fill a slot.
>Sorry this reply screams "I don't care, I'm tired, I'm stressed, don't make me think."
Well, if you're expecting anything else from a recruiter being send your resume you'll be in for a hard surprise.
The inverse is "I couldn't put in the time to make my CV tidy and intuitive, but you'll have to soldier thru it, because I have the mistaken opinion that I'm a unique snowflake and you don't get hundreds of them".
In fact, "don't make me think" is a GREAT advice for anything you want others to read/try/adopt/buy.
>Since my impression is that a good developer can deal with any situation necessary, I never understood the laundry list of technologies way of fitting a candidate to a "good hire."
Even if a good C++ game developer could switch to Javascript front-end development if needed (to give an extreme example), the time it takes to have them familiar with the relevant stack is better spent hiring someone already familiar. And, it's kind of obvious -- both can be just as good. It's just the second is also ready to hit the ground running on the stack a company uses.
And, of course, just because someone "can deal with any situation necessary" doesn't mean they'd like to. Some programmers like to program in X or Y languages (or language families), others like building Z or K kind of programs.
Just because someone could switch from Haskell to Ruby or from scientific programming to CRUDs doesn't mean they'd also like to. In this case the "laundry list" serves as a way to match hires that are interested in the specific things the company works with.
Agreed. I've put out a lot of fires in badly-written Ruby code, and at least 2 in badly-written Python code, but I couldn't stand working 8 hours a day with either of those languages.
So while my knowing them is definitely valuable, I need some way to convey, "hey I know Ruby, but no I don't like Ruby and I wouldn't accept a position that was primarily Ruby." ("Favorite" isn't a good word for that, but that's the intent I'm needing to convey.)
agreed, plus if you hire someone that already uses and likes your stack you don't get the constant whining about "if we were using Y it would be sooo much better"
Have you ever had to sift through 250 resumes to narrow them down to a shortlist of five??
If you haven't, it is very very hard. You simply don't have time to dive deep, figure out a person's unique value, and determine whether they could be a good fit.
Therefore, usability becomes very important. The candidates who give a recruiter the information he/she needs in the shortest amount of time possible will rise to the top.
Reviewing resumes is mind numbing work predicated on an already broken model. That's by there is so much opportunity in recruiting and why we are starting to see startups that are changing the recruiting industry. Since the skill involved in crafting the perfect resume is a poor predictor of the skill involved in writing software, we are seeing initial screenings based more on job tasks.
Internal recruiters(which is what I'm talking about) often times are stuck between a variety of competing interests in the company. Being sympathetic to this is only going to help you land a position. Recruiting in general is a more complex issue then just fitting a square plug into a square hole. This complexity combined with the internal politics that are at any company make for a stressed person.
Regarding the technologies other folks answered this already. If you have a candidate that can hit the group running rather then having to get up to speed that can be very valuable. I'd imagine even more so due with a startup where you have a limited runway and a need for agility.
Obviously it depends on the job, but if you can't be bothered to make the recruiter's job easy and not make them think, you probably won't be motivated to make customers' life easy either.
The real question is why did you end up in a pile of 250 resumes in the first place. Why didn't you stand out enough that you can go around this queue?
Yeah I think it's due to the (mis)use of quoted text to indent some paragraphs, which means there are vertical bars all over the place. The additional horizontal lines don't help much either. I think if he removes that it would look relatively clean, like a README.md on GitHub. Here's the source of the example by the way: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/awalGarg/a8e97b27b249f2c9...
Agreed. Plus the source is an even bigger mess, which negates one of the biggest benefits of using markdown in the first place (ie, if you can't easily parse it in Notepad then you might as well just create the document in HTML, ODF, DOCX or, better yet, send it in as a PDF.
I think even the joke JSON resume was easily to parse and the JSON format wasn't intended to be human readable / editable.
You realize the idea of JSON resume isn't "Write your CV in json and send that to your employer"... right?
It's actually quite sound: JSON Resume wants to standardize CV fields to improve compatibility between tools, ease conversion, ease theming and such.
It's a joke because it sounds good on paper but the execution is awful. I tried it out and the resulting CVs are look completely unprofessional, except they took three times as much effort.
This was my experience with JSON Resumes as well. I tried it out and eventually went back to MS Word.
I got all my data in there, although I found the schema to be very limiting. Then I went through 50-70 themes and none of them actually looked good when exported as a PDF or something you can email to someone else. Note to theme creators: 30px padding everywhere does not look good and makes things harder to read.
I could have customized a theme to fit what I wanted, but the schema was garbage. At that point, I might as well toss the schema and generator and implement my own resume template using something like Underscore, but it was a lot simpler to use Word.
Yeah I still think its a good idea, its nice to have all that information stored somewhere. If its in json then I can use it in a program or if I want to do it manually then I can read the json file directly. Definitely better then the scribbles in my notebook.
I don't really understand what part of it constitutes a "joke".
I was on about a specific resume that featured on HN about a year back (give or take). I wasn't aware of jsonresume.org when I made my comment. Sorry for the confusion.
Hmm, well, noted :) If you could point out some specific elements in the rendered version though, like "not enough spacing" or "that h3 should be an h2", that'd be extremely helpful!
It's not really that simple. I'm not trying to be dick about, because I do think that resumes from markdown is a good idea.
The grey borders/lines, they need to go. They serve no purpose.
Contact information goes on top, not buried under the profile.
Technologies, can go after the "job description". It makes sense to list them in relation to the jobs though.
Know one cares how many time your project was stars or forks your project has. If that was relevant they would have contacted you :) Just link to your GitHub/Bitbucket/whatever- page.
Writing and favourites can go, unless you a famous blogger, but then I would just list it as a job.
The entire resume takes up to much space. It's country specific, I know, but I think it needs to fit on one A4 page.
> The grey borders/lines, they need to go. They serve no purpose.
Completely agree. While I think it is fair to put a bit of blame of Github's bad rendering (the same markdown looks much better in stackedit's rendering, for instance [1]), but I'd still see how can I preserve the grouping without blockquoting things.
I can see the reasoning for rest of the points as well, but to each his own :)
Rather than creating the markdown for a specific renderer, I think you should focus on creating markdown that can be easily read and edited - so no "######" headings, no quoted text or horizontal lines, basically no clutter. Then how it appears in HTML can be tweaked by the renderer and via CSS. Also I assume clean markdown would generally look better in most renderers.
>the same markdown looks much better in stackedit's rendering
Link to that one as the example then ;)
I think it's down to different markets wanting different things. A cool project, but maybe not so useful, would be a resume generator that from one data source (in Markdown perhaps) could generate resumes in the "correct" form for Europe, India, the US and so on.
> Know one cares how many time your project was stars or forks your project has. If that was relevant they would have contacted you :) Just link to your GitHub/Bitbucket/whatever- page.
I assume you mean "no" instead of "know".
But more on point, are you sure this is true? I have heard many companies (Google is one) look highly on projects you made which are very popular.
This is what grabbed me in the title even before looking at the link.
Someone calling their own creation elegant. I just found it weird. Like someone saying "I made this good game". Of course that's what you would (should) say to the customers, but here it doesn't fit somehow.
I like LaTeX but it was very tedious for resumes. With resumes, you sometimes want to change the format entirely. LaTeX is great for a consistent format, not so much when experimenting.
Markdown also has the benefit of giving you an up to date plaintext resume. I like that a lot, considering a lot of job sites like to automatically (and poorly) convert PDF into plaintext.
So LaTeX is perfect for that, since you can change the entire format by changing the content of a function. You did mark up all your entries as function calls, didn't you?
Hey! It seems like rawgit was having some issues serving the files randomly. I have switched it to use the CDN url instead. Hopefully that shall fix the issue :)
I miss the point with this entirely, but for those that are looking for a "input markdown -> output web-friendly/pdf-friendly resumé" head over to my CV repository at https://github.com/andreineculau/cv and fork it!
While almost no one accepts .html as a resumé format and it's difficult to convert to .pdf or .docx seamlessly, it works pretty well for converting to .txt for some job applications.
I've thought about making a simple resume builder for this format.
I find that format quite heavy, would move education to bottom, trim down each job to tangible achievements/projects completed ("delivered project X using Y" vs "improved features"), remove all stamps & logos, and do away with honors and awards - recruiters in software development are unlikely to be impressed by those unless it's something really big. That would help increase signal vs noise ratio.
Granted, the type of CVs I usually look through are for a slightly different skill set but I believe the same reasoning applies.
A developer who lacks the communication skills necessary to write a resume by hand isn't worth having. They may be great at what they do, but everyone needs to be able to communicate effectively.
Any HR department that relies on automated tools, that only reads resumes that match a profile dictated by the needs of an automated reading machine, isn't doing its job. If they are getting too many useless resumes that they need robot to read them, they need to better describe the offerings and/or broadcast to a more focused audience.
Announcing jobs to everyone in the world and sifting through the millions of applicants with a machine might make you feel good, it might make you think you are finding the diamond in the rough, but in reality you are selecting candidates almost by lottery.
It even worse: good candidates will avoid expensive application procedure.
I spent month on Crossover for senior position: 3 days for test case (dumb but large), then waiting for interview, then again waiting for interview, then interview with a middle which asked me questions "Do you know singleton pattern? Do you know factory pattern". Then they refused me because "unit tests are failed" :-/
I just wrote to my colleague that I am free and got hired. It took about 1 minute. Difference in hourly rates (after taxes and bank commissions): about $1.
Will I try to use Crossover again? Never. It is too expensive for me.
Sorry but I have to disagree with this. Just because I am using a tool to do something doesn't mean I lack the skills to do that thing without the tool. IMHO, it is entirely justified to use as many tools as you want and not do things "by hand" if that saves you time and increases efficiency.
As for this specific case, note that the user still would write stuff in sections detailing his/her profile or experience/education etc (which all take markdown as is). The app only really helps with generating the markdown in a pre-structured format, which is easy to edit as well.
I said not doing the job, nothing about lacking the skills. If HR people are reliant upon mechanical means to read resumes then that is a problem. Maybe the people aren't efficient, maybe their approach to offerings is to broad, or maybe the department is simply understaffed. To say that a department isn't doing its job isn't to say anything about the people in said.
Please excuse my questions, I'm old and slow... I see where I can try it myself, can I see one already done (before investing the time to download and try it myself)? As an hourly contractor, everything is a tradeoff w/billable hours.
I'd like to see a sample too - right now, the website looks like it is basically taking the input from the forms and outputs it to markdown? Or is it applying the styling used in the mentioned stackoverflow resume generator?
The key to a great markdown-based resume is the subsequent styling, writing lists and headings in markdown isn't a big issue. That's where the other markdown-resume generators break down, I simply did not like the styling and did not want to change all the CSS myself, at the time, needing something decent quickly.
Not an expert, correct me if I am wrong here. But I've wrestled with something similar.
Be careful not to use REM for font-sizes as @Print ignores them, if you must (and obviously I/Brain must) you could get around by using % (so 1.5 REM -> 150%).
Make sure to set font-size on both body and html.
Also, not sure how to explain it, but if you open up a PDF in Preview, and select print. You might get a different size/layout and some design issues there. So always double check, but be careful not to use the Printed (Saved from Preview.app) as it disables links.
Don't spend any time on CSS transitions, as a PDF won't show them(?) (yep, sigh)
Also watch out for printers adding margins both top/bottom and sides.
What would you guys want to see in a blogging platform?
Markdown or WYSIWYG? Or both somehow?
Git for source control? Or versioning and diffs like wordpress?
Themes? Purely css or something more, less secure? How would you want to host it and customize it?
Would you want any social features besides roles and permissions? Such as quoting content from others, or pingbacks or something?
Finally, generate static files or just cache heavily? I think the latter is better but a script can exist to generate the former on environments where caching infrastructure isn't very robust.
Comments - here I would just say use third party javascript based stuff and plop it on the page.
It's kind of related to this post but I have built a framework where I could probably make a blogging app like Wordpress in a week.
A service kindly provided by the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training [2] a European Union's agency.
It has a CV builder and outputs an standardized PDF that can even be fed back into the builder for further updates.
It is a joy when going through a pile of CVs to read the ones built by that tool, makes the job a lot easier because it allows the applicant to focus on the relevant data instead of on the layout. Better for the RH, better for the applicant, win win all around.
[1] https://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/en/home
[2] http://www.cedefop.europa.eu/