Sounds like you found an effective strategy to weed out ineffective companies (or at least those w/ HR departments putting unnecessary requirements on people they want). It may not seem representative of the entire company, but like many things, first impressions are often accurate.
Or perhaps it's the companies weeding out ineffective candidates that cannot adapt and figure out how to provide a very common format such as a Word doc.
I have no idea how true it is but what I've always been told is never to give someone a word-processor format resume as they will then turn around and use it in hiring/recruitment scams.
The biggest problem is that recruitment agencies and/or HR can mangle it before it gets to the people that matter. I interviewed someone for C skill and halfway through they (very politely) interrupted to point out that they had only worked with C++. The recruitment agency had 'helpfully' amended C++ to C/C++.
I've heard that advice as well, but I have a hard time explaining how it would be all that important. PDFs are editable, after all, you'd just have to spend a few minutes looking up a tool. So that would just cut out the absolute laziest or most incurious of scammers, right? How much value could there really be in that?
harder to automate, which is the real reason why companies don't like pdf.
every company/hiring startup is making tools to just feed your word docs into the system and then highlight candidates based on whatever the company values
> every company/hiring startup is making tools to just feed your word docs
Whereas pdftotext tools have been there since forever.
I've written tools to try and extract text from docx files programmatically (not CVs but citations and footnote citations) and I seriously doubt "hiring startups" wouldn't just ask you to fill a web form.
(As a matter of fact, I'm low key job hunting and what I've seen typically is that the systems try to extract the text from my non-standard formatting latex-made pdf, and then pre-fill a form. The form is usually right but needs fixes here and there. It's a good approach.)
As a counterpoint, I have heard this before but have never had someone ask for a doc file. I never used agencies or recruiters, so maybe that plays a role?
This looks nice and having it produce websites and pdfs is surely useful.
Some hopefully constructive criticism:
- The light gray, low contrast theme makes it harder to read and also look washed out.
- Fonts and kerning tend to be handled better in latex, e.g. moderncv
- Having a non-open source license is of course your choice, but makes this quite unattractive to use (is it still going to be around in a few years? Will anyone maintain non-free software if you lose interest?)
1. Body text has the contrast ratio of 7.52 under WCAG 2.0 standards (https://contrast-ratio.com/#%234a5568-on-white) which is within the optimal range for legibility. On paper, the text is 100% black. On the screen, that can be too much, so I used grays. Labels are lighter because I wanted to treat them as supporting text, not main.
2. This is primarily for the Web. So, HTML/CSS. I didn’t know about LaTeX before, interesting.
LaTeX is really great. My CV is a 7 kB file with embedded fonts. My thesis is 1.2 MB with embedded fonts, 60 vector images and hyperlinks (references and ToC). LaTex is a serious amount of labor but it makes the best documents.
I have my own responsive, displayagnostic, offlinecapable cv and think everyone should have his own, because it is a platform for showing off your skills.
backend developer? make an API now that would be a creative resume one could query nizmow/education or explore experiences endpoint so that one can navigate freely back and forth between experiences and skills. I mean, painters did this ages ago, putting everything they can do on a single frame and sending them to galleries or mecenates as gifts and whatnot
it is of course just to get the foot in, you can then have your black and white skill table for the HR drone to fill up the necessary db.
That’s the thing, in general you are not chosen by the relevance of your resume. Resume building is more SEO than showcasing relevant skills. If you can min max your SEO to get a conversation with someone who matters in your hiring process, then it works.
Yeah sorry, none of this is a good idea. If you are in marketing or something like that it may benefit you to get a little creative with resume formatting, but even that has limits. Stick to PDF resumes if you must do something fancy like that include it as a link to your resume. When I have 20-200 resume's to sift through the fact that I have to somehow store a link to your resume, while everyone else's is a PDF in folder that I can easily peruse at any time will work against you, not for you.
As a front end designer, you should understand, fancy and flashy is not the same thing as good UX. When I have to compare a bunch of candidates a predictable format is far better UX than whatever "creative" way you've chosen to try to demonstrate your skills, and what you've really demonstrated to me is you've failed to consider the needs of your user.
Edit: This should have gone on the GP's comment, but applies here too.
Because the application is written in Node, and it uses dependencies? If you'd prefer something not written in Node, I'm sure you can find other options.
Tailwind CSS generates CSS from JS config file containing a design system. For example, several custom sizes are generated to multiple utility classes for specifying margins and paddings.
Thanks leerob! It's nice to see more resume templates focus on typography and readability, instead of distracting visuals, charts, pictures, infographics, etc. Standard Resume has received praise from many recruiters and hiring managers for its similar styling.
If you like the typography centric design of the URT, but are looking for a hosted solution with an easy to use web based editor and style customizer, definitely check out https://standardresume.co. If you want full control of your hosting and styling, URT is the best option I am aware of.
I'm a little surprised that the multipage demo doesn't have a working print stylesheet. Granted, most of these resumes won't be printed out but I think they're minimal enough where they would look great printed out. A few well placed page-breaks [1] would fix it right up.
In Chrome, you can save it as .pdf by Right-click → Print. By expanding More Settings, change Page Size to A4 or Letter. Next, maybe find a .pdf to .docx converter.
PDFs are notoriously hard to convert to anything else. Imagine a web page where every single character is positioned absolutely relative to the `body` element: This is how PDF layout works.
It's easier when the PDF also contains HTML tags. So your approach may actually work though it's kinda silly.
Text is a bit fatter in Firefox — that is, takes up more space. Please remember to choose A4 or Letter size by navigating to Properties → Advanced → Paper Size.
People still asked for it to be emailed in DOC format.
Let's just say I experimented with the then current version of Word to see what would happen if I renamed that PDF to a DOC extension.