Basic HTML hosted at cv.dallen.co

I have a pipeline that creates a PDF version with weasyprint: https://github.com/damienallen/cv

I am using Overleaf which is a Latex GUI and has quite a few good templates.

i just filled out the Europass template really

Hey chatgpt, write me a resume for a <insert job description> that will likely fly with a 6B publicly traded company. Include details about <insert field expertise here> and wors it like Tony stark wrote it.

I write my CV in Markdown (just headers and bullet points), and then use pandoc to generate a pdf. Very easy and straightforward!

This has landed me interviews although not hired (I think that’s down to me, not the format of my CV 😅)

pandoc \
--variable title-meta:"ambitiousslab - CV" \
--variable author-meta:"ambitiousslab <ambitiousslab@example.org>" \
--variable lang:"en-GB" \
--variable geometry:margin=1cm \
--variable colorlinks:true \
--variable pagestyle=empty \
cv.md \
-o ambitiousslab-cv.pdf

Page on my personal site, with good print styles so I can print to pdf if needed.

Using pdflatex and a tree of resumes stored with git, one tailored to each application. And a lot of proofreading by other people. Get feedback on what you prepare!

I use Google Slides - you get better control over the layout.

Draw.io allows you to build quite sophisticated stuff. If you use group + lock/unlock + copy/paste, it’s not half bad.

LaTeX and gitlab but today it’s mostly for fun. To get any replies you have to use one of online generators. It doesn’t matter if it’s readable to humans anymore. AI has to be able to parse it.

I use LibreOffice has my word processor, and no substantial amounts of automation to speak of. And each time I intend to submit a resume, I save off a new copy and tailor it specifically for the recipient employer. After all, what’s relevant and worth highlighting (not literally!) to one employer won’t be the same as for another.

Yes, I’m aware that a lot of recruiters/reviewers use LLMs as a first-pass filter, but that’s precisely why my submission should be crafted by hand each time: if it’s an LLM, then I want its checkbox exercises to be easily met, and if it’s a human, I want to put my best foot forward.

In days of yore, where paper resumes were circulated by hand to prospective employers at career fairs, having a bespoke resume for each would have been difficult to pull off. But with PDF submissions, there’s no reason not to gear your submission to exactly the skills that a company is looking for.

To be clear, tailoring a resume does not mean adding fake or hallucinated qualifications that you do not possess. Rather, it means that you copyedit the resume so that your relevant skills are readily apparent. If you already listed an example project from a prior employer or internship, but a different project would better align to the prospective employer, consider swapping out the example for max appeal. Bullet-points are particularly easy to rearrange: if you have web-dev skills and that’s desirable by the employer, those should be moved up the list of bullet-points. And so on.

Although resumes are now mostly PDFs, the custom remains – both as an informal fairness criteria between applicants, but also because it would be more to read – that one’s resume should fit on a single sheet of US Letter or A4 paper, barring unique exceptions like professors that have long lists of published papers or systems architects that hold patent numbers. And so the optimization problem is how to most effectively use the space on that sheet of digital paper.