[ItsOfficial]

Definitely! There's only so much room to maneuver on resume layouts as it is.

One of the, if no THE, most important things I found was the machine readability of a resume. We could build generators that spit beautiful resumes all day but they wouldn't ever get in front of a human to care.

[vilvadot]

Wow, didn't think about that. I'm not familiar with so automated hiring processes but I guess that is a big concern.

Did you find out why? layout, text style? they need a specific template?

[ItsOfficial]

Yeah, I wasn't and didn't either!

I love playing around in Adobe Illustrator and so built my resumes in there. I spent DAYS and WEEKS crafting what I thought were a beautiful, icon rich, intuitive, apple-of-my-eye resumes. 250+ applications later the only time I ever got any response was from one or two small operations where it was a human manually reviewing submissions.

Turns out HR/recruiting suites that companies use aren't so hot on parsing, classifying, and tagging image based PDF resumes. Haha, who knew, right?

Finally a friend turned me on to LaTex and I had GREAT success with that. This made a ton of sense: what could be more machine readable than something built out using markup elements, tags, and IDs that explicitly do all that classifying work for the programs already.

So yeah, huge take-away: when your site constructs the resume if you're using HTML and then converting out to PDF (what we did on PortHub) make sure your HTML is verbose and explicit, even if it doesn't get displayed "on page".

[vilvadot]

That is a problem I had on an unrelated project with image based PDFs. With this one I wanted to avoid that, if you check the output, it is text 100% selectable (and even some interactive elements). So hopefully it avoids that problem.

Surely not as easy to parse as something done explicitly for that, but hopefully good enough.

Such good insights in your post! thanks for sharing your past experience.