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by duck 671 days ago
> They’re often polished, curated, and tailored to tick boxes rather than showcase genuine skills.

I look at a lot of resumes and would say most aren't well polished or curated. They often don't showcase skills either, but it is surprising how bad resumes still are today.

4 comments

Haha, exactly this! The resume is the first work sample you receive from an applicant, and it's absolutely baffling that even nowadays with all the tools available, a LOT of them still have glaring typos, poor grammar, confusing formatting, wrong length, you-name-it. It is absolutely correct that a perfect resume might not mean much in terms of skills, however, it's been very rare that someone with a poorly made resume even made it through the first screening interview.
I am one of those who made through the hoop of first and second rounds with the most horrid of CVs, still cant believe I got the job. Extremely happy that I did, I was told later that the resume I submitted was the worst one by far, but the person (ie. Me) was the best applicant, which I still consider funny yet depressing.
If a company excludes bad resumes they are possibly just optimizing for good resume writers just by assuming that good resume writers are good workers.
It's like handwriting - good handwriting does not necessarily mean good worker but bad handwriting quite often means bad worker.
That’s exactly why I believe they are still a good indicator for assessing people.

How much effort did they put it? That’s at least a first indicator how much they care about getting the job.

Mine is written in LaTeX, and converted to PDF with pdflatex. Does that work? :D
As someone who gets a ton of resumes from academia, I see these very often. The problem here is that they all look the same because everyone is using the 'moderncv' package. If you want to stand out, invest some time to create your own template (but otherwise, it's perfectly fine, at least you'll have the basic structure correct).
Well, I am not using "moderncv" at all. I use three packages: "geometry", "inputenc", and "graphicx". That said, it does not look as appealing as these "creative" resumes (made using HTML & CSS or Adobe Illustrator, etc)
Then you know where to look for things. Imagine if papers started to put the abstract somewhere else
Meh. My "resume.html.pdf" has gotten me multiple jobs.
That doesn’t say anything, really.

It might very well be that you html.pdf thingy is great.

What are the things you generally look for? I've looked at a lot of resumes myself, but I still struggle with my own. I'd really love to see an example of one of the best resumes you've seen!
Just pay a professional to write it for you.
This matches my experience as well.