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Professional resume writer here. Quick review. We don't use first person voice on resumes. We use 'implied first person' (no 'I'). So "Former emergency respons
by fecak 5y ago
Professional resume writer here. Quick review.
We don't use first person voice on resumes. We use 'implied first person' (no 'I'). So "Former emergency response driver..."
Mentioning a Twitter handle is only useful if your Twitter has things you'd want people to see.
The professional experience section (Modules here) should be in reverse chronological order - so most recent first. It would be useful to say something that you did while working for RustMinded and maybe tell the reader who the company is. So it might look like:
Software Developer, Rustminded $DATE_- present
RustMinded is a Belgian startup dedicated to the promotion of the Rust language.
As others have said, I don't really get the fascination with LaTeX. I get a lot of incoming resumes from my tech clients that are written in LaTeX. It feels more like "I built it using LaTeX to try and impress you" than "it's the best tool for the job".
The project sections are mostly OK other than some language issues.
- foldr 5y agoGrammar nitpick: first person is not a voice.
- bradrn 5y agoFurthermore, I’d describe GP’s comment as encouraging ‘pro-drop’ rather than any ‘voice’. (Though I suspect the technical details of syntactic terminology are somewhat irrelevant for résumé-writing.)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- foldr 5y agoI'm afraid pro drop isn't technically right either, for a couple of reasons :D First, English doesn't have pro drop. Second, there's more than just the subject missing in "Former emergency response driver...". If you read it as elliptical of a sentence, then the sentence is something like "I am a former emergency response driver...". If English had pro drop, pro drop would give you "Am a former emergency response driver..."
- bradrn 5y ago> English doesn't have pro drop Depends on the situation! For me it’s grammatical in most informal texts, e.g. emails. (Also, the first sentence of this paragraph.) > Second, there's more than just the subject missing in "Former emergency response driver...". This is a good point; I did indeed miss this subtlety. (Actually, it’s not even very subtle!) In this case, I must admit to being unsure about how to analyse this.
- foldr 5y ago>Depends on the situation! For me it’s grammatical in most informal texts, e.g. emails. (Also, the first sentence of this paragraph.) This isn't technically pro drop. It's a different process called "diary drop". By coincidence I wrote a rant about this only a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28127035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28127035
- bradrn 5y agoHuh, interesting — thanks for the pointer! I’ve been wondering about this for a while. Do you happen to have any more resources? (I enjoy linguistics, but haven’t really read much about syntax; my favourite topic is morphosyntactic alignment.)
- foldr 5y agoIt’s hard to find any good scholarly references on the differences between pro drop and diary drop (I guess because they are uncontroversial and not particularly subtle). However, section 4.2.1 of this MA dissertation has a decent, though very brief, summary: https://awweir.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/weir-ug-diss.pdf https://awweir.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/weir-ug-diss.pdf Similar observations are also made in the following paper: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/76381796.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/76381796.pdf
- bradrn 5y agoAgain, thanks! I’ll read through these when I get some time.
- bennylope 5y ago> As others have said, I don't really get the fascination with LaTeX. I have gone down this path with other types of documents (reports, proposals) not because I love LaTeX but because I hate composing and editing in Word, etc. Especially for long lived or repeated documents. Some of those tech clients might just prefer working with plain text for editing, source control, and/or version branching.
- cookieswumchorr 5y agoI never had the time/brains to get past the learn curve with LaTeX. Recently I started using a pipeline of markdown to html with Pandoc and then to pdf with Dompdf for project documentation. Turns out you get neatly formatted printable docs with not so much effort, and the raw markdown stays with the code where it can be used and updated by fellow devs
- jjjbokma 5y agoFwiw, I have made a LaTeX resume template [1] for Pandoc. Input is markdown and output is LaTeX or LaTeX rendered to PDF. [1] https://github.com/john-bokma/resume-pandoc https://github.com/john-bokma/resume-pandoc
- kemiller2002 5y agoYou've never really "lived" until you realize that your document with the different sections, etc. that you've painstakingly setup is broken because of a copy paste issue when adding a new section. LaTex maybe a pain, but at least the output is consistent. There is no magic where the formatting bleeds over due to something you can't see on screen.
- thrwyoilarticle 5y agoUnderfull \hbox (badness 10000)?
- im3w1l 5y agoThe odt format is xml in a zip and simple enough that you can hand edit it if you really want to.
- dvdkon 5y agoI don't think a novelty résumé needs to be so conventional, people will mostly, in my opinion, either dislike it for not following layout/organisation conventions or look past all that altogether.
- fecak 5y agoFor someone like this with little experience, being unconventional is probably OK because they aren't being judged by the same criteria as an experienced hire. That said, you can be unconventional and still provide the reader with the basic facts they'd want to know (like 'what are your accomplishments?' or 'did you attend school?').
- dcminter 5y ago> We don't use first person voice on resumes. We use 'implied first person' (no 'I'). Who is "we" here? I've always had good results with a first person CV - so far in the US, the UK, and the EU. Maybe I just get away with it by luck or circumstance, but it's clearly not a set-in-stone requirement. > It feels more like "I built it using LaTeX to try and impress you" than "it's the best tool for the job". Anecdotally a friend who at that time worked at Sun Microsystems told me that his team prioritised CVs created with LaTeX over all others. After all, if the purpose of a CV is not to "try and impress you" then what is it?
- fecak 5y agoNot using "I" on a resume is pretty much the first rule of resume writing. If you were to search for rules of resume writing, I expect that would probably appear on every article. If you've had good results with a first person CV, that's probably because your experience is strong enough that the reader forgives you for the error. Of course you 'can' write a resume in first person. It's just not the voice that the reader expects. Similar to third person. A resume is certainly meant to try and impress the reader, but typically we're trying to impress the reader with professional accomplishments. I'm much more impressed by someone's professional accomplishments than their choice to use LaTeX.
- volta83 5y agoSince you are openly advocating for people to blindly follow this rule… can you at least explain _why_ do you think this rule makes sense and people should follow it. When I hire, I couldn’t care less about whether the person uses I or We.
- fecak 5y agoSearch for "should I use first person on resume", the articles will explain a bit. One reason is brevity - we want to use as few words as possible. The other is redundancy - if we use "I", chances are almost every sentence will begin with "I". I did this, I did that.
- baby 5y ago> We don't use first person voice on resumes. We use 'implied first person' (no 'I'). So "Former emergency response driver..." Sorry but no, that’s bad advice.
- fecak 5y agoI've written thousands of resumes, and all written using implied first person. My results are pretty consistent with hundreds of clients getting jobs at many of the most selective employers in the world. I appreciate your response, but implied first person is the industry standard, and has been for as long as I've been in business.
- baby 5y agoI screen and read resumes as part of my job. Never heard someone who cared about that. This is just not something people look at in resumes unless they’re looking for non technical people perhaps.
- xondono 5y ago> As others have said, I don't really get the fascination with LaTeX LaTex is really powerful when you get to a certain point, but unless you’ve tinkered with it until you reach that point, it’s a PITA. To me the number 1 advantage is that I can easily keep updated various versions of the CV, because by working at startups I’ve always have to wear a lot of hats. I keep a more ‘hardware oriented’ CV, another more ‘software oriented’ CV, and I added a more “management” version that showcases better team leadership instead on focusing on the tech stack. It’s also very handy to keep everything as text documents when you are asked to submit to different webforms, and being able to adjust things like quality vs pdf size is important when submitting your CV in some places
- cies 5y ago> I built it using LaTeX to try and impress you I built my LaTeX resume trying to impress a potential employer yeeears ago. So far it's really easy to keep up to date and to temporarily remove parts (comment them out). I think the end result looks a bit more professionally type-set than a Word/GDocs creation.
- UnpossibleJim 5y agoOut of sheer curiosity (and this has nothing to do with the conversation at large), how does one become a "professional resume writer"? Is that a recruiter who helps write resumes, or are you solely focused on resume writing? Is it a side gig, or do you do enough resume writing to make it a full time job? I apologize if these are well known answers but I stick with a fairly technical crowd and, well word of mouth usually gets us passed around to be brutally honest. I hate to admit it, but a half way legible resume and it's usually just references after a point =/
- fecak 5y agoI was a recruiter for 20 years, and I've always been a strong writer. As a recruiter I read tens (perhaps hundreds?) of thousands of resumes, and I knew the audience. I had always done some resume editing or helping my candidates with their resumes, and I decided I wanted to see if I could support myself as a writer instead of a recruiter. I do quite well as a writer. My hourly rate is $100/hr, I also offer flat rate services, and for the past few years I've consistently had a roster of anywhere from 30-40 clients at any given time. My clientele is about 50% tech, as that's my specialty and I was a tech recruiter for my entire recruiting career. Word of mouth does sometimes get you by if you have a good network. There are quite a few reasons people hire a resume writer. Some just simply struggle to write. Some struggle to understand what the reader wants to know. Some aren't comfortable taking credit for their accomplishments, so a writer makes it feel less 'braggy'. I hope I answered your questions.
- UnpossibleJim 5y agoYou absolutely did. Thank you. I wasn't trying to be flippant, I was genuinely curious.
- _moof 5y agoUgh, LaTeX resumes. They're a dime a dozen (I've interviewed hundreds of engineers) and they utterly fail to make people stand out, which is the whole point of a resume. When I get a resume that was done in LaTeX from someone who isn't a mathematician, it makes a bad impression. I'm not saying that's right, or fair, but it's true. It comes off as trying to look smart without the substance to back it up, and because so many people do it, it also comes off as really unoriginal, and makes the resume forgettable. So please everyone, stop with the performative LaTeX. If you had any idea how many people do this, you'd be embarrassed. (And to add a dash of humility to this comment, I'll confess that I used to write my resume in LaTeX. After seeing how many other people do too, I stopped.)
- anchpop 5y agoI don’t have a math background but I learned LaTeX out of necessity. If I needed a resume I might use it just because it seems easier than messing with Word. It’s not like LaTeX is that hard to use so I don’t see why you see it as performative.
- sampo 5y ago> It feels more like "I built it using LaTeX to try and impress you" It's not meant to impress you, a resume writer. It's meant to impress other techies.
- fecak 5y agoCorrect. The "you" here isn't actually "me" (the writer), but rather the decision maker (the recruiter or hiring manager).
- teakettle42 5y agoWell, I can tell you that, relying on the experience of my own 30 year career using and reading LaTeX resumes, you're quite wrong. I appreciate a LaTeX resume because: 1. It's almost always much more readable than a Word document. 2. It's not about impressing people. It's about readability for the reader, and maintainability (by avoiding finicky and annoying WYSIWYG editing) for the author. If using a LaTeX resume means self-selecting out of resume-grinding HR departments that require Word documents — and/or annoying entirely useless tech recruiters — that's a feature, not a bug.