19 ms·

Can we bring back this form of resume, please? Information is clearly organized, easy to read, easy to remember. No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colore

Can we bring back this form of resume, please? Information is clearly organized, easy to read, easy to remember. No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot...

akamaozu 4y ago
I just updated my resume for a new round of job hunting, and I think its similar to what you're describing http://designbymobius.ca/resume http://designbymobius.ca/resume
Arn_Thor 4y ago
The replies here are hilarious: from people saying how much they loathe it to people saying they wish more resumes were like this. It just drives home how much of a crap shoot applying is...
Kostic 4y ago
You can use something similar, even today. My CV isn't *much* different than the one in the link and it seems that it does stand out as I've been complimented about it, twice.
- rmnclmnt 4y ago
  I do too, but I see way too many people "over-thinking" their resumes, especially in the presentation layout: if the raw data is clearly organized, the layout should be minimal, not the other way around
yupper32 4y ago
I don't see many 5-star skill ratings, dual colored backgrounds (?), or unreadable fonts. Where do you see those? I would turn people away from that format if they asked my advice. My resume, and the resumes I've seen aren't too far away from this format. More bullet points and a bit more detail than this, I guess. But otherwise pretty similar
- onei 4y ago
  I see them a lot for interns and new grads. I think there's a bunch of templates that have these 'features' and when people are first starting out they don't know better. No interviewer I've ever met thought 5-star ratings were a good idea.
  - DMell 4y ago
    I graduated last year and one of our final classes required a resume be submitted using the professors format which was colorful, differing fonts, and used "confidence percentages". I wouldn't dare use it in the real world but I'm wondering how many of those new grad resumes are similar.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      And new grads are probably often looking for something anything to stand out if they haven’t done any projects that really stand out and have a middling GPA from a middling school.
  - smcl 4y ago
    Yep 100%, and I did the same to be honest - I have a memory of painstakingly deciding which languages or technologies I was "experienced" in and which I was merely "intermediate" in, without realising it was wasted effort :) I think people tend to be quite forgiving of graduates or those new to the industry, it's hard to know what's expected of you.
- 2ICofafireteam 4y ago
  As someone who has been through several government vocational programs in Canada, I will say that when your Case Manager or Instructor says to write your resumes and letters a certain way, you do it.
  - DMell 4y ago
    My girlfriend is a biologist with the National Parks Service and all of their resumes are expected to be three to five pages long. It hurt my soul when she told me that.
jstx1 4y ago
All of these things are generally frowned upon already.
- youngNed 4y ago
  I got made redundant in 2008, i signed up for unemployment benefit (UK) and part of the requirements was i had to attend a cv writing one day workshop, in the basement of a particularly dingy pub. The guy leading it was spectacularly useless from the get-go, training us in how to use word in the most wonderfully terrible way, one particular nugget i remember him coming out with was: 'bold is particularly good for standing out, in fact I would even go as far as putting the entire document in bold' I asked him about all caps, but stopped short of asking him if i should sprinkle it with glitter for fear i would 'fail' in his assesment of me and cut my benfits.
  - mindcrime 4y ago
    'bold is particularly good for standing out, in fact I would even go as far as putting the entire document in bold' Jeeeeeebus. That sounds like something right out of an episode of BOFH!
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    > 'bold is particularly good for standing out, in fact I would even go as far as putting the entire document in bold' What a muppet. Clearly you should use the Header Font.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot... I read a lot of resumes. Honestly, the number of quirky over-designed resumes I see is probably 1 in 50. The vast majority of people do submit clearly organized resumes based on a template they found. The reason those quirky over-designed resumes get shared on HN or other social media is because they’re different, not because they’re common.
- j33zusjuice 4y ago
  In my experience looking at résumés (mostly for entry-level tech roles), fancy formatting is 100% an attempt to cover for a lack of skill. I haven’t seen one that had good content. Intuitively, this makes sense to me, and seems to fit with the old adage, “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” Imo, your experience should speak for itself.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I would do your best to fully ignore anything like this. It's bound to be incorrect sometimes.
    - j33zusjuice 4y ago
      Oh, for sure, I read all of them top to bottom when I’m part of the hiring team. I just haven’t actually seen one that was fancy that had good content. The layout doesn’t matter to me, as long as it’s consistently formatted.
  - 2ICofafireteam 4y ago
    >Imo, your experience should speak for itself. What's wrong with saying, "May I draw your attention to my experience? They have something to say."
  - Ultimatt 4y ago
ryandrake 4y ago
Also: I kind of like the concise wording when the writer doesn't feel they need to adhere to STAR. "Duties Included" is the only meat I want to see when I read a resume. I don't care what the specific challenge you faced was, or if your hard work transforming protobufs from one format to another resulted in "23% year over year revenue growth and 3 industry awards" for a product that uses your protobufs 5 layers up the API stack. Yet resumes are all moving over to including this cruft. I admit I use STAR on my own resume because every resume coach insists it's the only way to get noticed. It's just yuck.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  My guess is if you sum all of the money saved/revenue gained listed in each MBA CV you'd end up with a number bigger than the GDP of the history of the world.
  - logical_ferry 4y ago
    Oh I've got a buddy that'll laugh his pants off when he reads this. I know I am.
- jcadam 4y ago
  I have an MBA, which I don't really use as a working software engineer, but nowhere else will you learn to take a clear, concise, one page paper (i.e., this is what we did and this is the result) and expand it to 10 pages of BS-laden corporate-speak nonsense. It's a real skill, I tell you.
  - tenpies 4y ago
    MBA is still the junior leagues. To learn to take one line and turn it into a whole page you have to go to law school. And even then, I would daresay that those are applied and therefore lesser. If you want to be able to expand one word into one entire paper, you need to go deep into academia.
- quacked 4y ago
  I've had the opposite experience--if you don't list accomplishments you don't get a call back. Job duties alone are considered an insufficient resume.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hef19898 4y ago
I struggle with getting a good CV, one that I do feel comfortable with. So, as a reference, I just saved this resume as a reference to use as soon as I get to rework mine. It is straight forward, not overburdened with details and covers the essentials. Great stuff!
kypro 4y ago
Something I was surprised by was the amount of white space and the straight to the point job descriptions. Whenever I send my CV to recruiter I'm always asked to add a little more about some language or skill. Over the years my CV has become super dense with text, not because I have more experience to list but because I've been told repeatedly to list all the languages I've used and details of the projects I've worked on.
- conductr 4y ago
  I think that's correct method. Being a software engineer at Google could mean anything, so job titles alone don't communicate enough by today's standard. In 1980, this guy's job titles alone told you enough to know if you wanted to meet him for your job opening. There's probably a volume aspect too. The hiring manager in 1980 wasn't getting 1,000 resumes that looked like this where project information would help differentiate.
seanw444 4y ago
I concur. It has the bonus of a retro feel.
jimmaswell 4y ago
My experience from around 2017: Today's employers just don't like good simple resumes for some reason. They expect you to be a graphic designer to even look at it. I had a clearly formatted, simple resume and had a 0% success rate (besides one offer for 30k which was an insult) after hundreds of applications coming out of college to places far and wide or local, until a recruiter for a consultancy company cold contacted me. People online lombasted my resume for not being fancy enough. I still think it's an example of a perfect resume personally. Doesn't matter anymore thankfully now that I have a great job I want to stay in. Found a picture of it for reference, plus or minus minor tweaks depending on the company: https://external-preview.redd.it/Sfx4gvcEZXKXr8cxBseyyW2ycGPxzAQigSnJGND8NKA.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=20aec6c11c2f0814b47a7fe11896ba748de76a81 https://external-preview.redd.it/Sfx4gvcEZXKXr8cxBseyyW2ycGP... Certainly far above average chops for an entry level applicant so I don't know what every employer's problem was. Much harder world for junior developers than anyone would make you think if even I had that much trouble. I was legitimately scared I had no future outside of fast food for a while there.
- kubanczyk 4y ago
  Thanks for taking trouble to actually link to the resumé in question. I'd only wish critics of it were similarly verbatim.
- Bakary 4y ago
  You don't need it to be fancy, you just need to be one step above the raw Word appearance you have there. It's the equivalent of having the same pair of pants but it fits you. But as you've said it's moot now that you have a job.
  - jimmaswell 4y ago
    The OP resume looks like a raw typewriter document to me. I don't understand what value it brings to go beyond - it's nothing but a tool to convey your skills and experience.
    - Bakary 4y ago
nogridbag 4y ago
This resume has better UX than 80% of the resumes I've seen - which is particularly frustrating especially if it's a FE resume. These days I'm happy if the candidate can correctly spell the technology they claim to have been using the past N years. Most are full of bullet points with every other word bolded. If the bulleted skills list is greater than 5 lines chances are it has the same skill duplicated multiple times. I'm not sure if the candidate is fully to blame as I'm sure the recruiting companies manipulate the resume format. But ultimately the candidate is responsible for the quality of the resume.
- eastbound 4y ago
  I need React devs but I’ve dropped the ball — I just hire Java people and they’re better at front-end. Usually more savvy about libraries, they at least ask who did the lib and what license it uses. I’m sure thousands of competent frontendists exist but they’re drowned out by people from bootcamps who can’t even spell “bartender” properly (and I have a bartender who’s the best of the class in my team, so again, nothing is set in stone, but I was losing my time with front-endists).
rr888 4y ago
Presumably it was typed out by hand, one for each job? Maybe a photo copy. Its a good reason to keep it simple.
- ghaff 4y ago
  1980 was not the dark ages. Photocopiers though not personal ones were widely available and used. But yes it was probably typed on a typewriter initially. (There was typesetting but you probably wouldn’t have used it for a resume.)
macintux 4y ago
Mine is still plain text. Basho at least found that charming.
- mattbillenstein 4y ago
  Mine too - works for programming gigs - also, searchable. https://vazor.com/resume.txt https://vazor.com/resume.txt
  - kubanczyk 4y ago
    Broken link inside (404): https://vazor.com/media/tech.png https://vazor.com/media/tech.png
    - mattbillenstein 4y ago
      thanks!
Prcmaker 4y ago
I'm a big fan of these. I maintain both a simple text resume, and a 'fancy' one in a pretty latex template. I've gotten jobs from both, and have even (successfully) submitted both in separate parts of the same job application. Sometimes people want to see the 5 star skill ratings, though I'll never understand why, but having it as an option has unfortunately helped.
smcl 4y ago
With the amount of people who can put "duties involved: computer programmer" in their CV today, you're asking to receive dozens of near-identical applications. Hope you enjoy interviewing every single candidate because you can't evaluate ahead of time whether their programming experience involved, say, pottering around with VBA or implementing their own compiler.

akamaozu 4y ago

I just updated my resume for a new round of job hunting, and I think its similar to what you're describing http://designbymobius.ca/resume http://designbymobius.ca/resume

Arn_Thor 4y ago

The replies here are hilarious: from people saying how much they loathe it to people saying they wish more resumes were like this. It just drives home how much of a crap shoot applying is...

Kostic 4y ago

You can use something similar, even today. My CV isn't *much* different than the one in the link and it seems that it does stand out as I've been complimented about it, twice.

rmnclmnt 4y ago
I do too, but I see way too many people "over-thinking" their resumes, especially in the presentation layout: if the raw data is clearly organized, the layout should be minimal, not the other way around

yupper32 4y ago

I don't see many 5-star skill ratings, dual colored backgrounds (?), or unreadable fonts. Where do you see those? I would turn people away from that format if they asked my advice. My resume, and the resumes I've seen aren't too far away from this format. More bullet points and a bit more detail than this, I guess. But otherwise pretty similar

onei 4y ago
I see them a lot for interns and new grads. I think there's a bunch of templates that have these 'features' and when people are first starting out they don't know better. No interviewer I've ever met thought 5-star ratings were a good idea.
- DMell 4y ago
  I graduated last year and one of our final classes required a resume be submitted using the professors format which was colorful, differing fonts, and used "confidence percentages". I wouldn't dare use it in the real world but I'm wondering how many of those new grad resumes are similar.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    And new grads are probably often looking for something anything to stand out if they haven’t done any projects that really stand out and have a middling GPA from a middling school.
- smcl 4y ago
  Yep 100%, and I did the same to be honest - I have a memory of painstakingly deciding which languages or technologies I was "experienced" in and which I was merely "intermediate" in, without realising it was wasted effort :) I think people tend to be quite forgiving of graduates or those new to the industry, it's hard to know what's expected of you.
2ICofafireteam 4y ago
As someone who has been through several government vocational programs in Canada, I will say that when your Case Manager or Instructor says to write your resumes and letters a certain way, you do it.
- DMell 4y ago
  My girlfriend is a biologist with the National Parks Service and all of their resumes are expected to be three to five pages long. It hurt my soul when she told me that.

jstx1 4y ago

All of these things are generally frowned upon already.

youngNed 4y ago
I got made redundant in 2008, i signed up for unemployment benefit (UK) and part of the requirements was i had to attend a cv writing one day workshop, in the basement of a particularly dingy pub. The guy leading it was spectacularly useless from the get-go, training us in how to use word in the most wonderfully terrible way, one particular nugget i remember him coming out with was: 'bold is particularly good for standing out, in fact I would even go as far as putting the entire document in bold' I asked him about all caps, but stopped short of asking him if i should sprinkle it with glitter for fear i would 'fail' in his assesment of me and cut my benfits.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  'bold is particularly good for standing out, in fact I would even go as far as putting the entire document in bold' Jeeeeeebus. That sounds like something right out of an episode of BOFH!
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  > 'bold is particularly good for standing out, in fact I would even go as far as putting the entire document in bold' What a muppet. Clearly you should use the Header Font.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot... I read a lot of resumes. Honestly, the number of quirky over-designed resumes I see is probably 1 in 50. The vast majority of people do submit clearly organized resumes based on a template they found. The reason those quirky over-designed resumes get shared on HN or other social media is because they’re different, not because they’re common.

j33zusjuice 4y ago
In my experience looking at résumés (mostly for entry-level tech roles), fancy formatting is 100% an attempt to cover for a lack of skill. I haven’t seen one that had good content. Intuitively, this makes sense to me, and seems to fit with the old adage, “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” Imo, your experience should speak for itself.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I would do your best to fully ignore anything like this. It's bound to be incorrect sometimes.
  - j33zusjuice 4y ago
    Oh, for sure, I read all of them top to bottom when I’m part of the hiring team. I just haven’t actually seen one that was fancy that had good content. The layout doesn’t matter to me, as long as it’s consistently formatted.
- 2ICofafireteam 4y ago
  >Imo, your experience should speak for itself. What's wrong with saying, "May I draw your attention to my experience? They have something to say."
- Ultimatt 4y ago

ryandrake 4y ago

Also: I kind of like the concise wording when the writer doesn't feel they need to adhere to STAR. "Duties Included" is the only meat I want to see when I read a resume. I don't care what the specific challenge you faced was, or if your hard work transforming protobufs from one format to another resulted in "23% year over year revenue growth and 3 industry awards" for a product that uses your protobufs 5 layers up the API stack. Yet resumes are all moving over to including this cruft. I admit I use STAR on my own resume because every resume coach insists it's the only way to get noticed. It's just yuck.

robertlagrant 4y ago
My guess is if you sum all of the money saved/revenue gained listed in each MBA CV you'd end up with a number bigger than the GDP of the history of the world.
- logical_ferry 4y ago
  Oh I've got a buddy that'll laugh his pants off when he reads this. I know I am.
jcadam 4y ago
I have an MBA, which I don't really use as a working software engineer, but nowhere else will you learn to take a clear, concise, one page paper (i.e., this is what we did and this is the result) and expand it to 10 pages of BS-laden corporate-speak nonsense. It's a real skill, I tell you.
- tenpies 4y ago
  MBA is still the junior leagues. To learn to take one line and turn it into a whole page you have to go to law school. And even then, I would daresay that those are applied and therefore lesser. If you want to be able to expand one word into one entire paper, you need to go deep into academia.
quacked 4y ago
I've had the opposite experience--if you don't list accomplishments you don't get a call back. Job duties alone are considered an insufficient resume.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hef19898 4y ago

I struggle with getting a good CV, one that I do feel comfortable with. So, as a reference, I just saved this resume as a reference to use as soon as I get to rework mine. It is straight forward, not overburdened with details and covers the essentials. Great stuff!

kypro 4y ago

Something I was surprised by was the amount of white space and the straight to the point job descriptions. Whenever I send my CV to recruiter I'm always asked to add a little more about some language or skill. Over the years my CV has become super dense with text, not because I have more experience to list but because I've been told repeatedly to list all the languages I've used and details of the projects I've worked on.

conductr 4y ago
I think that's correct method. Being a software engineer at Google could mean anything, so job titles alone don't communicate enough by today's standard. In 1980, this guy's job titles alone told you enough to know if you wanted to meet him for your job opening. There's probably a volume aspect too. The hiring manager in 1980 wasn't getting 1,000 resumes that looked like this where project information would help differentiate.

seanw444 4y ago

I concur. It has the bonus of a retro feel.

jimmaswell 4y ago

My experience from around 2017: Today's employers just don't like good simple resumes for some reason. They expect you to be a graphic designer to even look at it. I had a clearly formatted, simple resume and had a 0% success rate (besides one offer for 30k which was an insult) after hundreds of applications coming out of college to places far and wide or local, until a recruiter for a consultancy company cold contacted me. People online lombasted my resume for not being fancy enough. I still think it's an example of a perfect resume personally. Doesn't matter anymore thankfully now that I have a great job I want to stay in. Found a picture of it for reference, plus or minus minor tweaks depending on the company: https://external-preview.redd.it/Sfx4gvcEZXKXr8cxBseyyW2ycGPxzAQigSnJGND8NKA.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=20aec6c11c2f0814b47a7fe11896ba748de76a81 https://external-preview.redd.it/Sfx4gvcEZXKXr8cxBseyyW2ycGP... Certainly far above average chops for an entry level applicant so I don't know what every employer's problem was. Much harder world for junior developers than anyone would make you think if even I had that much trouble. I was legitimately scared I had no future outside of fast food for a while there.

kubanczyk 4y ago
Thanks for taking trouble to actually link to the resumé in question. I'd only wish critics of it were similarly verbatim.
Bakary 4y ago
You don't need it to be fancy, you just need to be one step above the raw Word appearance you have there. It's the equivalent of having the same pair of pants but it fits you. But as you've said it's moot now that you have a job.
- jimmaswell 4y ago
  The OP resume looks like a raw typewriter document to me. I don't understand what value it brings to go beyond - it's nothing but a tool to convey your skills and experience.
  - Bakary 4y ago

nogridbag 4y ago

This resume has better UX than 80% of the resumes I've seen - which is particularly frustrating especially if it's a FE resume. These days I'm happy if the candidate can correctly spell the technology they claim to have been using the past N years. Most are full of bullet points with every other word bolded. If the bulleted skills list is greater than 5 lines chances are it has the same skill duplicated multiple times. I'm not sure if the candidate is fully to blame as I'm sure the recruiting companies manipulate the resume format. But ultimately the candidate is responsible for the quality of the resume.

eastbound 4y ago
I need React devs but I’ve dropped the ball — I just hire Java people and they’re better at front-end. Usually more savvy about libraries, they at least ask who did the lib and what license it uses. I’m sure thousands of competent frontendists exist but they’re drowned out by people from bootcamps who can’t even spell “bartender” properly (and I have a bartender who’s the best of the class in my team, so again, nothing is set in stone, but I was losing my time with front-endists).

rr888 4y ago

Presumably it was typed out by hand, one for each job? Maybe a photo copy. Its a good reason to keep it simple.

ghaff 4y ago
1980 was not the dark ages. Photocopiers though not personal ones were widely available and used. But yes it was probably typed on a typewriter initially. (There was typesetting but you probably wouldn’t have used it for a resume.)

macintux 4y ago

Mine is still plain text. Basho at least found that charming.

mattbillenstein 4y ago
Mine too - works for programming gigs - also, searchable. https://vazor.com/resume.txt https://vazor.com/resume.txt
- kubanczyk 4y ago
  Broken link inside (404): https://vazor.com/media/tech.png https://vazor.com/media/tech.png
  - mattbillenstein 4y ago
    thanks!

Prcmaker 4y ago

I'm a big fan of these. I maintain both a simple text resume, and a 'fancy' one in a pretty latex template. I've gotten jobs from both, and have even (successfully) submitted both in separate parts of the same job application. Sometimes people want to see the 5 star skill ratings, though I'll never understand why, but having it as an option has unfortunately helped.

smcl 4y ago

With the amount of people who can put "duties involved: computer programmer" in their CV today, you're asking to receive dozens of near-identical applications. Hope you enjoy interviewing every single candidate because you can't evaluate ahead of time whether their programming experience involved, say, pottering around with VBA or implementing their own compiler.