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Ask HN: Do you have a personal copy of CV?

3 points by mapcars ↗ HN
It seems strange to me that HRs are often asking for a personal copy of my CV when I'm sending them PDF from LinkedIn. I mean LinkedIn does a great job of formatting and aligning text, headers, links etc. My handmade variant wouldn't be so good and fancy, and I'll have to keep both in sync.

Do you have your personal CV? If you do, don't you want to automate generation of a portable version? Why don't companies like autogenerated CV's?

4 comments

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cjbprime
There are services that will take a LinkedIn profile and generate a PDF/document from it, you could use one.

I do have a personal CV.

Isammoc
I have several personal CVs. All about nothing, I made an unique CV for each job description I'm into. Only to try to fit as close as possible what I figure they want (no cheating, only highlighting what is more interesting for them).

But only when I personnaly ask for a job.

On contrary, when they come to me, I refuse to give other information other than publicly available : they are coming, I do not work for them yet.

rickhanlonii
Companies don't like auto-generated CVs because putting together a good CV is a sign of expertise in that field.

When I go through a stack of CVs, the ones that jump out to me are the ones in which the candidate seems to know exactly what I'm looking for--and you have to have experience in the field to know what matters. These are things like not listing a bunch of information under Education if you have 6 years of experience, or making sure to emphasize the right languages/frameworks you've used on projects.

The good CVs seem to exude both a skills confidence and the experience to know how to describe them well.

Generated CVs don't get that. They standardize every candidates background, making it difficult to know if the CV itself demonstrates expertise. Besides that, it's exhausting to look through a stack of the same document and try to distinguish candidates.

My best advice is to use LaTeX to create a personalized resume template you like and just keep that up to date. I originally stole this from jedberg [1], but you can find mine here [2], and there's a HN thread about it here [3].

[1]: http://www.jedberg.net/hire_jeremy_edberg.html

[2]: https://github.com/rickhanlonii/rickhanlonii.github.io/blob/...

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10502227

sheraz
I've taken to simply screens-hotting my website (single long page), converting that to a PDF, and sending that.

Surprisingly, I've had a good response to it.

(Yes, it is basically a JPG embedded in a pdf.